Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

In Bucharest, a private video the history teacher Emi made with her husband ends up online. The parents call a meeting and put her on trial in the school yard. The film has three parts: in the first Emi walks through the city in a mask, in the second a dictionary arrives, in the third the meeting takes place. The subject is not the video but how the language of morality gets used. What the parents say to Emi is in open contradiction with what those same parents do in the street, and to prove it the first part wanders the city at length: advertising hoardings, a church, a military monument, people shouting into phones. The middle section is the strangest. Radu Jude stops the narrative entirely and presents an alphabetical dictionary, each entry given as a piece of archive footage and a short definition. It is full of hard jokes about Romanian history, the church and the army. The film offers three separate endings and does not say which one holds. It was shot during the pandemic with masks, which are not a stylistic choice but the condition of filming. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 2021. Katia Pascariu plays Emi. Who it is for: viewers who like political satire and formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone wanting distance from explicit sex and crude language; the film supplies both from the first minute.