Romanian director Corneliu Porumboi seems to be a bright star in Romanian film, with his two most recent movies receiving accolades from Cannes and one of them, 2006’s post-Communist comedy “12:08 East of Bucharest” winding up on a ton of Top 10 lists at the end of the year.
So there was an understandable amount of excitement about his new film, “Police, Adjective” playing at the New York Film Festival, especially after it won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section (it runs parallel to the Palme d’Or) at Cannes.
Except, it turns out, that it’s the most boring fucking movie that’s ever been filmed. Ever. And this is no exaggeration (yes, we’re counting that cluster of pre-“Milk” Gus Van Sant movies that consisted mainly of people walking down long hallways/through the woods/in an imagined Kurt Cobain scenario).
Let’s rundown the movie’s “plot:” a Romanian cop is tasked with tracking a teenage pot smoker, an offense that could send the kid to jail for the better part of a decade. The cop wrestles with the morality of this assignment and, in one of the more painful sequences, we watch him eat soup for a good 10 minutes. (Painful because the soup doesn’t look very yummy and every slurp is given the deafening, digital sound treatment of a stampeding “Jurassic Park” dinosaur.)
We watch as the cop follows the kid, for chunks of at least 20 minutes. We watch him dodge meetings with his superior. We watch him eat soup. We watch him follow the kid for another 20 minutes. And the only interjection is a couple of scenes where we get to read his police reports. No voice over, nothing. We see something happen for a long ass amount of time, then we read a description of what just happened. It’s not interesting, it’s not arty, it’s head-up-your-ass pretentious, and it’ll make you want to claw your eyes/hair out, while others around you force strained laughter. (Yes, this is supposed to be a comedy.)
The “climax” of the movie involves the cop finally having a sit-down with the superior he’s been avoiding for the whole movie. The superior makes the cop read definitions from a dictionary. THAT IS LITERALLY IT. (“Iron Man,” it’s not.)
There’s no music, there’s very little dialogue (this silence doesn’t help if you’re trying to discreetly open a miniature bag of Goldfish, to try to keep yourself awake) and the entire thing is an endless slog (at 115 minutes, it feels like watching “Watchmen” three times in a row) of pretentious nothingness. You don’t feel anything, you don’t really see or hear anything, and there’s no real reason anyone would want to see it, unless it was really hot and you wanted to cool off inside with the theater’s frosty air conditioning.
Porumboi may be the future of Romanian cinema, but this is undoubtedly a folly – a cringe-inducing folly of biblical proportions. If you do find yourself locked in a theater while this is playing, we recommend a nap (if we weren’t embarrassed by the idea of sleeping while sitting next to the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, we probably would have just snoozed too). [F] – Drew Taylor
[Editors note: Not to undermine our writer here, but having seen some NYFF films, they definitely appeal to a certain type: the artiest of the arthouse crowd. For example our art-leaning writer Sam Mac loved “Eccentricities of A Blond Haired Girl,” and I liked its wry, sociopathically deadpan and theatricalized ways, but I could see normal civilians wanting to kill someone after the gag of an ending (when I saw it this weekend the crowd seemed to have a hushed and disgruntled, “I want my money back or this director’s blood” air to it). Just some perspective, these films can be brilliant, but they’re not for everyone. I personally like most of Gus Van Sant’s mid-art-period as well.]