THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Of the new Romanian wave that appeared in the middle of the 2000s, Radu Jude, born in 1977, is undoubtedly the most politicized filmmaker and, in this sense, the one who shows the greatest bite. His fiction films reached France (Daddy is coming sunday, in 2012, Aferim, in 2015) hide a more protean work, also strewn with documentaries or archive montages, obsessed with a Romanian historical consciousness burdened with denial and falsifications, in particular on the massacres and oppressions of the recent past. It was all the object of the formidable I don’t care if history considers us barbarians (2018), where a woman from the theater put on a show on the involvement of the Romanian army in the massacres of Jews in Odessa (1941), and inadvertently awakened the anti-Semitism rampant in crowds.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Golden Bear of the Berlinale (digitally) of 2021, in this sense, does not do in detail. Under this exuberant title, approximately translatable by “Unlucky fuck or fucked up porn”, A direct intervention film is hiding, shot on the breach in the midst of a pandemic whirlwind, one of the first to have integrated the wearing of a mask as a social phenomenon on the fly and to fully play it.
His argument, simple, openly satirical, is an ax charge against our supposedly advanced information societies, but marked by a large-scale return of obscurantism. Emi (Katia Pascariu), professor of history at a prestigious college in Bucharest, learns that a video of her sexual antics, shot to spice up her married life, has leaked onto the Internet, and that everyone is now likely to take notice. She is called to a disciplinary council to face the pack of parents demanding her dismissal.
Market obscenity
The construction of the film is dialectical, in four blocks that confront each other. From the outset, Radu Jude places us in front of the video of the dispute, in medias res if we can say so: an amateur porn tape which has, in the end, nothing very shocking. Then, we find Emi in street clothes, crossing Bucharest, devastated while waiting for her “trial”. Following in his footsteps, the camera takes advantage of its verbatim journey to linger on such and such a detail: an advertising poster in which the model takes a lascivious pose, displays spewing out screaming junk, a stampede of unsightly signs, of huge 4 × 4 overflowing on the sidewalks …
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