One of Eastern Europe’s most acclaimed directors argues that corruption, hypocrisy and racism are far more obscene than pornography in a candidate for a Berlin film festival about a teacher whose sex tape ends up on the Internet.
Romanian Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” is perhaps the most daring of the 15 films competing for the Golden Bear’s main prize on Friday at the Berlinale, which was completely virtual due to the pandemic.
Opening with an extremely real-looking porn video, he tells the story of Emi, a history teacher at a high school in Bucharest.
The clip is taken from an amateur film she shot with her husband, which goes from PornHub to the cell phones of her colleagues, students and parents.
With disputes over social distance and wearing a mask already raising tensions and exposing social divisions, Emi fights to save his job and reputation.
The conflict finally boils over at a surreal conference of parents and teachers, where representatives of Romanian institutions, including the Orthodox Church, the military and the new rich in the professional class put Emi on a kind of show-trial.
Although sex tape is the issue at hand, Emi’s defense of Roma children at school, his insistence on teaching about Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust and his appeal to peer sexism are all under attack.
The confrontation reaches a ridiculous climax that The Hollywood Reporter called “worthy of vintage John Waters”.
Jude belongs to the new wave of Romanian cinema that wins awards at festivals around the world.
He won the Berlinale award for best director in 2015 for “Aferim!” on the roots of discrimination against Roma.
Romania entered both that film and its 2018 feature film, “I don’t care if we go down in history as barbarians,” as candidates for the Oscars, about the Odessa massacre in 1941 by the Romanians.
“Many of the things that Emi is accused of are things that I was accused of in online comments about my previous films,” Jude told AFP in an interview with Zoom in Bucharest.
“Viewers are invited to make a comparison between the so-called obscenity of this porn video and the greater obscenity, the public obscenity of society, of hypocrisy, of the vestiges of history that come to us.”
– ‘Comedy of Despair’ –
Shot entirely last summer during the Covid-19 outbreak, the film has been adapted to take into account the high “aggressiveness” in the air.
“It becomes a metaphor – people with masks trying to shout at each other. So I collected all the masks I found and chose them for the actors as a fantasy, as a time capsule.”
He said he was inspired by WhatApp’s sometimes hysterical conversations between parents at his children’s school when he wrote the scene of Emi’s trial.
“When it comes to children, I have a feeling that sometimes parents give up on the facade, give up education and go more directly to their values,” he said.
“As it is about children, this is not a game and we must go to the heart of the problem.”
But he said that was no reason not to laugh at human frailty.
“There is a comedy of despair, there is a comedy of sexuality, there is a comedy of the human condition if you see it from a certain angle,” he said.
“But that does not, of course, exclude being furious or angry at some aspects of society.”
dlc / hmn / jz