https://www.jta.org/2021/11/19/culture/sex-lies-videotape-and-antisemitism-indie-film-uses-shock-value-to-discuss-jewish-persecution-in-romania?utm_source=JTA_Maropost
Sex, lies, videotape — and antisemitism: Indie film uses shock value
to discuss Jewish persecution in Romania
BYANDREW LAPIN <
https://www.jta.org/author/andrew-lapin>NOVEMBER 19,
202111:03 AM
An actress in a mask in a scene from a movie
Katia Pascariu in "Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn." (Magnolia Pictures)
(JTA <
http://jta.org/>) — It begins with a hardcore sex scene. It ends
with a debate about Holocaust education.
This is the strange and — for better and worse — unforgettable world of
“Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn,” an oddball Romanian arthouse film that
is seeing a U.S. release this week after winning the prestigious Golden
Bear at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival and being selected as the
country’s Oscar entry for best international film.
Coincidentally, Romaniajust enacted a law this week
<
https://www.jta.org/2021/11/17/global/romania-makes-holocaust-education-mandatory-in-all-high-schools>making
Holocaust education mandatory in all high schools — a development that
the history teacher at the center of “Bad Luck Banging” would likely
meet with some skepticism.
In the movie, which was filmed and set during the first year of the
COVID-19 pandemic, a history teacher at an elite Bucharest prep school
(Katia Pascariu) films a sex tape with her husband and uploads it to an
adult website. After her students find the video, she risks losing her
job. The first third of the movie shows the teacher, Emi, wandering
around Bucharest. The second is a discursive detour: in Godardian
fashion, the film presents various words and concepts and defines them
as it sees fit (“Children: Political prisoners of their parents”). The
film’s final third depicts a climactic parent-teacher conference, during
which Emi must defend her reputation against irate parents who are
demanding her head on a platter.
It’s during this segment that the storyline suddenly pivots into a
discussion of Romanian antisemitism. As the parents work to gather
additional evidence to support their claims that Emi is an immoral
teacher, they point to her lessons on the Holocaust, which include
telling her students that Romanian troops, not just Nazis, murdered Jews
of their own volition; the parents characterize such lessons as
“indoctrinating our children.”(That quote inexplicably comes from a
priest wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” mask. Is he a parent? The movie
doesn’t elaborate.)**
They also react with horror to the news that Emi cited Hannah Arendt,
the Jewish German philosopher, in class to tell her students that grades
aren’t as important as knowledge, and that she went off-curriculum to
assign her students a story by the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel.
When Emi says she’s not Jewish, one parent alleges she’s nevertheless
been “paid by the Mossad.”
Such ugly accusations become commonplace in the film’s final stretch.
“Hitler and the camp commanders were all Jews killing their own as an
excuse to create Israel!” one parent asserts. He happens to also be a
retired general in full military regalia.
The antisemitism is interspersed with other ignorant comments from
parents, including anti-Roma sentiment, COVID conspiracy theories and
latent nostalgia for dictator Ion Antonescu’s fascist regime. Lest the
viewer takes any of this too seriously, the angry parents are
occasionally drowned out by some guy on the soundtrack making Woody
Woodpecker noises. So is this an indictment of modern society, or a
silly cartoon? More likely it’s both.
Writer-director Radu Jude, a provocateur amongthe typically dour
Romanian filmmaking scene
<
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20Romanian-t.html>, knows
his audience will be shocked by his movie’s content — and that’s to his
advantage. The sex appeal serves as foreplay, if you will, to a
principled denunciation of Romania’s whitewashing of its own historical
atrocities, includingthe nation’s difficulties acknowledging its own
complicity in the Holocaust
<
https://www.jta.org/2014/01/21/global/romania-has-come-a-long-way-on-holocaust-remembrance-but-denial-persists>;
through this lens, the film is best described as an angry farce.
Jude himselfis not Jewish
<
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/a-stage-for-a-romanian-massacre/>,
despite his name — but he has a strong interest in stories that poke at
Romania’s national narrative about its treatment of Jews. His 2019
satire“I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians”
<
https://momentmag.com/the-best-jewish-movies-of-2019-part-two/>followed
an artist as she attempted to publicly re-stage the 1941 Odessa
Massacre, in which Romanian soldiers acting under the orders of
Antonescu slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews.
Like “Bad Luck Banging,” “Barbarians” is a bitter and cynical film,
displaying very little faith in the public to honestly confront its own
history. The title comes from an infamous speech delivered by Antonescu,
who was portrayed sympathetically in Romanian culture even after his
execution for war crimes. It also serves as an artistic mission
statement about the futility of processing atrocities in the eye of
history. Both films offer their protagonists as stand-ins for Jude
himself, artists and educators trying to communicate the right message
in a sea of wrongheadedness.
Jude’s earlier films also delved into Romanian Jewish themes, including
“Scarred Hearts,” an adaptation of a novel by the Romanian Jewish author
Max Blecher; and two documentaries, “The Dead Nation” and “The Exit of
the Trains,” dealing further with Romanian complicity in the Holocaust.
“Bad Luck Banging” is considerably more playful and outrageous than his
earlier works — there’s plenty of graphic nudity — and its canvas is
bigger, focusing not just on Jews but on all manner of ways in which
deeply ingrained prejudices and the added stress of the pandemic are
swiftly rendering modern society uninhabitable. Every social interaction
in the movie, from a grocery store customer yelling at a cashier to a
driver deliberately hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk, portrays a
community on the verge of total collapse.
Spoiler alert: in the final scene, an enraged Emi inexplicably
transforms into a superhero, ensnares all the parents in a giant net and
does something very NSFW to them. “I told you she was a Jew!” one of
them cries when they see her newfound superpowers. When it’s all over,
the viewer is left feeling a little gross — and not always the way Jude
intends.
/“Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn” opens Nov. 19 in New York, with a
view-on-demand release to follow./
*******************************************************************************
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Received on 2021-11-22 02:23:23