Movie Discussion! - Page 57

Police officer Cristi (Dragos Bucur) has the school playground under surveillance. Although drug use is evident, he is hesitant about making an arrest. With Romania the only European country in which marijuana use and distribution is still a punishable offense, he feels he would be pointlessly ruining a kid’s life by sending him to prison for 3 ½ years for violating a law that is likely to be repealed. He wants to wait a few weeks and trap the older brother, who he suspects of serious drug dealing. The chief doesn’t see it that way. In his view, Cristi has succumbed to the chaos of subjective morality and gives him the ultimatum of either enforcing the law and being a police officer or following his own moral code and leaving the force. In “Police, Adjective,” writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) uses a dictionary to define who and what we are when our only means of self-knowledge is the subjection of our variable moral codes to the objective definitions of words.