Police, Adjective

EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN! ► The latest wonder from the remarkably fertile Romanian new wave, Police, Adjective, a consensus critical favourite at Cannes in 2009, may be the most unlikely — and most intellectually arresting — policier you’ll ever see. A marvel of irony and dry wit, the film is directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, whose 12:08 East of Bucharest won the Camera d’Or (best first feature) at Cannes in 2006. The story, simple enough, has a small-town undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) assigned to tail a young student suspected of dealing drugs. The assignment is drudgery; the cop concludes the kid isn’t much of a pusher: he’s really just sharing weed with his pals — and Romania’s drug laws are likely to be liberalized soon anyway, so why ruin a kid’s life? His refusal to make an arrest leads to the film’s virtuoso climax: an astonishing back-and-forth between the cop and his dictionary-wielding captain (played by Vlad Ivanov, the abortionist in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), on the meaning of law, justice, morality and conscience. “The confidence, conceptual audacity and artistic maturity that Porumboiu displays in his new film belie his years . . . An astute philosophical enquiry that’s also dramatically gripping, brilliantly witty and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour” (Geoff Andrew, Sight and Sound). “Probably the smartest film of the year” (Vancouver I.F.F.). Colour, DigiBeta, in Romanian with English subtitles. 115 mins.