BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN
Special Features: 2021 Oscar® Selection, Romania
[BABARDEALĂ CU BUCLUC SAU PORNO BALAMUC]
Romanian auteur Radu Jude won the Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival for this scathing, hilarious and over-the-top multi-part essay film about, well, nearly everything that's diseased, evil and corrupt about modern society. Jude deploys a shock tactic — the film's infamous opening minutes depict a couple's homemade pornographic video, which they intended only for personal use — before introducing one half of the couple, history teacher Emilia (Katia Pascariu), on the day she learns from her husband that the video has been leaked onto the internet; later she learns that she will be called before a tribunal of her fellow teachers and the concerned parents of students who attend her school. In between, Jude conducts a walking tour of Bucharest rife with sexually suggestive advertising among the city's mix of architectural styles, and an Ambrose Bierce-inspired lexicon of terms given wickedly subversive definitions in current parlance. But the fateful school tribunal is the film's pièce de resistance — a scabrously satirical court scene-cum-political cartoon that indicts modern society's false pieties, institutional misogyny, structural racism, ahistorical proclivities and dangerously media-saturated derangements — culminating in a wonderful, gloriously pulpy finale. DIR/SCR Radu Jude; PROD Ada Solomon. Romania/Luxembourg/Croatia/Czech Republic, 2021, color, 106 min. In Romanian with English subtitles. NOT RATED
No AFI Member passes accepted.
Run Time: 106 Minutes
Opening Date: Friday, December 10, 2021
Genre: Comedy