Romanian cinema in transition

Police, Adjective" was shot in the drab provincial Romanian city of Vaslui. What you see won't make you rush to visit. Corneliu Porumboiu's compact fluorescent lamp film follows an undercover cop who battles with his conscience as he shadows a teenager whom he's ordered to arrest for a petty drug offense.

The slow drama's crescendo comes when the cop's imperious boss pulls out a dictionary and delivers a lecture on language and duty to the compassionate policeman that would make George Orwell shudder. Filmed on drizzly streets and in grimy interiors, "Police, Adjective" has rallied the critics at film festivals around the world. The gray-on-gray palette of Porumboiu's second feature and its focus on the struggles and dark humor of daily life are the signature of new cinema in Romania.

Once watched for Cold War intrigue, Dracula lore, and the flamboyant late dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu, Romania is now being eyed by cinephiles for its young filmmakers, Vaslui-born Porumboiu among them. Outsiders will be tempted to see the clash between a compassionate cop and a dogmatic superior as a holdover from Romania's strict one-party communist rule. Porumboiu, 35, says they would be right. "The movies that I make are about people living in this in-between world," Porumboiu said in a telephone interview. "My characters have this past, and they are living in this transitory world, like myself, of course. You can see the marks of this in my movies. But this one, 'Police, Adjective,' might be more universal, since it ends with people arguing over the definitions of words that they are using." "Every ideological system is built with words," he added. Porumboiu's first feature, "12:08, East of Bucharest" (2006), was based on a local television show in Vaslui, on which guests vied, in retrospect, to give themselves important roles in the small town's "revolution" when communism fell. The director, who wrote the script for "Police, Adjective," says he researched local police routines, but invented the story. "It's more absurd and abstract than the first one," he noted. Under communism, police were heroes in Romanian films and television, which Porumboiu says turned the word for policeman into a pejorative term. But the future director saw a different kind of cop on American TV shows as a child. "Columbo" was a special favorite. "I love it for its humor and for the main character," he said.

Porumboiu rattled off lists of film directors who inspired him, from William Friedkin ("The French Connection") to the Dardenne brothers, whose characters struggle on the margins of Belgian society - "it's realism, and they're showing average people in tragedy." "We never had neorealism, for obvious reasons," said the Bucharest-based film critic Alex Serban, who has watched a new generation of filmmakers emerge. "And the ethical element in neorealism is important for the Romanian New Wave." Asked if his Romanian realism had parallels elsewhere in Europe, Porumboiu hesitated. "In Turkey, maybe, but that's not Europe," he said. Other key influences are literary. As in the plays of Anton Chekhov, the dialogue of "Police, Adjective" allays provincial boredom. Gogol, Salinger, and Kafka are also favorites. Porumboiu's films share a texture with those of his peers in New Romanian cinema - everyday situations in zero decor, a rhythm that imitates real time, endings that lack any triumph. In the police captain of "Police, Adjective," Porumboiu also shared a key actor, Vlad Ivanov, who played a shady abortionist in "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days," the film by compatriot Cristian Mungiu which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. "I needed a mad guy with a nice, common face," the director said. (Porumboiu's "12:08" won the lesser Camera d'Or at Cannes the year before.) And that's not all Porumboiu shares. He bears a remarkable resemblance to Mungiu, and is frequently mistaken for him.

Yet you can tell their films apart, thanks to the chillingly austere look of "Police, Adjective" (even by Romanian standards) and its spare budget, less than $1 million. "It's the most radical film from Romania - it's pushing the approach to its extreme," said Serban.

So far, Porumboiu seems too extreme for the Romanian audience. "After communism, people stopped going to theaters. So now you have just 90 theaters in Romania, a country of 22 million people," the director said. "They want to take cinema just like entertainment, so they don't want to see what's happening in my type of movies." "Police, Adjective" sold only 13,000 tickets in its country of origin.