The movie begins with a young man watching a group of teenagers. The man is Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young plainclothes police officer in Vaslui—a town (pop. 70,000) near Romania's border with Moldova—and one of the teenagers is suspected of dealing drugs. Each day, the officer secretly watches the teenagers (two boys and a girl) from a distance. And every sunless day, the teens do the same dull thing: They smoke a joint in a secluded area behind a kindergarten, laugh a little, and then walk to their respective homes. (The real story—that the boys are in love with the one girl—is never explored.) The assignment is, of course, stupid. The young detective not only believes the teens are harmless but that it's only a matter of time before the laws change and, as in the European Union (which Romania wants to enter), the casual possession of pot will become more or less legal.

Cristi wants to end the investigation and start one with a little more meat, but his superiors want him to make an arrest in the teen/pot case. The young officer is certain that nothing good will come out of the arrest, that it will only destroy innocent lives; the superiors only want to follow the rules by the book: Pot is illegal, and its use and sale must be punished. Cristi thinks the real big fish is elsewhere, travels to Italy, and lives the highlife; his superiors only want the scrawny teenager who spends most of his time at home. There is no other tension in the film than the tension between the young officer (who does not want to arrest the teenager) and his superiors (who want him to make an arrest). Police, Adjective is a comedy.

The American poster for the film (which is written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu) shows a dictionary open to the definition of police. Directly on the definition rests a sinister pistol. This image, however, is very misleading. Not one gun is shown in the whole film (which is nearly two hours long), nor does the film contain anything that an American in their right mind would recognize as "action." The closest we ever get to suspense is a long scene (and the movie has lots of long, time-filled scenes) that sees the officer following a rather plain teenage girl. She walks; he walks. She turns down a street; he turns down the street. She walks into a shabby apartment building; he enters the shabby apartment building. She walks up some stairs; he walks up the stairs. She enters her place; he turns and walks down the stairs and exits the shabby apartment building—some dogs are on the street. And that is the end of the sequence. This is not about action, but the kind of comedy that leaves a wise smile on your face.

The gun is misleading, but the dictionary is not. Police, Adjective is about the definitions of three words: conscience, law, and police. The definitions are used by a superior (Vlad Ivanov) to show the young officer that he has no idea (or has a confused idea) about his job and place in society. Cristi's guts correctly tell him that the teenagers he is investigating are harmless and should be left alone, but the dictionary shows that conscience, law, and police have nothing to do with his gut feeling. It is here we reach the most profound and philosophical matter of the comedy. This matter has nothing to do with what the great film critic J. Hoberman calls "the tyranny of language" (an echo of the tyranny of Nicolae Ceausescu), but with a history of social contractualism

that begins with the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The argument essentially is this: Humans need an enforced contract to bind them, because otherwise there would be no peace, just a state of nature, which is a war of "all against all." This kind of thinking imagines social bonds to be unnatural and self-interest to be the true or ultimate condition of the individual. Humans, therefore, cannot cooperate without coercion (potestas). In the climactic scene, Cristi's superior makes this very point: "Where does this lead us? To chaos. Right? And in order for there not to be chaos, there is the law that we as police officers have to obey and enforce." This cold view of things sees in all human bonds the factor of use, of utility. Remove that utilitarian factor, and society becomes a jungle. But this view is wholly wrong; humans are by nature social (this has been proved by mirror neurons). What's unnatural is the enforcement of these natural instincts and feelings.

Cristi is right to recognize the good that is in the teens. This kind of recognition, this feeling, is indeed what makes him and others human. It is instead—and this is the core of the comedy—policing, enforcement, contracts, and constitutions that are less than human. "About police and police states," reads Cristi from the dictionary, "which are supported by the state and which exercise control through repressive methods—" "Ridiculous!" interrupts Cristi's superior. "All states depend on the police."