by FilmInk Staff
A favourite on the festival circuit Radu Jude (Aferim!, 2015), a Romanian national, is notorious for his outspoken political views and his fearless confrontational style.
Bad Luck… he told FilmInk is not just satirical but something closer to documentary. All he did, Jude says, was ‘exaggerate the reality’.
As a view on the Romanian national culture, this funny and vicious film is scathing; its principal targets are the hypocrisy of the Church and State. These powerful Institutions, he says, are too fearful to face a history of prejudice and genocide. But such attitudes, Jude believes, are far from being unique to his homeland.
Shot last year, in the middle of the Pandemic, Jude has designed the film in three ‘Acts’. The main story bookends the film. School teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu) has made a sex tape with her husband (shown in explicit ‘true-porn’ detail). When it goes viral, Emi must appear before colleagues and friends to defend herself as a person ‘worthy’ enough to teach children. In Act I, the beleaguered and anxious Emi runs errands in a Bucharest, which is over-populated with un-caring, bad-tempered callous nitwits. Act II is an ‘essay film’, a savage and even shocking trip through Romanian history, recent philosophy and literature in fast-cut montage. Act III is Emi’s ‘trial’, a cruel joke where she turns on her attackers, exposing the hypocrisy behind their so-called ‘decency’.
We understand that the film was based on some real incidents. Tell us about that?
“Well, usually when people say that ‘inspired by true events’ you are following facts… but that is not really what we did. But there were, in this case, a few incidences… in Romania, in Croatia, in Poland, in the Netherlands… [that we drew upon].
“In one case, there was a schoolteacher. It was a Live Cam [sex tape]. About ten years ago. It wasn’t the case itself that caught my attention but the reaction to it.
“It was before social networks became so important. It was discussed online. There were comments and they were horrifying. There were thousands of people saying, ‘you slut’ and ‘you should be kicked out’; and then one year later, there was news that this teacher was accepted back in the school and there were comments like ‘let’s be careful’… and all of this kind of thing.
“I took inspiration from these cases, but the rest is made up from other sources and my imagination.”
The sex scene is graphic, to say the least. How did you go about directing that?
“I must point out that here [in Romania], professional actors do not like to do sex scenes or even nudity and even refuse to do them in theatre and film.
“I thought in the beginning that this would be a very difficult issue. I had in mind to work with Katia Pascariu.
“I had not worked with her before, but I saw her during casting sessions in my previous films. Here she does a lot of underground theatre and political theatre. She is very involved with that scene.
“I gave her the project [to read] and we met. She was completely open from the very beginning. She said: ‘I don’t have any problem with nudity or sex scenes, simulated or even do them for real if you think it will help…’ I said, ‘maybe not the penetration?’ I felt more uncomfortable than she was!
“We actually hired a porn actor as the husband [Stefan Steel]. Which I am not very happy with, because he is very good looking, and I wanted someone more pedestrian looking.
“The shooting of it was only two hours. It was done before the pandemic. Before actual production began. This was February 2020.”
A few writers in reviewing the film have remarked that ‘Romania is a very religious country, very conservative.’ How do you respond to that?
“Well, there are two questions there. Conservative? Religious? They are connected but not completely. Yes, it is religious. I am not sure it is a religious country more than others. But it is a country where the religious traditions are very strong. I have two children, one seventeen, one six and because I really hate the Romanian Church and its policies and its history, I refused to baptise my second kid. Everyone from my family was really freaking out: ‘C’mon, how come?’ And I said, ‘well he can Baptise when he is older.’ I don’t want to step into a Church for the rest of my life.
“Some of my films have dealt with the killing of the Jews and the Roma population [I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, 2018] and I know how close to that process of genocide was the Romanian National Orthodox Church; by inciting hatred [and participating with] the Fascist regimes…
“What is more important, and more horrifying is the power of the Church as a political ‘actor’. The Church takes more and more money from the State.
These feelings are played out in the film’s climax. In this sequence, the ‘kangaroo court’ Emi must face off – parents, friends, colleagues, full of uniforms. There’s a Priest, a Militia… their significance is pretty obvious. But there’s also a pilot…?
“I wanted to have all kinds of uniforms. Here, there is the idea that people who wear uniforms are to be respected.
“The pilot uniform was an inside joke because our cinematographer Marius Panduru was an amateur pilot.”
Emi, in defending herself, exposes her accusers. She puts all that is toxic in the national experience, so it seems, ‘on trial’.
“That is completely correct. This is why I directed it a little artificially like a sitcom, like a theatre play. I couldn’t direct it in a realistic manner because many of these [ideas you could not use.]
“It’s an exaggeration. It’s accurate but the elements are exaggerated. The attitudes are accurate. Not just in Romania. If I had made the film in Australia, I’m sure I would have talked about the massacres of the native population.
“We used this Finnish pop song over the end credits. It uses lyrics from Wittgenstein, the philosopher. They talk about image: ‘In order to say whether a picture is true or false one must compare it with reality’.
“I like this comment. I thought it was funny. I thought it was saying what the film was saying.”
The ‘trial’ seems to accuse the official culture of Church and State as endorsing attitudes such as casual racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism…
“I think these attitudes are fermented through the Church [but they are not official].
“If I take one example, the racism against the Roma population. Many people hate them and say things like ‘they are a plague to our nation’. But the most disturbing thing is they never get to good schools, you would never see a Roma person presenting the news on TV. They are kept in the margins.”
Can you talk about some of the production details? For instance, the street location shooting in Bucharest? Were those shots ‘stolen’?
“Yes. We had a very limited crew. We didn’t want people to know we were making a professional film.
“We shot in twenty-three days. All my films are shot [that quickly], because we never have very much money. The first part was shot 35mm. Part II was archive and some stuff was shot by us. Throughout, I wanted to have all the formats because of the textures; 8mm, 16mm, video. We shot on the Red.”
Part II is an exercise in virtuoso editing by Cătălin Cristuțiu. There are hundreds of images and cuts, all underscored with many quotations and definitions on all sorts of subjects; sex, politics, society… How was it designed?
“I collected all those quotes used over many years and some of the images too. And we started editing some of it before we started shooting. The actual cut for that part only took three, or four weeks.”
Those scenes in Act I where Emi has lots of very angry and frustrating encounters with perfect strangers behaving badly in the shops and streets of Bucharest has been read as satire; a comment on the fact that ‘civilisation’ isn’t terribly civilised…
“I would say it’s less about the behaviour of people – though of course, it is about that – but it is not satirical. It’s quite accurate, to be honest.
“It’s only exaggerated in that those things that happen are unlikely to happen all in one day.
“The question posed in Act I is, can we imaging what kind of values are behind all this? What kind of life are people creating for themselves?”
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is in cinemas from November 25, 2021
