Marijuana is illegal. A cop named Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young man with a new wife, has been tailing a 16-year-old kid (Radu Costin) for some time. There is no doubt the kid is smoking pot, but is he distributing it? Probably. Trafficking? Probably not, but it hardly matters. Cristi’s job is to demonize what he sees, but his methods are absurd; he hangs around schoolyards in plainclothes, and stays a block behind the teenager and his friends in relatively empty, quiet neighbourhoods.

Sooner or later someone is going to notice him. So there’s that. He also must slide in after the joint has been tossed, and pocket it, something society otherwise reserves for hopeless addicts. And the result isn’t any better: because of Cristi, the kid could go to jail, be ostracized from his family and never recover. Or he could just learn to keep it inside, but under these ridged bureaucratic conditions, the punishment will probably not fit the crime.

Like its company in the so-called new wave of Romanian cinema – including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and director Corneliu Porumboiu’s previous film, 12:08 East of Bucharest – Police, Adjective is concerned primarily with how people bend, or don’t, under the pressures of the system. But as Cristi continually reinforces in his arguments over everything from dictionary definitions to song lyrics, the system is nothing but words, and words are ours to do with what we please. When it comes to judicial procedure, that is often counterproductive.

Porumboiu films in long, dry takes, observing and surveilling as Cristi himself observes and surveils. There are passages wherein he seems to be nothing of great importance. He has arbitrary meetings, eats dinner, paces across the pavement. In that sense, the movie is not particularly exciting, but consider the contrast of an abysmal American procedural like Righteous Kill, where a lot happens of “importance,” none of it interesting.

Porumboiu and his actors follow a strict code of patience and rhythm, never allowing the reality of policing – monotonous, careful observation and detection – to seem like anything but work. Our system is probably filled with young men and women who, after growing up on CSI, find the reality to be disappointing and filter that frustration back to the society they are sworn to treat fairly.

It all leads up to a climatic scene, wherein Cristi is going to present his case file to the police captain (Vlad Ivanov, who played the black marketeer in 4 Months...). The file says that over eight days, eight joints have been smoked. That’s potentially years in jail. Cristi is ordered to undertake a “stunt operation” (ostensively a sting), but he refuses. His conscience won’t let him. The captain orders him to read the dictionary definition of "conscience," which includes guilt caused by transgression of state law. Should his conscience not tell him to obey the law? But Cristi believes the law will soon change. Fine, but that’s then and this is now. Around and around, we see how semantics can obscure – rather than clarify – our relationship to the world.  

Now, how about that title? "Police" is a noun. "To police" is a verb. In English, "policeable" would be an adjective, but maybe that will change someday. Words, you see, morph and vanish over time, and to grasp them too tightly would be to reject the inevitable. To piss into the wind, so to speak. Same goes for the law.