This article was originally published on Cosmonaut magazine on March 25. It is written by Christos Kefalis, who is an editor of the Greek theoretical journal Marxist Thought.
Even in the period of the most unbridled rule of neoliberalism, anti-capitalist voices were never entirely lacking in the seventh art. During the last few decades, and especially after the 2008 economic crisis, these voices have become more numerous. Films such as Costa-Gavras’ Le Capital, and more recently Joker and Parasite, have offered grim X-rays of capitalist barbarity and of the growing social discontent. Even some “orthodox” Hollywood productions, like Titanic, The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Don’t Look Up, had something important to say against capitalism.
Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) adds a new vital link, with its deep, destructive satire of bourgeois conformity and its sharp critique of the manifestations of the system’s depravity and fascism in the pandemic era. The film, which deservedly won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, March 2021, offers some deep glimpses of everyday reality prompting a serious commentary.
A simple story, a complex radical result
The movie’s story is rather simple, even “commonplace.” A history teacher at a respectable Romanian secondary school, Emi Cilibiu (played by Katia Pascariu) films a sex tape with her husband, who stores it on his PC. The video is subsequently stolen, presumably by someone who has hacked the husband’s computer, and is uploaded to some porn sites. This provokes a scandal with the staff and outrages parents at Emi’s school. A meeting is called with the intent to fire Emi, as she is seen as a threat to the ethical norms of the pupils.
This case gives Jude the opportunity to make a devastating satire of social life in his native country, Romania, exposing its absurdities, blatant contradictions, and extremes. The film was shot during the lockdown period, with the actors wearing masks, thus capturing the spirit of the COVID-19 era. Yet Jude also directs his arrows directly towards capitalism, in whose workings he traces the roots of all the suffering and irrationality he observes around him.
The film is split into three parts, respectively titled “One Way Street,” “A Short Dictionary of Signs and Wonders,” and “Praxis and Innuendos (Sitcom).”
In the first section we follow the heroine as she wanders the streets of Bucharest, wondering about the video’s leak and her upcoming appearance at the school meeting, where her position as a teacher will be decided. It also includes characteristic episodes and shots from the Romanian capital, highlighting the social context in which the heroine’s personal drama unfolds and giving a bleak picture of modern Romania, one of the most corrupt capitalist countries in the world.
The second, documentary-like part makes a long break in the narrative, inserting a group of 26 independent “sketches.” In the form of a “dictionary,” they present old and modern moments from the history of European culture, with topics such as fascism, the role of the church as a support of neo-fascist and ultra-right gangs in Romania (in a sketch we see nuns and inmates in an ecclesiastical institution singing fascist songs), the French and Romanian revolutions, the treatment of animals, but also humorous glances at the side effects of the pandemic, captured in an event where the participants dance while keeping their distance by holding long sticks.
In the third, concluding part, we watch the meeting at the school –a typical middle-class institution– where Emi tries to defend herself against hostile parents, citing arguments from Romanian history and the country’s national poet, Eminescu. She is supported by some of her colleagues and a few enlightened parents, against a puritanical, conservative gang of upstart, well-to-do, and cocky philistines, careerists, and hysterical middle-aged women, concerned about the danger of their children seeing the video. Many of them prove supporters of right-wing extremism and the anti-vaccination “movement,” as well as anti-Semites, obscurantists, etc., like those who parade in the streets and social media today.
At the end, Jude presents three alternative successive outcomes. In the first two, the heroine is acquitted and retains her job (in the first) and is convicted and resigns (in the other) by a small majority. In the third, imaginary one, after being convicted she suddenly turns into a “wonder-woman” and traps her pursuers with a net, forcing them to fellate a dildo.
Some comments on the plot of the movie
Jude’s movie, with its three part structure and three outcomes, is quite original in its form. In a sense it is also shocking, starting as it does with the controversial video. Yet its originality is not capricious or impressionistic, but carefully calculated by the director. His aim is not only, and so much, to shock the viewer, but to mobilize their mind and sensitivity.
In connection with their content, the three parts could have been called respectively, “Situation,” “Causes,” and “Results.” In the first we are acquainted with the heroine’s problem, which, despite its originality, turns out to be just one of many similar perils which common people face in their lives.1 This being established, the second part is conceived to reveal the socio-historical forces involved in creating this universal uneasiness, so as to make the final part unfold in a way that is not only plausible but indicative of the forces at work.
In the first two parts, Jude uses Brechtian techniques such as distancing and didacticism to “imprint” on the viewer the contradictory aspects of present social reality. Distancing is at work in the first part’s persistent shots, which single out familiar realities of everyday life, in order to highlight their hidden connections: broken sidewalks, abandoned neoclassical buildings, street hawkers at the entrance of the metro and, on the other side, signs with the brands of the largest multinationals at their luxurious offices. These scenes, as well as dialogues in the street (where a remark by a heroine to a driver is countered with vile insults), a pharmacy, and a supermarket (where a poor woman is forced to leave some goods in the cash desk having no money to pay), the blind dissatisfaction and individualistic outbursts of people, all fruits of reckless capitalism.
In the second part’s sketches, on the other hand, the didactic intention is evident in the attempt to place these repulsive phenomena within their historical context, both Romanian and global.2 Jude’s radicalism is manifested in his recognition of revolutions as the driving force of history, as well as his bitter, ironic commentary on how they are usurped by rulers, to become wine brand-names, “1789” for the French and “1989” for the Romanian Revolution.
Without intending to discuss Brechtian modernist motifs here, we will only point out their Marxist critique by Georg Lukacs, according to whom didacticism, which introduces the views of the artist from outside, as “ready-made conclusions,” and not through the development of the plot, fails to have a deep and lasting aesthetic effect. Jude’s film tests the scope of these techniques, showing what can be achieved with them.
Moreover, it does not stop there. The third part follows a realistic approach, depicting through lively types the main human responses to the developing situation. Jude does not include all social classes, but a group of types we meet in middle-class and upper petty bourgeois environments, aptly chosen as the social background of his story: Emi’s school is a “serious” educational institution, attended by the offspring of “good families,” and in this environment the incident with the video cannot pass unnoticed.
The didactic second part helps the director highlight the deep rooted hypocrisy of these middle-class strata. Some porn scenes inserted there make it clear that anyone, including their children, can download and watch them on their mobile devices, yet these people worry only about Emi’s video, as if the question whether they will see this one or any of countless others makes any real difference. To satisfy their blind morals they willingly ignore the fact that she was not responsible for posting the video. They are the kind of individualists who only look to how to keep order in their small backyard and will never wonder if tomorrow the impending war in Ukraine will knock on their own door.
The typical representatives of these strata, both the progressive supporters of Emi and her persecutors, are lively, convincingly presented, their dialogues being plausible and enlightening. Jude portrays them as full of self-love and conceit. His anti-vaxxers, prone to discover everywhere conspiracies of Soros and Gates, the anti-Semitic army man who eagerly attends Emi’s video at the meeting eating a banana, a bored middle aged woman, etc, are models of today’s furious petty bourgeois. Even his positive types, represented by an intellectual and a liberal priest, are not free from such tendencies. They wear some anti-capitalist caps or badges with popular slogans like “I can’t breathe,” but this is all. They limit themselves to high-sounding speeches full with quotations on scientific subjects, but they are not ready to directly and decisively defend Emi. They don’t even notice a charwoman (a member of the working class) who cleans the place, being so inferior to them. Jude depicts in this way the emptiness of the former types and the superficiality of the latter’s radicalism.
Is Jude an “anti-communist”?
Jude’s movie includes some harsh, well deserved comments on the Ceausescu “communist” dictatorship. In one of them, a guide in front of the provocatively named “People’s House,” the huge building ordered by Ceausescu to house his megalomania, informs some tourists about its heavy cost in resources and human lives. This has prompted a silly Greek Stalinist columnist to present him as an “anti-communist,” who vilifies “Romania’s socialist past.” The critic, under the pen name “Difficult Nights,” called the movie “a surreal mix of anti-communism, social criticism and (sex) comedy against the backdrop of Bucharest amid the pandemic… One does not need,” she goes on, “to feel much enthusiasm for the executed last leader of socialist Romania, in order to be indignant with scenes as that of the guide in front of the famous ‘House of the People’ (seat of the Romanian parliament), where he tries to convince us that ‘slaves like those in the pyramids and the Great Wall’ worked for its construction, with ‘an unknown number of dead.’”3
All this of course is sheer folly. Just to give a few data, the “People’s House” is the heaviest building in the world, weighing about 4,098,500,000 kilos, with a total area of 365,000 square meters. To clear space for its construction, 7 square km of the old city center were demolished, with 40,000 people being relocated, while up to 100,000 people worked on the site, including huge numbers of soldiers and “volunteers.” The materials used included 3,500 tons of crystal; 700,000 tons of steel and bronze; 1,000,000 cubic meters of marble; 900,000 cubic meters of wood; 200,000 square meters of woolen carpets. Even today 70% of the building remains unused, while the cost of heating, electricity, and lighting exceeds $6 million yearly.4 Even the Winter Palace of the Czars, stormed by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, looks like a humble hut in comparison. How on earth could one reconcile communism, a theory envisaging a society without class distinctions and inequalities, with such a pharaonic undertaking?
Of course it would be an unrewarding task to comment further on this article, which, if anything, makes more difficult not only our nights but our days too. Yet it provides us with a chance to discuss Jude’s political viewpoint, at least to the extent it is expressed in his films.
Jude has a lively interest in the history of Romania and, as part of it, in the period of Ceausescu’s rule. In 2020 he directed Uppercase Print, a movie about the story of Mugur Călinescu, a 16 year old Romanian teenager, who was jailed by Securitate for writing some anti-regime graffiti on the walls of the Party HQ in Botoșani, and, after heavy interrogations, was diagnosed with leukemia and died three years later. The movie alternates actors voicing parts of Călinescu’s police files and archival footage of Romanian TV shows, propaganda songs, and broadcasts of the regime. The resultant picture reveals the chasm between the regime’s pretensions to a harmonious society and its oppressive, brutal practices.
Jude’s work is permeated with a radical tendency to preserve the memories of common people’s fights, and this is the aim of Uppercase Print. He himself commented on that:
“[Călinescu’s] story was totally hidden before… There was a class element to this. People in the intellectual realm who opposed the regime, such as journalists and writers, were more well-known. The ones who did it from the periphery of society, like this teenager, or workers, didn’t have the tools to make their experiences known. It’s important to show morality, idealism, and courage existed among everyday people too.”5
The same viewpoint permeates Jude’s other historical movies, which often bring dark, suppressed chapters of Romania’s history to public consciousness. These include Aferim! (a movie on the enslavement of Roma in the 19th century), I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians (2018, discussing Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust and anti-semitism) and Exit of the Trains (2020, a tribute to the victims of the Iași pogrom that the dictator’s Ion Antonescu government carried out in 1941). All these films are steadily directed against reactionary tendencies in Romanian history, Bad Luck Banging in this respect extending this critique to Romania’s contemporary capitalist elite, themselves closely connected with the reactionary traditions of the past.
If Jude cannot find anything commendable in Ceausescu’s times, we may add, this has not to do with any prejudice on his part, but with the character of the regime, by far the worst of all post-war Eastern Europe’s “Peoples’ Democracies.” This was in fact a necessary result of the specific Romanian conditions, of which we can only briefly speak here. In contrast with the other East European and Balkan countries, which possessed strong native communist parties and resistance movements, Romania was perhaps the country with the weakest communist traditions. Moreover, almost all important communist party cadres, who had found refuge in the USSR to avoid prosecutions under the Antonescu dictatorship, were executed during the 1936-38 purges. They included Alexander Danieliuk (the General Secretary of the Romanian party in the 1930s, a distinguished Polish communist), Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea (the son of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, the historical leader of Romanian socialism and a close friend of Trotsky), Ecaterina Arbore, Imre Aladar, Ion Dic Dicescu, Eugen Rozvan, Marcel Pauker, Elek Köblös, Elena Filipescu, Dumitru Grofu, David Fabian, Timotei Marin, etc.6 Moderate leaders like Ana Pauker, who had opposed forced collectivization, were ousted from the Party and imprisoned in the early 1950s while Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, an influential Party intellectual, and others, were executed after a show trial in 1954. With Romania being governed first by a hardened Stalinist clique under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and then by an unprincipled arriviste like Ceausescu, one could hardly expect anything better.
Had Jude presented in the same light the history of other communist regimes, e.g. in Poland or Hungary, he could perhaps be accused of “anti-communism,” or at least of historical inaccuracies, since these regimes enjoyed some substantial popular support during Gomulka’s reign in Poland and Kadar’s in Hungary. As things are in Romania’s case, he simply narrates what happened. And if he somehow reflects the confusion about the past in present day Romanian public opinion, then this is not in the main Jude’s personal confusion, but one brought about by historical experience itself.
It should be also noted that Jude nowhere adopts the well known, reactionary equation of the October Revolution and Bolshevism with Stalinism. At one point in the third part, the heroine even positively refers to a short story by Soviet writer Isaac Babel (later executed during the Stalinist purges) about the war-torn Bolshevik Russia in 1920. His criticism of the Ceausescu regime clearly does not aim at any general judgments about communism, being part of his feeling that somehow his country took the wrong path in critical moments of its history (the Antonescu fascist dictatorship and siding with the Nazis being another major instance) and that its capitalist present is even worse.
The film’s three endings
We have already referred to the film, and especially its final part, as “realistic” in its approach. This assessment might seem erroneous in view of its grotesque, chaotic, and even “extravagant” construction. Realism, however, as Lukacs used to stress, refers exclusively to content, to the ability of the writer or artist, to create original types who embody the conflicting, contradictory aspects of a given social reality. It does not preclude but necessitates originality –at times even to the extent of extreme farce, “absurdity,” and provocation– of means and form.
In this respect, both human types and dialogues in the decisive third part are realistically conceived. As Neely Swanson aptly sums up:
“Katia Pascariu gives us an Emi who travels from unbridled sex goddess, to ordinary woman, to freedom fighter… she is everywoman, extraordinary and ordinary by turns. Olimpia Malai as Emi’s nemesis is effectively odious. Also notable is Nicodim Ungureanu as the army officer who takes offense at anything reflecting badly on Romanian history as he hilariously veers from defending the Fascism of the war, the Communism that followed, the continued Anti-Semitism and persecution of the Roma, and the righteousness of those who denigrate Emi… ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ is a brilliant satire of prejudice and hypocrisy as practiced everywhere. Very few films ever lead to the kind of discussion that this one puts forth.”7
An interesting question here is: why did Jude choose to present three alternative endings instead of one? This, in our opinion, has to do with the transitional features of the present conjuncture, more or less common not only to Romania but also to the rest of the world. Under such conditions, presenting all possible outcomes can be a way to make the viewer aware and sensitive to still unformed future social tendencies and highlight in this way our human responsibility.
There is however a significant difference between the outcomes. The first two versions present the two obvious, likely solutions that could arise in the given middle-class context, with things following their normal course: the teacher is convicted or acquitted by a few votes, the current state of things is maintained and life goes on as before. The third, on the other hand, expresses the inner, insurgent mood of the victim, who would like to revolt against her persecutors. However, since this mood is not as yet widespread in Romanian society, and still less in the middle-class microcosm presented in the film, it is placed on a purely subjective level and fulfilled in an entirely imaginary way, by transforming the protagonist into a “wonder-woman.” This in fact makes a hint for collective action, as the only way to achieve what is desirable for each oppressed person individually.
One could imagine, of course, a different plot, which would make this side more tangible. Jude, e.g., could have incorporated in the school’s staff a genuine communist, who would counter the army officer, draw some correct conclusions about the Ceausescu era and comment more concretely on present day reality, against the power of multinationals, etc. Had he taken that way, he would also have to readjust some loose sketches from the second part and restructure the dialogues in the third. Also, the ending of the film would rather follow the version in which Emi is fired –the most likely outcome under the current circumstances– leaving the future open.
Jude selects a different path and this is not coincidental. His goal is not to reveal the whole truth, but first and foremost to make the viewer receptive to it, by presenting a vital part. The light, almost lyrical mood in the beginning of the parts creates an atmosphere that aims to mobilize the sensitivity of the audience, stemming from the director’s deep humanist commitment that despite all adversity and disasters the inner human core cannot be erased. This commitment allows him to go much deeper in his criticism than the somewhat superficial progressive Hollywood productions we mentioned.
It would be risky to affirm that the alternative outlined would be more productive. Moreover, apart from a humanist revolutionary spirit, which Jude already has, it would demand a better understanding of communism than his present one. So, perhaps the path chosen was the most suitable for his artistic purposes. What can be safely said is that such an approach will not suffice to achieve a complete realism at a later stage, when possibilities that remained undeveloped in the story will have to be observed and developed, should one remain faithful to life.
Patrcik Hao makes an important point here when he remarks:
“Radu Jude is a diagnostic filmmaker, one who has a clear eye for his targets. However, he suffers from a lack of self-editing as the targets are so far and wide that they begin to clash with each other, obscuring any salient points beyond ‘society is absurd.’ Then again, maybe society is absurd is enough of a thesis because the public discourse reminds us of that every day.”8
Jude himself summed up the core of the film in a statement: “Vulgarity is the subject of this film and viewers are constantly asked to compare the supposed vulgarity of a banal, amateur porn film with the vulgarity around us and the vulgarity of recent history, the traces of which are still everywhere.”9
In difficult times like these, preserving memory, awareness, and measure are vital requirements of life. Jude’s film, by informing the viewer of their own experiences of savage capitalism and outlining future threats, reinforces these still weak but historically necessary and imperative attitudes. For that alone it deserves our warm interest and approval.
