Police, Adjective (2009),
malicious compliance, and the potential of a good cop
Corneliu Porumbiou’s 2009 film Police, Adjective follows Brasov, Romania police officer Cristi as he wrestles with a particularly disheartening assignment: he’s told to arrest a teenager who smokes hash. Cristi spends days delaying the arrest. While most Hollywood cop movies would resolve their conflict with shouting and shooting, Police, Adjective resolves its conflict with a nineteen-minute long meeting, involving only six cuts, during which Cristi refuses to execute a planned sting operation. Cristi thinks of himself as an individual policeman with a conscience rather than an instrument of the state. To convince him that he is simply an instrument, the Captain first makes Cristi give his own definition of conscience, then makes him read the dictionary. Building on the similarities between the dictionary and Cristi’s naïve definition of conscience, the Captain directs Cristi to a further series of words. First, after Christi learns that a law-abiding person respects the law scrupulously, the Captain directs Cristi to consider the definition of moral law as vague and idiosyncratic, as opposed to the law of the state, which is black and white and uniformly applicable. Finally, Captain tells Cristi to look up “police.” This is where Police, Adjective gets its title and, I want to claim, the film’s interest in a possible path to a better form of policing. The key part of the definition of police appears on screen in an extreme close-up of a page of the dictionary:
Roman (sau film) polițist = roman (sau film) în care înfățișate fapte criminale maim ult sau mai puțin misterioase, al căror secret este operit în cele din urmă prin ingeniozitatea unui polițist sau a unui detective
[Police novel or film involving criminal happenings that are to some degree mysterious, resolved in the end through the ingenuity of a police officer or detective.[1] [open endnotes in new page]
Police, Adjective is the story of Cristi failing. But Cristi does not fail to solve fapte criminale misterioase [mysterious criminal acts]; the case is simple. Rather Police, Adjective shows Cristi failing to solve something larger about fapte criminale misterioase: the way the law is enforced, moving from the state downstream to the cops, those who execute the law and are the face of the state on the street. But how far downstream is Cristi, and how much of his individual conscience gets washed away across that distance? In the middle of the definition a key aspect to the definition appears: ingeniozitatea [ingenuity]. In film terms, Porumbiou’s shows ingeniozitatea in his formal approach, organizing the film around inaction and words, rather than action and violence; foregrounding the mundane through an emphasis on both dialog and noise. In narrative terms, the character Cristi tries to direct the case through all appropriate channels, and to write a report that is so extensive and detailed in its evidence, so thorough and by-the-book, that he will not have to make an arrest. Cristi’s attempt at ingeniozitatea takes the form of a tool familiar to those of us who aren’t cops, but who work in other offices and worksites: malicious compliance.
We might see Cristi taking so long to arrest suspected drug-taker and possible drug-dealer Victor as a post-revolution Romanian spin on the old joke from the Soviet Union: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” But more is at stake. After going abroad on a honeymoon to Prague, Cristi has seen that minor drug arrests are not the European norm, and life abroad seems to go on just fine without them. Confronted with the potential for making such a minor-level arrest, Cristi engages in malicious compliance as a form of sabotage. As Geoff Brown notes,
“the word sabotage derives from the older French usage involving the word sabot: such as ‘dormir comme un sabot’ (to sleep extremely deeply or heavily) and ‘travailler comme un sabot’ (to work slowly, clumsily, and over-deliberately)” (xii).
Cristi’s over-deliberate work has three main facets: consulting with all key parties thoroughly, collecting as much evidence as possible, and writing the most detailed and extensive report possible. These three parts together, Cristi hopes, will mean at worst not having to make a bad arrest (Victor, just a crazy kid). In a best case scenario,this malicious compliance could also mean creating a situation in which Cristi could make a good arrest (the suspicious grass Alex or the older brother who may be a dealer) and serve justice. In a related way, Porumboiu’s 2006 film 12.08 East of Bucharest, asks in a comic register if the fall of Ceaușescu changed life in the city of Vasuli, Romania much. Police, Adjective has an answer: Not much has changed. The police state, supposedly a symbol of the Ceaușescu era, continues in a slightly different form. As we will see, not even strictly adhering to the official form of police work can prevent “order” from taking precedence over justice.
Early in the film, Cristi establishes a pattern of going through proper channels to delay acting on the imperative to arrest Victor. After a wordless pursuit/surveillance of some teens, Cristi goes to his office, where he calls the prosecutor to discuss a case. Before the meeting he bickers with a fellow cop who wants to play foot-tennis with him. Cristi tries to fob him off, but finally has to take the direct route of being honest: Not being good at football means you’re not good at foot-tennis, that’s the law—lege. That word, lege, appears ten times in his nearly 6-minute, zero-cuts discussion with the prosecutor and reappears throughout the film. As they talk around the case—Cristi’s getting married, Prague’s nickname, Brasov’s history as Stalin City—Cristi and the Prosecutor discuss the limits of how much discretion a cop has.
Police, Adjective was released in 2009, a generation after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu and shortly after Romania joined the European Union. The change in the city’s name, from Stalin City to Brasov, shows this change from Soviet satellite to neoliberal state, perhaps heralding an increase in discretion. The man of steel may disappear from the place name, but the iron remains. As described by Loïc Wacquant in Prisons of Poverty,the U.S. export of hyper-incarceration to western Europe led to
“a new government of social insecurity wedding the “invisible hand” of the deregulated labor market to the “iron fist” of an intrusive and omnipresent punitive apparatus” (1).
Thus there is no mystery as to how Police, Adjective will end. In spite of Cristi’s observation that smoking hash is not criminalized in Prague and that (in some wishful thinking) in Romania the same will soon be true, the Prosecutor assures Cristi that a sting will happen. But before Christi’s case reaches this inevitable conclusion, the ingeniozitatea that Porumbiou and Cristi deploy draws out Cristi’s flexible sense of lege [law] in the specific case to which he is assigned. The film juxtaposes the policeman’s actions against a black-and-white law-and-order understanding of the law that prevails in the police as an institution.
Ironically, Cristi has a black-and-white understanding of almost every other facet of his life; only in police work does he see shades of grey. This is made clear in two comic domestic scenes Cristi shares with his wife Anca. In the first, Anca listens to the Mirabella Dauer song “Nu te părăsesc, iubire” three times in a row. Cristi, perhaps a little drunk, thinks the song makes no sense, and is perplexed by the song’s lyrics,
“Ce ar fi marea fără soare? / Ce ar fi câmpul fără floare? / Ce ar fi astăzi fără mâine? / Ce ar fi viaţa fără tine”?
[“What would the sea be without the sun? / What would the field be without the flower? / What would today be without tomorrow? / What would life be without you?”][2]
He responds to the lyrics as literal statements that verge on the nonsensical. It seems he wants Mirabella Dauer to write a police report in song form. On the other hand, Anca reads the lyrics grammatically—the importance of using an article in one instance—and metaphorically, starting with the song’s rhetorical device of anaphora and then working through the chorus’s four lines to show how they create a coherent message. Cristi walks back his disagreement slightly, using the song’s lyrics as a model for a joke about his toothpaste, but his clear desire is for Mirabella Dauer to be direct, to say exactly what she means—as he does when he turns down his colleague’s foot-tennis request. A similar desire appears in a conversation Cristi and Anca have about his pursuit report, which he misuses/mis-spells the word niciun [not any]. Learning that the Romanian Academy has declared that niciun should be written as one word, Cristi first responds with incredulity that someone has the job of policing grammar. Nevertheless, Cristi accedes to the prescriptive grammar that Anca explains. He thinks it’s crazy, but he’ll do it. Cristi does not approach his police work in the same manner. Rather, in his estimation some laws make little sense and will soon change anyway, so they are unreasonable demands. He sees selective enforcement as a kind of professional discretion he can bring to police work, if not to his written reports.
That the law might soon change or that a different, more agreeable-to-pursue crime might soon replace the investigation’s current target mean Cristi sees the potential to run out the clock. While he doesn’t directly engage with Police, Adjective, critic Ira Jaffe dedicates a chapter in his book Slow Cinema: Countering the Cinema of Action to filmmakers Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu, who like Poromboiu are part of the Romanian New Wave. In Jaffe’s account of the experience of waiting as the basis of slow cinema characters’ way of experiencing time:
“Characters in the films by Puiu, Mungiu and [American director Todd] Haynes cannot “forget the passage of time” as they endure physical and psychological pain. The alienating silence, indifference and delay they confront in seeking care make it no easier for them to “pass the time”” (12).
What distinguishes Cristi in Police, Adjective is that while he arrives at the same end point, he tries to make the passage of time do something: prevent an arrest. He tries to do this by carrying out his job extremely by the book, continuing to collect evidence even after being told of a sting’s inevitability, hoping new evidence might redirect the sting’s target. The license plates on the cars he sees in front of the hash smoker Victor’s house get run through the system; maybe they belong to someone with a significant criminal record. Another time, Cristi brings a list of names related to his case to the records office and to the passport office, casting the net very wide, looking for bigger fish. He even comes up with evidence of someone leaving Romania and perhaps bringing drugs back in. A record of a DUI should be a reason to give a suspect a look, certainly. A drug distributor who also drives drunk seems to present an instance when an “intrusive and omnipresent punitive apparatus” might be called for. When the Captain calls him for a meeting, Cristi extemporizes, saying he has a “new lead” that he has to track down before he can see the Captain. Cristi then sets up a meeting with his informant Alex, asking for potentially testable drug material so that he can develop the case, a fool’s errand that buys more time. Even that approach is ingenious in its own way, using one part of police work to avoid doing another part of police work: arresting someone who does not need to be arrested. In his pursuit of more evidence Cristi performs a fishing expedition, but not with the express purpose of finding a crime or even pinning a crime on someone. Rather, he goes fishing to show that he’s busy doing policework, to keep the case running, maybe until the higher-ups lose interest or a less life-ruining option for the teen smoker will present itself.
Gathering so much evidence necessitates writing a report that encompasses all the information related to the case. “Good” police work means Cristi has to collect as much evidence as possible; this means more surveillance. Cinematically, Poromboiu films Cristi’s pursuit and surveillance in long takes of long shots. His shoulders hunched up, face buried in his sweater’s collar, watching Victor’s house, watching Victor smoke a cigarette. The film’s flow plays against the usual fast editing of cop movies. The duration of shots and prolonged sequences of the pursuit itself show how boring and pointless the case against Victor is. Watching from a playground, Cristi watches the teenagers smoke a joint and leave the area. When he investigates the “crime scene,” a long shot in a long take shows him pick up the remnants of a joint. At the same time, mundane playground noises of children yelling as they kick a football overwhelm any sound Cristi might be making. Everyday life doesn’t just go in spite of Cristi’s investigation, it drowns it out.
Subsequently, Cristi’s handwritten reports mention not only the mechanics of his pursuits—streets, buildings, observations—but also his doubts about the case, such as Alex the informant seeming insincere (“Alex Iancu a avut o atitudine nesciner”) or the teenager he’s meant to arrest not appearing to represent a danger to society (“un pericol social”). In addition to voicing his own doubts, Cristi includes official documentation to support his desire to re-direct the case’s focus. After completing his eighth pursuit report, a long shot of Cristi at his desk shows him flipping through 13 pages of previous reports before adding report 8 and the three pages of criminal and passport records. In this way Cristi uses an appropriate paperwork channel to propose an investigation into Iulian Paraschiu—who is older, has a criminal record, and has a record of international travel that might enable drug access rather than a kid who smokes hash with a couple of friends. This kind of overly-detailed report is Cristi’s stab at malicious compliance so as to take control of his work.
Such an approach at first glance resembles what Michael Lipsky calls the work of
“street level bureaucracies…the schools, police and welfare departments, lower course, legal services officers, and other agencies whose workers interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or the allocation of public sanctions” (xi).
A cop often mediates between the law and the citizen as a street level bureaucrat, and can exercise discretion by letting someone off with a warning rather than arresting them. But Cristi can exercise no discretion; he is an instrument of the state, not an individual with a conscience. The Captain makes it clear: either Cristi performs the sting or he resigns his job. Rather than Lipsky’s hopeful liberal imagination of how the police work, a closer experience here might be David Graeber’s more critical assessment of the police: “So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons” (73). Cristi’s bureaucratic move—making a report so good that it generates discretion—fails. The work structure here is not an evolving assessment of changing circumstances, which Cristi hopes to address by 1) at least not arresting crazy kids and 2) perhaps arresting someone who represents a real pericol social [a danger to society]. Instead, the work structure is a black-and-white approach to the law used to maintain order.
In Police: A Field Guide, David Correa and Tyler Wall argue,
“It is through the concept of order we can best make sense of the concept of police. The central mandate of police has always been “good order” …Most importantly law is understood to produce a just order, one based on norms in which punishment follows violation, and all of this serves the goal of equality—we are all equal before the law, in other words” (84, 94).
The order is capitalist property relations. But, Cristi’s actions ask, how does a kid smoking hashish do anything to capitalist property relations? Cristi tells the Prosecutor and his Captain he doesn’t want to have a dumb arrest on his conscience, doesn’t want to have ruined the kid’s life because smoking hash with friends does not present un pericol social. What Cristi knows, having lived those long takes, is that his job is boring and stupid, and the socially destructive figure is not a teenager smoking hash, but a cop so far downstream from law-making that he enjoys no (positive) discretion on how to enforce the law.
In the introduction to Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society Nicole Rafter offers a useful definition for a “crime movie”: a film that “focus[es] primarily on crime and its consequences” (6). In many crime movies, the criminals face consequences. They are caught and prosecuted. Order is restored. By the police. As Rafter points out later in the same book, in the chapter “Cop and Detective Films,”
“Movies in the alternative or critical tradition [of cop films] gravitate toward the character of the corrupt police officer, demonstrating that there is no such thing as a good cop…By implication, they also suggest that there is no such thing as a good man” (131).
The “critical” approach Rafter desribes seems limited to a narrative about individual action, with a focus on a character’s morality and psychology. But Police, Adjective sees the police as an institution, literally providing a dictionary definition during Cristi’s meeting with the Captain. Here Ira Jaffe’s argument about slow movies like Police, Adjective, which combine narrative and form, seems more useful:
“slow movies are hard to take not simply because they portray feelings contrary to optimism. Rather they also inhibit the expression of such feelings, just as they restrict motion, action, dialogue and glitter. Slow movies thus bring to the fore cheerless aspects of existence that are likely to worsen if ignored, but drape them in stillness, blankness, emptiness and silence” (9).
By dwelling on the bureaucracy-based resistance of malicious compliance, Police, Adjective stages an approach to police work that seeks to use something still, blank, and silent—extensive reports that require more and more time to complete and act on—to sidestep cheerless aspects of existence that are likely to worsen. The problem for Cristi is that this approach doesn’t work. The mediation Cristi’s reports offer, that of a cop as an individual with some discretion, cannot overcome the mediation of cop-as-instrument of the larger institution.
Travis Linnemann deploys an old adage in the service of an abolitionist argument: “police are often not there when you need them, around when you don’t, and ultimately of no use either way” (57). The climactic dictionary-reading scene of Police, Adjective puts the adage to the test and reveals its truth. The Captain wins the argument, Cristi performs the sting, and nothing useful happens. In terms of its narrative events, Police, Adjective appears to fit into Linnemann’s critique of
“the ideology that glosses over policing’s many contradictions and failures is not simply imposed by political power from above but is also actively produced by those who make the Faustian bargain, choosing the violence of police in order to avoid the more horrifying realities of an inherently inhospitable and insecure world.” (53)
In Hollywood films that Linnemann uses to build his case, the bribe cop movies offer their audiences is a simple fantasy: Cops solve the problem through violence, create safety, and further entrench the violence-based police order of the (racist, sexist, exploitative) status quo. But Police, Adjective is not a Hollywood production. There are no car chases but rather a very slow pedestrian trailing. There is no on-screen physical violence. No one even carries a gun. For most of the movie Cristi stands on the footpath, shoulders hunched, trying to stay warm while he watches teenagers smoke a joint. The perversity of a cop trying his hardest not to enforce a law he knows to be unjust by strictly adhering to all expectations of professional conduct dangles before us the possibility of Cristi being a good cop. But a good cop is a temporary, imaginary figure; it depends on believing what’s in the cop’s heart rather than recognizing their actions, because the results remain the same. The fapte criminale misterioase [mysterious criminal acts] Cristi cannot solve are how to be a good cop and how to avoid enforcing an unjust law. He shows some ingeniozitatea [ingenuity] by trying malicious compliance, but the reports still take as their starting point the unjust law, placing him downstream and at an immediate disadvantage.
All of this makes the ending particularly jarring. In close up is a blackboard diagram where we see Cristi’s hand drawing a schematic of a sting operation that occurs offscreen, after the end of the film. This blackboard image is shot in a POV shot that implicates us as one of the cops in on the sting, not only looking at the map and listening to Cristi’s narration, but also listening to the sounds of the chalk against the chalkboard, tapping, scraping. The imminent piercing screech of the chalk, the sonic intrusion of the punitive apparatus, looms as a danger throughout the sequence. The police order choosing violence remains, but its ideological force is made stronger by all we have seen before. The sting plan tosses all of Cristi’s verbal protestations and maliciously compliant forms into the dustbin. In the end, someone who wants to keep their conscience clean like Cristi can either leave the police or make stupid arrests. The truth of policing pervades Cristi’s attempts at malicious compliance: it does not matter if he complains, makes reasoned arguments, and fills in all the right forms. It simply delays the inevitable. In the end you draw up the sting operation and ruin some crazy kid’s life.
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| The sounds of the chalk against the chalkboard. | The final image of the inevitable sting operation. |
