In case you didn’t know, I’m a big-time consumer of Romanian post-90’s movies and the one I did watch last night is "Police, adj." by Corneliu Porumboiu, winner of an important award at Cannes Film Festival in 2009 (3rd award actually at the same festival). With his previous movie in mind "12:08 East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost), one of my favorites, I was expecting something quite interesting while totally different type of a movie altogether from what I could gather reading about it. Found it unbearably static, but you expect that when you get to some elitist intentionally out-of-the ordinary European movies. Got that no-editing and raw shooting stamp that quite a few of the most recent Romanian "new school" movies promoted as the new norm.
OK, how about the interesting parts then ? What makes this movie so special ? To me, and I’m by no means a pro when it comes to reviews, there were a few parts worth enjoying – in-depth analysis of the apparently stupid lyrics of the song played over and over again, a contrast between what seems to be real stupid turned into surprisingly valid mix of interpretations.
The final climax scene is also quite original and the way the police chief gets to the bottom of meaning of words based on the dictionary definitions comes through surprisingly well. However, as a Romanian language speaker, I got no idea how this would come through when filtered out by subtitles since I didn’t follow those in English at all. So a total of a couple of memorable scenes put in balance with the rest of the movie that seems to build up tension in waiting over building up tension in waiting with zero outcome. Including one of those frustrating no-ends that are becoming more and more the norm in lots of contemporary movies.
Compared to this movie, “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” (another Cannes-awarded Romanian movie) seems to be a pure adrenaline rush and believe me, it is actually very far from that. And speaking of frustrating movie experiences, another example of a torturing plot, this time signed Francis Ford Coppola - "Youth without youth" based on a novel by Mircea Eliade one of the big shiny names in Romanian literature, I still wonder how I could resist all the way to the conclusion of it stuck to the theater seat, on remote possibility might be the movie photography direction, a quite artistic one.
Here below filmography for two of the actors in "Police, adj." (a candidate to the Oscars' foreign movie section for 2010):
http://www.cinemagia.ro/actori/dragos-bucur-529/ - which I found to be an excellent actor otherwise in at least a couple of other previous movies, unfortunately not much material for him to build upon for this one
http://www.cinemagia.ro/actori/vlad-ivanov-30295/ - a good and short role for him, contrasting with the rest of the movie – he was part of the cast too in “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” among others
I kind of suspect the director (Porumboiu) to have intentionally concocted “Police, adj.” with the latest in-fashion Cannes award-winning profile in mind, meaning painfully long scenes with no dialogs where we simply watch the main character going on with his daily suspect-tracking routine all assorted with chain smoking, eating, and so on. You get the feeling this is one of the typical movies geared specifically to guarantee box-office failure and therefore maximizing its chances for elitist film festivals jury selection as the one to embrace. Total lack of editing and raw shooting taking out any illusion of art photography contribute to the whole extremely unappealing feel for the vast majority of cinema crowds result. And I’m not talking about "Transformers" or "Fast and the Furious" crowd either.
On the other hand, during the short stay in Bucharest this year, got to see another Romanian movie, this time a quite entertaining and enjoyable one - "Amintiri din Epoca de Aur" – a cinema theater packed with a mostly young crowd that seemed to love the movie. What am I saying, entertaining has become a shameful attribute when it comes to award-winning movies how dare I even mention this word ? I’m just one number out of the box-office statistics and these are also something irrelevant. How about starting to rely exclusively on government subsidies for producing jury-satisfying movies from now on ? It must be my recent trip to France that contributed to my thinking evolution way to the far left, someone help !
