On DVD: "Police, Adjective"

At Cannes 2009, the methods and motives of the police procedural came under interrogation from two young directors convinced not everything in this world could be tied up as neatly as the genre has traditionally suggested. From the Philippines came Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay, which followed a rookie cop seeking to prove himself on his first mission - a process that just so happened to involve the real-time kidnap, rape and dismemberment of a prostitute. From Romania, meanwhile, there was Police, Adjective, Corneliu Porumboiu's follow-up to 12:08 East of Bucharest, which dispatched its own forces on what was conversely the least thrilling assignment imaginable: to tail a teenage boy who's been accused of smoking - shock, horror - marijuana.

Our protagonist, Dragos Bucur's good cop Cristi, is reluctant to pursue the case too far, not least as it involves such adrenalin-free non-excitements as a) plodding along at a discreet distance behind the suspected hophead as he ventures to and from school, and b) going through the soil for any discarded dogends. At one point, the camera follows Cristi as he nips home for lunch, whereupon he has some lovely warming soup. (I think it was chicken, but I couldn't be sure.) We are reminded of how, in dramatising the absurd lengths to which the bureaucratic regime of old (and, apparently, its modern equivalent) would go, the Romanian New Wave has sometimes lapsed into pointscoring pedantry itself: I was all right with the soup, but checked out a little mentally when Porumboiu obliged us to watch Cristi having his tea, from which the only thing there is to be gained is an appreciation of the cop's rather functional table manners.

"Life goes forward," shrieks a love song Cristi's girlfriend is listening to in the very same scene, but Police, Adjective keeps shifting sideways, into the realm of nitpicky conversations where solutions are floated and hairs are split, but nothing ever really gets resolved - a metaphor for the country's lingering political stasis, perhaps. Where the livelier films in this movement - 12:08, Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin', segments of the Tales of the Golden Age portmanteau - had the breezy air of Ealing comedies, this takes its anti-authoritarianism from mid-period Godard, attempting first to nail down meaning with images, and when all else fails, training the camera on the reports Cristi has written, shot in such a way as to underline in black ink just how little forward progress is being made in the film's case.

With that, there arises a tricky strain of didacticism: it may be key that the cop's girlfriend is a teacher, his targets of high-school age, his chief informant apt to dash off to do his homework, and that the whole thing concludes with a (in the circumstances, reasonably amusing) half-hour dialectics lesson, complete with chalk and blackboard, given in the police chief's office-turned-classroom on the subject of the individual's needs versus those of the state. It's less an intrigue than an exercise: if not a punishment, exactly - "I WILL NOT PLAY TO THE CHEAP SEATS", written out once every minute for 110 minutes - then a project undertaken by a nation still struggling to define itself, with its cinema as with any other language.

Police, Adjective is available on DVD from Monday.