December 15, 2009 -- This movie isn't exactly painful to sit through, but it does move at glacial speed. If you edited out all the parts where nothing happens, the running time of this film would be reduced from 114 minutes to 15 minutes. You know you are in trouble when the most exciting part of the film is listening to a man read the dictionary. We spend vast amounts of time watching a man watching other people. We see three teenagers smoking hashish from such a distance away that we can't really tell much of anything about what these kids are up to for long periods of time. The editing and cinematography are both sloppy.

The key element of the story is one cop's struggle with his own conscience over the proposed arrest of a young man for doing something which is not a crime in most of Europe. This Romanian cop Cristi (Dragos Bucur of “Youth Without Youth”) is investigating a youth who is smoking hashhish with his friends. He considers this a waste of time because this youth is not really a dealer or even a major distributor of the drug. Cristi would rather go after the supplier, a man who regularly travels to Italy to get drugs, but his superiors are only interested in going after the youth because they believe the case against the youth would be easy to make. Cristi is also convinced the police informant who informed on the youth in question is hiding his own guilt. Cristi is ordered to do a “sting” operation to trap the youths, as if that is all that easy to pull off. He resists the sting operation.

Much of the film has Cristi on foot, following the youths, picking up unburned butts from the ground and testing them for the hallucinogenic drug THC. He hides behind pillars and in doorways, following the youths at a discreet distance on foot. Most of the buildings in the background appear to be decaying remnants of the Communist era, depressing concrete monoliths. Cristi shares an office with another cop, a shambling fellow marking time to his retirement. He doesn't share Cristi's problem with conscience. He just wants to do well enough to keep his job.

The film;s real substance has to do with the meaning of words. There is a lengthy discussion between Cristi and his wife over the meaning of a song's lyrics. Cristi's wife seems to be well-educated about the fine distinctions between various kinds of words. Cristi thinks it is nonsense to worry about such things, until, that is, his very livelyhood depends on the meaning of words. What do the words “conscience,” “law” and “police” really mean? When Cristi refuses to take part in the sting operation because he doesn't want to ruin a young man's life and to have that weighing on his conscience, his boss gets a dictionary and forces Cristi to read the meanings of those very words. The dictionary seems to support the boss's idea that there is no such thing as a personal moral code which supercedes the law.

Cristi's boss gives him a few hours to think things over and then choose. Either do the sting operation, or lose his job. That is really what the film's big showdown is all about. A man reading the dictionary. This does raise interesting philosophical, moral and ethical questions. Is Cristi merely using his boss's philosophical arguments to justify his own lack of moral courage? Does the fact that the meanings of words change over time have any bearing on this moral choice? How come Cristi doesn't just tip the kids off so they don't get caught? We are left with many perplexing questions. None of this, however, is the stuff of which compelling films are made, particularly if one is reduced to reading these lengthy Romanian language arguments in condensed English subtitles. It would work better as a short written story, than as an overlong film loaded with static scenes. This film rates a D.

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