An Interview with "Police, Adjective" Director Corneliu Porumboiu

by James Hansen

Police, Adjective - one of the major highlights at this year's New York Film Festival - opens in New York at IFC Center today. I wrote about the film in my round-ups of the festival, but I was also lucky enough to sit down with director Corneliu Porumboiu during the festival to discuss his approach in crafting this challenging film. The following is an edited conversation I had with Mr. Porumboiu on September 29, 2009 discussing the film, his cinematic influences, and, well, words.


James Hansen: How did the story come about?

Corneliu Porumboiu: There were two stories I heard that inspired me. One was about two brothers, one of whom betrayed the other in a small case about consuming hashish. The second story: I have a friend who is a police officer and he told me about case that he had where he decided he didn’t want to solve it because of his conscience.

JH: How much did the real events effect your stylistic choices for the film like the use of real-time during the police investigations?

CP: Doing research for the second draft of the script, I discovered that police officers have a lot of time - death time - waiting and surveilling. This was very important for me because it fits into the spirit that I wanted to give to the script and to the absurd tone of my movie. I take real time and it becomes an absurd time. The movie is about meaning and a policeman trying to get that sense in his world. The real time allowed me to construct that feeling.

JH: You mention the absurdist qualities of the film, which are infused with the realism. I wonder if this is what informs the comedy of both Police, Adjective and your earlier films?

CP: I think the comedy is really just coming with me. I don’t think before I make a movie as to whether it will be a comedy or something like that. It’s something that is in my point of view on life so it’s very natural.

JH: What your major influences were for this project?

CP: I had seen many police movies (policier) like All of Us, but for this particular movie I was influenced by Bresson’s Pickpocket and Antonioni’s Blow Up. Big parts of my movie are silent and the body language counts a lot. So, in the sense of both timing and atmosphere, I was thinking a lot about these two movies.

JH: Blow Up is an interesting choice since it is all about the dissection of an image, and in Police, Adjective it seems you invert the process by dissecting language. Can you talk about your approach to text and dialogue in the film and its relationship with the image, particularly in the final sequence and conversation with the dictionary?

CP: Blow Up is one of my favorite movies. I was thinking more about the technique in Blow Up for my first movie (12:08 East of Bucharest) in trying to define the revolution. In this case, when I was doing my research, I was seeing the daily reports from police officers. With these came the idea of representation that you can also see to some extent in Blow Up. You see what he’s doing everyday by what is written on the page. And it is just a representation of what happened that day. That was the first point when I started looking at language and words and what they really mean and what the express. You have this structure that repeats day after day after day, which is what leads into the final conversation.

JH: And that all leads into the final shot of the film, which I think is stunning. Can you talk about the idea behind the last shot and how it connects back to ideas of symbology, image, and text?

CP: As I mentioned before, it’s coming from those words and details and reports. They go into the word conscience and finally the word police. The drawing on the blackboard at the end gives you the absurd tone of the movie. Everything becomes a graphic. But I don’t believe so much in symbols. An image is dealing with an image. But it all goes back to the meaning of the words. And it’s a repetition leading to a certain kind of art. Plus, I prefer being a little cynical.

JH: Is your cynical approach to the search for answers and clarity in Police, Adjective related to your personal your views about Romania, whether before or after the revolution?

CP: For me personally, after the revolution, I was thinking all the changes would come the next day. I had quite a romantic point of view about it and life in general. Years after, I’ve become a more cynical. Maybe it’s the way things should be, but, for me, the expectations that I had were broken. For my research, I asked ten different friends to define the word conscience. There were so many different definitions! After that, I started to write and that was my idea in the end: what is in the back of these words? If it’s in a dictionary, I think it’s absurd, and that is the feeling I had writing and making this movie. What is the link to these words? What is the conscience of a society? It’s coming from this sentiment I have. The definitions [of conscience] were so different, but, at the same time, they express, as I feel, that in Romania we often don’t understand each other. The words are no use at the end.
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NYFF 2009: Searching For Answers

After a strong start to the New York Film Festival, with only one major dud in my first report, the festival continued its strong set of films with a couple works by some of the more provocative directors out there (Von Trier, Dumont), and hyped arrivals for the Romanian Cannes Jury Prize winner Police, Adjective, directed by 34-year-old Cornielu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest), and Berlin Golden Bear winner Everyone Else, directed by 32-year-old Maren Ade. But did our shockers shock? Did the hype from Cannes and Berlin hold over? Or did reports of weak festivals around the world finally reveal itself in New York? Much of this is still to be seen, but its certainly something to think about as these dispatches and other reports continue to come out. Onward and upward.

But first, a non-critical explanatory note: the press screenings begin before the festival and ex-tend throughout it. As such, I have had a bit of difficulty trying to see as much as possible while feeling confident about what I’m writing for these dispatches, so taking it a little bit at a time seems to be the best choice. I’m covering the four films mentioned above in this set, while leav-ing a couple that I’m sure people are interested in (and may have seen preliminary reactions to on Twitter or Facebook) – Trash Humpers, Around A Small Mountain – for the next set to give them a little more time to sink in.


Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, Denmark)- I don’t get much more excited about new films than I did for Antichrist. After the in-sane reactions from Cannes (which always seem so intent on saying something that brash acclamations are thrown around without much thought), Antichrist was and is undeniably a film whose reputation will precede it for most first time viewers. But, lest you buy into everything you have read (and as Michael Sicinski has aptly described), Antichrist spends about two thirds of its running time being an intense, oftentimes beautiful, and thrilling psychological thriller. Did people really think this was a giant humorless prank? Featuring some razor sharp debates between He (Willem Dafoe) and She (an incredible Charlotte Gainsebourg), Von Trier isn’t throwing scissors around without set up. An extremely skilled artist and, yes, provocateur, Antichrist is sure to entice, but only after the brilliantly bizarre wind up. Set up in a chapter structure, slightly reminiscent of Dogville but without the sly reflexive commentary, Antichrist uses the first two chapters to earn the smack down (of sorts) that most of you have probably heard about by now. And while the horror is certainly what most people seem to remember (unfortunate as its the weakest section of the film), Antichrist is extremely interested in empathy, guilt, sorrow, fear, and the search for self-empowerment (or the lack thereof/inability to do so) following extreme situations –elements anchored by Gainsebourg’s fearless performance. Pleasure becomes non-existant and indescribable pain are part of the severe depression, but what this really leads to for the psyche of She is total chaos. Antichrist’s third chapter does just that as it escalates to the majority of its already infamous moments. Von Trier loses some “emotion” in the face of shock, yet the shift to visual horror (shown in great detail, mirroring pornographic ideas of visibility indicated in the film’s first scene) after so much psychological discussion under-scores the progression of terror from the interior to the exterior. In the end, Antichrist is a powerfully affective psychological horror film questioning states of suffering and pondering the ability to exist in a world whose very nature is founded on chaos. A-
Antichrist will be released by IFC Films on October 23.


Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany)- I wish I had a chance to see this again to really give it its due. A superbly crafted work for sure with incredibly strong performances, Everyone Else tells the story of Gitti and Chris, a couple on a summer vacation to Sardinia where they try to learn about and redefine themselves for each other. Taking the position of their parents (at Chris’s parents summer home), Gitti and Chris are finding their new positions in the world, as a little bit older, a little insecure, and totally unsure of what do from here. Mirrored by a neighbor couple who represent what Gitti and Chris think they want, but know they can’t and won’t be, Everyone Else is more classically structured and “accessible” than anything else I’ve seen at the festival thus far, yet Ade’s direction is so in command that it becomes sharp, assertive, and downright exciting. I’m a bit amazed that this doesn’t have distribution. Is German film really that down in the US these days? B+


Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, France)- Having only seen Twentynine Palms, I’m certainly not a Dumont expert enough to say things like “Hadewijch is an interesting change of direction for Dumont”, but Hadewijch seems to be an interesting change of direction for Dumont. Chronicling the religious devotion of a young girl named Hadewijch, banned from her monastery for her attempts at martyrdom in the name of Christ (abstinence, not martyrdom should be the goal, say the nuns), Hadewijch recalls the religious tales of Robert Bresson in a thoroughly modern context. Forced out in the world to face “real” demons, Hadewijch, going by the name Celine (and portrayed in a captivating performance by Julie Sokolowski), meets Yassine, a Muslim, at a café. In an attempt to make a con-nection without losing devotion to her own religion, Celina befriends Yassine to the point of sexual attraction, but refuses his calls saving herself, instead, for Christ. The requirement to see and touch pitches Yassine as a religiously devout Doubting Thomas and Celine as a (blind?) follower never questioning the status of her savior. But how far will this devotion go? [major spoiler alert] Influenced by Yassine’s older brother Nassir’s Islamic teachings of love and devotion, while not turning away from Christianity, Celine begins preparations to sacrifice herself for her cause. Nassir ponders violence in nature and who is really innocent. All of this is rather interesting and Dumont’s direction is clear, but a larger set of implications make Hadewijch a troubling work. The overbearing coda following a literal explosion certainly hightens the emo-tion in Celine’s final call for grace, amid the under construction monastery complete with an accused murderer released from prison, now a bricklayer for the church, becoming a stand in for Christ after Dumont pulls another page from Mouchette. Michael Koresky has said, “As in all of the director’s previous films, acts of terrible finality ironically refuse to provide any sort of resolution…” and it is precisely in Dumont’s final plunge into a large graceful resolution that is Hadewijch’s biggest, regrettable misstep. While some have argued that there is more subversion hidden with the film, I’m yet to be convinced that this is anything other than more Western fundamentalism positioning Islam as a threat to the modern world. Sympathetic characters can’t justify the extreme action following Islamic influence and the laughable coda where handyman Christ swoops in to save our heroine from the outside world once again. I’m willing to give this a second viewing, which could make all this analysis mute, but, for now, I don’t buy it. C+


Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)- Another major Cannes arrival in New York, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Jury Prize winning Police, Adjective follows 12:08 East of Bucharest in the mode of taking vague concepts or ideas (for 12:08, what, when, and where did a revolution occur?; for Police, Adjective –what is a conscience) and questioning them in a move to reposition the words, events, or moments in new ways. The effect of this questioning and repositioning, as well as pondering who is asking the questions, who gets to define what, and why we believe any of it anyways, is at the heart of Police, Adjective where the penultimate scene features characters literally reading definitions out of a Romanian dictionary. In a kind of reinvention of the police procedural crime film, Police, Adjective tracks Cristi, a morally conflicted cop, in real time as he follows a young boy accused of selling hashish. Worried about the long term effects of an arrest and convinced the law is going to change anyway, Cristi prolongs the case trying to bide time for the case to develop and his conscience to remain clean. But what is the conscience? And how does it relate to the law? To being a policeman? To being Romanian? Ingeniously infusing ideas of text, images, and the effects of deeper meaning, seen particularly in a long scene where a music video plays alongside Cristi eating dinner, Police, Adjective is perfectly acted and oftentimes riveting look at the power of language in all its forms and its ability to repress or, at the very least, alter any subject it comes into contact with. The incredible final shot is a marker of everything that has come before it. It stands as an abstract symbol where people are no longer just people, words are no longer just words, and language is shown to be a powerful, far reaching weapon. A-
Police, Adjective will be released by IFC Films on Dec 23.
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