Police, Adjective.

Then I realized: it was odd to call the film Police, Adjective. I was at the library, and I opened up their big dictionary on the table. A transitive verb, yes, a noun, certainly, but no listing as an adjective. My MacBook's dictionary doesn't have police listed as an adjective. It does have 'police procedural', an instance I think of police being used as an adjective, although in my MacBook 'police procedural' is listed as one word and as a noun, defined as 'a crime novel in which the emphasis is on the procedures used by the police in solving the crime.' Police, Adjective is a police procedural film that deals with the ambiguity of basic concepts, concepts misshaped into amorphousness by semantics, culture, education, beliefs, etc.

And the joke is consulting a dictionary over the title of Police, Adjective. I can't begin to describe the suspended state of hysterical absurdity (punctuated by the still life bowl of fruit on the table, and chalk-drawing on the board, and a secretary's search for a dictionary) which the film ends on. Some of the film's biggest detractors claim its final moments almost single-handedly save an otherwise obnoxiously boring movie.

The movie's very boring, is what most people were saying today at PIFF, following its screening yesterday. I heard a couple local Portland critics saying it was the worst film of PIFF thus far. Get the fuck out of here, as they say.

Police, Adjective is a film in which long takes search out natural rhythms, and the temporal fabric echoes the vast moral field which is the film's playground. The film is about a policeman who contemplates essential questions with enormous consequence in the mundane circumstances of modernity. Police work is an ideal conduit for expressing everyday dullness (and habit and ritualization as obstruction from comprehension of the meaningful) because of cinema's legacy of glamorizing police work. Here is cinema's most illustrious genre, a genre which for many defines the medium, and here it is stripped bare. Which is why everyone can at least understand the semantic, bureaucratic farce at the end (another great one occurs between the husband and wife over a song, and their dispute illustrates how words can function as obstacles between raw feeling and rationality - and who understands words better, the husband, who understands words only as tangible objects, or the wife, who participates in the struggle to grasp the intangible depths of words).

The final semantic journey charts itself between conscience - law - moral - police: a policeman in a boss's office is asked to turn the dictionary pages to each word as they discuss whether or not a raid should be executed on a teenage boy (where is the teenager in your mind as this conversation takes place?). I also overheard the Portland critic tell his friend that he felt like he was being lectured to the entire film, and that the final question was simply a matter of strict adherence to the letter of the law* versus the spirit of the law. But it's more than that. It's about a buried feeling, hard to name, hard to express. Where does it originate, and how true is it? A feeling embedded in the soul. And also, importantly, how much of our lives are shaped by how well we can express ourselves?

This is the spirit of the film that goes deeper than the words debated in those final moments, and though I can try to be persuasive on this point, part of my argument will remain trapped within me, inexpressible for various reasons, owing to the words I use and the way I search to express them, and that's something Police, Adjective understands about people and their lives. I've never seen it expressed so well, so clearly, in a film.

*The film has deadpan letters of the law jokes. Visual puns that make me shit my pants from laughter just thinking about.