One of Eastern Europe’s most acclaimed directors argues corruption, hypocrisy and racism are more obscene than pornography in a Berlin Film Festival rival over a teacher whose sex tape ends up on the internet.
“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” by Romania Radu Jude is perhaps the most daring of the 15 films vying for the Golden Bear’s highest prize at the Berlinale on Friday, which became virtual as a result of the pandemic.
It starts with an extremely real hardcore porn video and tells the story of Emi, a history teacher in high school in Bucharest.
The clip was taken from an amateur movie she shot with her husband, which moves from PornHub to the cell phones of her colleagues, students and their parents.
With disputes over social distance and a mask that already produces tension and exposes social divisions, Emi fights to save her job and her reputation.
The conflict finally boils over during a surrealistic parent-teacher conference where representatives of Romanian institutions, including the Orthodox Church, the military and the nouveau riche professional class, put Emi on a kind of show hearing.
Although the sex tape is on hand, Emi’s defense of Roma children at school, her insistence on learning about Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust and her outcry of sexism from colleagues are all being attacked.
The showdown reached a witty climax, The Hollywood Reporter called ‘worthy John John Waters’.
Jude belongs to the new wave of Romanian theater that wins prizes at festivals around the world.
He won the Berlinale’s best director award in 2015 for ‘Aferim!’ about the roots of discrimination against Roma.
Romania has submitted the Oscar film, as well as its 2018 film ‘I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians’ about the massacre in Rome in Odessa in 1941.
“A lot of the things Emi is accused of are things I have been accused of in online comments about my previous films,” Jude told AFP in a Zoom interview from 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 the hypocrisy, of the traces of history that come to us.”
– ‘Comedy of despair’ –
The film, which was shot last summer during the Covid-19 outbreak, has been adapted to take into account the increased “aggressiveness” in the air.
“It’s becoming a metaphor – people with masks trying to shout at each other. That’s why I collected all the masks I found and chose them for the actors as a costume, as a time capsule.”
He said he got inspiration from the sometimes hysterical WhatApp conversations among parents of his children’s school when he wrote Emi’s rehearsal scene.
“When it comes to children, I have the feeling that parents sometimes give up the facade, give up the politeness and go more directly to their values,” he said.
“Because it’s about children, it’s not a joke and we need to get to the heart of the matter.”
But he said there was no reason not to laugh at human weakness.
“There’s a comedy of despair, there’s a comedy of sexuality, there’s a comedy of the human condition when you see it from a certain angle,” he said.
“But that, of course, does not exclude anger or resentment for some aspects of society.”
dlc / hmn / jz