by Helen Barlow
When a film titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn comes along, you might think it’s not something to take seriously. Yet the Berlin Festival’s Competition jurors did, awarding Romanian director Radu Jude’s film the top prize, the Golden Bear. Jude had previously won Berlin’s directing prize for 2015’s Aferim!
The satire, which Deadline says “offers dark laughs and (an) indictment of society”, is angry and provocative and given its hardcore porn content, is not something you could expect at a mainstream festival. The New York Times calls it “a dirty winner in an online edition that lacked the magic of in-person moviegoing”.
Shot last summer during COVID in Bucharest, with cast and crew wearing masks, it follows Emi (Katia Pascariu) who has shot a homemade sex clip with her husband that has been uploaded onto the internet and has gone viral. The film, which also focuses on complicity in Communist-era corruption, sexism and Romania’s sordid political history in its second section, has Emi ultimately defending her job in its third act and plays on the true nature of obscenity. From watching the film, you’ll also learn that blowjob is the most looked-up word in the English dictionary.
The Jury statement noted: “The Golden Bear goes to a film which has that rare and essential quality of a lasting artwork. It captures onscreen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time, of this very moment of human existence.
“It does so by provoking the spirit of our time (i.e., zeitgeist), by slapping it, by challenging it to a duel. And while doing that, it also challenges this present moment in cinema, shaking, with the same camera movement, our social and our cinematic conventions.
“It is an elaborated film as well as a wild one, clever and childish, geometrical and vibrant, imprecise in the best way. It attacks the spectator, evokes disagreement, but leaves no one with a safety distance.”
The festival was largely a European event and the competition and its jury reflected that. The jury consisted of Ildikó Enyedi (Hungary), Adina Pintilie (Romania), Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran), Gianfranco Rosi (Italy), Jasmila Žbanić (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Nadav Lapid (Israel).
The competition featured no English-language films, though films from outside Europe were included. There was Iranian film Ballad of a White Cow by Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam, about a widow seeking justice; Japanese film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, which tells a trio of charming Tokyo stories and took out the Jury (second) prize); Introduction, a story of tangled relationships by Korea’s Hong Sangsoo won for best screenplay; and Yibrán Asuad took out a Silver Bear for artistic achievement for editing Mexico’s A Cop Movie, an inventive investigation into what motivates the police directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and releasing through Netflix later this year. Memory Box, a French-Lebanese-Canadian co-production, was filmed in Montreal and Lebanon and tells a tale of adolescence in the ‘80s.
There were four German films: Maria Speth’s Mr. Bachmann and His Class, which took out a Jury prize and gives a birds eye view of a class of immigrant children in Germany; Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man about a woman and her custom-made robot lover (Dan Stevens) for which Maren Eggert won the newly inaugurated gender-neutral acting award; Dominik Graf’s Fabian – Going to the Dogs, a love story with German star Tom Schilling; while another German star, Daniel Brühl, made his directing debut with Next Door about a German star who is full of himself (not Brühl) confronted by his neighbour.
Two films from Hungary won awards: Denes Nagy’s Natural Light for best director and Lilla Kizlinger for best supporting performance in Forest – I See You Everywhere.
The two French competition films were left out of the awards, though both of the renowned directors were not at their best. Still, Jeremie Renier is riveting as usual in almost every scene of Xavier Beauvois’s Drift Away, where he plays a small town cop who accidentally kills a suspect. And Celine Sciamma delivers arresting images in Petite Maman, which is much smaller in scope than her award-winning last film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
