The Second Game

Calling The Second Game a glorified DVD commentary track seems unfair. After all, who would bother to put this muddy video of a 1988 Romanian soccer match on DVD? As per every snide joke ever aimed at professional soccer, the game even ends in a riveting 0-0 tie. And while there is some ancillary entertainment value in following the players as they slip and slide their way through a snowstorm, nothing on the field can match the subtle battle of wills occurring in the conversation between director Corneliu Porumboiu and his father Adrian, the referee of the game on display. True, the pair’s debate over Romanian history and the art of soccer periodically rambles off into dead ends or dull tangents, and one has to wonder whether Corneliu even planned to release this audio when he first recorded it (the occasional ding of a cellphone notification suggests the conversation was taped under rather relaxed conditions). But the game—featuring a team associated with the army and another with the police—is also rife with the everyday absurdities of life during the twilight of the Ceausescu dictatorship, such as when the camera pans across the audience to avoid showing an on-field argument. Good communists, we’re told, are expected to play nice.

Adrian’s initial response to his son’s questioning over every detail of the match is bemused. He can’t quite understand why anyone should be concerned with a 25-year-old soccer match. The game exists to entertain in the moment. Once over, who cares? The man seems blasé about his precarious position—an opening title card reveals that a young Corneliu even received an anonymous threat against his father—balancing the egos between the rival instruments of state oppression, police and army. There is a generational divide opening up in these responses to the pained history of the Ceausescu years, with the younger generation pushing for more answers than their elders care to give. But as the film progresses, the lulls in conversation stretch out like taffy as both father and son become increasingly absorbed by the game. The father is pulled back into the match, critiquing his calls and gruffly admitting that he is enjoying the spirited play between the two teams. Still, he denies the past, and for good reason. Those long-gone days remain too painfully vivid to be embalmed in history just yet.

Police, Adjective

Sometimes, while watching a film, I will find moments that seem to suck the heat from the room and leave the audience chilled to the bone. Let’s call them frost-bite moments—stinging scenes of cold control and brutal insight. Police, Adjective, a sharp new film from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, contains two such moments, although both are so unlikely that you probably won’t even notice the mercury dropping.

The first of these shuddering epiphanies comes, surprisingly, while the camera simply scans over a hand-written report, slowly passing over the words so that the audience can read the entire document. By all reasonable standards, this is the very opposite of drama.

Yet there is something startling in the stark clarity of the report, drawn up by a young police officer named Cristi (Dragos Bucur, a fine performance, the police officer as lackluster student, prepared for a scolding and refusing to cringe when it comes). The events described within make up the first portion of the film, where we watch Cristi watch three teenagers through a series of mundane moments, all filmed with an exacting patience. Quite frankly, these scenes are dull—so dull, in fact, that it’s shocking to realize this quiet day contains a crime that could net one of the teens a minimum of three and a half years in prison.

That crime is supplying pot (not selling, you’ll note, but simply passing around a joint). Even as Cristi performs his job dutifully, the prospect of sending a harmless teenager to prison for an outdated law that he feels will change in a few years bothers his conscience. That’s the shock of the report—mild actions reduced to their barest legalities. The blunt language of the police report turns the restrained naturalism of the opening scenes on its head, using our own detachment and disinterest against us. The words incriminate whereas the actions appear innocuous.

The second chill comes at the end of the film, during the incredible dictionary reading scene (yes, that’s right). When Cristi argues against convicting one of the teens—by offering up another possible target, and then finally flat-out refusing to take part in a sting operation—his captain brings in a dictionary and demands that the young man read aloud the definition for a variety of words, among them “conscience,” “law,” and “police.” (Amusingly, when Cristi begins to read the definition for “police state,” the captain cuts him off, dismissively explaining that every state is supported by the police, making the term meaningless—and infinitely more horrifying, I might add.)

What makes the scene so disturbing is seeing Cristi broken down by the smooth authoritarian manner of the police captain, played by the brilliant Vlad Ivanov (who seems well on his way to becoming the international face of the Romanian New Wave at this point, especially with showcase roles like this one). Similar to his performance as the abortionist who demands a harsh fee in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Ivanov portrays power at its most forceful and intractable. With that quiet, controlled voice of his, he gives the impression of someone who speaks softer the angrier he gets—definitely not someone you want to fuck with. He commands the scene from the start, and whereas he violated bodies in the earlier film, here he violates minds—calmly assuring the helpless police officer that he does not know his conscience, right and wrong, even his own self.

In an interview with CinemaScope magazine, Porumboiu says that he sees Romania as “a kind of a post-communist society without liberal values: it’s like you left a place and you don’t know where you’re going.” This lack of identity informs the film as much as its preoccupation with Orwellian manipulations of language, which is how the young officer’s moral quandaries are obliterated, leaving him a pliable tool of the police apparatus. If his conscience bothers him still, he has no way to express it anymore. Unable to define his language, Cristi is unable to define himself: you are what you speak.