Police, Adjective

In this anti-police procedural, Cristi, a young plainclothes detective, is assigned the case of three high school kids who have been reported smoking dope. Certain that the draconian laws they may be breaking are an outdated hangover from the communist era, he’s reluctant to collar them. He’s nonetheless obliged to stalk them for hour upon hour, and translate their banal comings and goings into data for the police dossiers that will be used to prosecute them.

Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu’s acutely minimalist film takes its pace from the tedium of objective surveillance, and its barbed intellectual vitality from the concomitant process of ‘defining’ what’s unfolding before our eyes.

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