by John P. Meyer

"Nowhere in Europe are you arrested for smoking a joint."

What they should do is book a double feature with Brooklyn's Finest followed by Police, Adjective. Separate the casual film fanciers and teenage date crowd from the absolute die-hard, Kafka-reading, beret-wearing, artsy-fartsy film fanatics. (See, the first group would leave the theater five or ten minutes into director/writer Corneliu Porumboiu's drab, dull, desultory Transilvania Trophy award winner.)

P, A is the farthest thing from a cop thriller imaginable. To say that nothing happens over the course of the film's 113 minute runtime would not be accurate (images do, in fact, flicker and flit across the screen) – but in terms of dramatic action this would be an entirely fair characterization.

Policeman Cristi (Dragos Bucur, dour and hangdog throughout) has been assigned to shadow a teenage schoolkid accused of drug possession. He's been on the case for weeks now, observing the boy as he smokes dope with his friends on the playground, collecting the butts for evidence, and following him back to his home. Where Cristi stands for long stretches of time across the street. As we sit in the theater, watching him standing there. (Tic, toc, tic, toc.) (Tic, toc.)

Watching and waiting

If not a thriller, then P, A certainly qualifies as a police procedural. It's procedural to the max, in fact, exploring everything from Cristi's personal reluctance to actually arrest the kid (expressed through his conversations with the prosecutor, his associates, and his wife) to the interoffice political schmoozing required in order to get background information on a suspect vehicle.

The drama [sic] eventually reaches its climax [sic] in the office of Cristi's captain, Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov, deliciously dry). The captain, it turns out, is a student of lexicography. He wants to make sure that the recalcitrant Cristi understands his role in the grand scheme of law enforcement. So he calls for a dictionary to discover whether Cristi's usage of the word "conscience" is appropriate to the situation.

Waiting for the dictionary

(We wait – as Cristi, the captain, and Cristi's partner wait – for five some-odd minutes while the captain's secretary seeks out and delivers said volume.)

The captain has Cristi's partner (Ion Stoica, as Nelu) write up on the chalkboard Cristi's concept of what the word means; he then has Cristi read the actual definition straight from the dictionary. In similar fashion, we get rulings on the meanings (and perceived meanings) of "law" and "police." The captain refers to what they're doing as "dialectics."

Here's the bizarre thing about the experience of sitting through this film, and I'm pretty sure the effect will be magnified in a theater full (well, at least partially full) of patrons: the tedium and monotony start to become inadvertently hilarious. The more we see of Cristi standing on the streetcorner across from the suspect's house, watching and waiting – the more mundane and meaningless his conversations at home with his disaffected wife Anca (Irina Saulescu) – the greater our level of amusement.

"This food is delicious."

I would be completely surprised if a theater audience were able to refrain from outright laughter as Cristi's long-winded pursuit report – page after page of it – appears onscreen, and is read aloud by the narrator. (In Romanian, with English subtitles.) I guess that makes me an artsy-fartsy film fanatic.

[NOTE that the peppy soundtrack attached to the trailer is nowhere in evidence in the film itself, the "action" in which is accompanied by ambient sound and dialog only. And precious little of that, thanks very much.]