I have several reasons to rejoice that Radu Jude‘s ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ received the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, where it was released. One of them is that the film demonstrates that the Romanian Wave in cinema, which is far from new, has become permanent as tides and its lead directors continue to make films that capture viewers’ attention, reflect Romanian reality (and more recently also history), and they do it in various styles and ways. Another reason is that the film itself is excellently made, with a perfect mastery of the technical means of the profession, and in dialogue with the films of previous generations of filmmakers in Romania. The film was made under the conditions of the pandemic and is (also) a film about the pandemic, one of the first. Many others will of course follow it. Last, I am glad that the success belongs to Radu Jude, the film director who bravely approaches the present and past of the country in his films of the last decade.
The film opens with a prologue that everyone has probably heard about and closes with three possible endings from which the viewer can choose the one he prefers. Between them, three parts, each in a different style, each a facet, a perspective of the complex realities of contemporary Romania. The story is quite simple. Emi (Katia Pascariu), a teacher at a school in Bucharest and her husband film themselves while having sex. Somehow, for reasons never well clarified, the film reaches the Internet. The parents of her students, indignant, ask for a meeting that will lead to the exclusion of the teacher from school. In the first part, filmed in documentary style, often with the hidden camera, we see Emi waiting for the meeting, wandering in the streets of the Romanian capital, with their mixture of modern buildings and old houses, often in ruins, with people in a hurry, indifferent, vulgar, nervous and ready to quarrel over nothing. The second part is a dictionary illustrating a few dozen words from current Romanian vocabulary, including various concepts from history to pornography, illustrated with archive, animation or static images, somewhat in the style that Jude had used in ‘The Dead Nation‘ . The third part describes in a theatre style mixing Caragiale and Kafka the meeting presided by the principal of the school in which the fate of the teacher who faces accusations ranging from immorality to lack of patriotism is debated. The ending will be decided by the viewers.
The film asks the audience a few questions, some may be specific to the Romanian reality, others with a much broader meaning. What are the boundaries between private life and professional and public life? To what extent does an educator or any personality with a public activity have the right to confidentiality in her private life? What does vulgarity mean and to what extent is sex automatically associated with pornography? What is the purpose of the educational activity? Which are the models that we offer to the young generation? What does patriotism mean? Those who know the Romanian realities will probably be less surprised by the mixture of vulgarity and boastful language that comes to the surface in the meeting between parents and teachers. Radu Jude combines three different styles, and they complement each other, the middle section including a very illustrative context, useful to the viewer less familiar with what is happening in Romania today. Katia Pascariu plays the role of Emi excellently, in her sober clothes and with the attitude that combines the panic of paying for a stupid mistake and the fear for the future on the one hand, with the dignity with which she defends her private space and the professional and intellectual probity she faces the crowd of parents. Jude manages to turn the constraints of the conditions in which he had to film into a creative artistic element. The masks required by ‘social distancing’ erase some of the facial expression but give more power to the eyes and the words that are spoken by the characters. The ending includes a sarcastic reference to routine cinematic approaches, but it is not the only one, in fact there are actually a few more dialogue sequences throughout the film between the director and the cinematography of other times. In my opinion, the jury of the Berlin Festival deserves congratulations for the awarding of this film that is not shy to provoke, but it does so with courage and a precise target. As in previous films, Radu Jude places in front of today’s Romanian society a mirror into which many refuse to look. I look forward to seeing how the film will be perceived and received by viewers in Romania and in other countries.