Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
Bad luck banging or loony porn...
That's how the title of a film reads, more loony than porn, more good than bad luck banging...
History always repeats itself twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Prologue: Amateur homemade porn video with everyday interferences.
Act One: One-way street
Emi walks through the city of Bucharest, markets, supermarkets, shopping centers, construction sites, SUVs, carousels, folk songs, parodies, toys, Barbie.
Everyone is talking loudly, arguing, using vulgar language.
Advertisements with explicit sexual references; video game arcades, slot machines.
She receives phone calls discussing the amateur video published on PornHub.
Emi keeps walking, it's the observation point on the city.
Discussions about intelligence, government cuts to education and healthcare, tranquilizers, the "incense that would be a cure for cancer."
Decaying buildings, destroyed structures, residential neighborhoods, libraries, widespread political speeches, plastic mega ice cream cones, Bucharest's cinema palace.
Act Two
Encyclopedia of anecdotes about Stalin, Hitler, archive photos of aborigines and colonizers, ethnic persecution, exterminations, collusion between the Orthodox Church and dictatorships, Ceausescu in power for 24 years.
The story of the Medusa Gorgon who turned men into stone; the moral: not wanting to see the horror to avoid being paralyzed.
The movie screen is Athena's shiny shield, allowing us to watch horror without being petrified: that's Radu Jude's cinema.
The poet Eminescu, folk songs, statistics: 6 out of 10 children experience domestic violence.
Vulgar and misogynistic phrases, songs, writings on elevator doors, crowded amusement parks.
Anecdotes of paralysis in the right arm resolved with Nazi incitement; "mathematics is what would exist if there could be absolutely nothing."
The metaphor of the fishhook game.
"Blowjob," the most searched word in the online dictionary; the second: empathy.
Quote from Aleksander Blok, April 15, 1912:
"I learned with joy about the sinking of the Titanic, at least there is still an ocean."
A splendid idea: "the true beauty of a woman lies in her man."
THE CITY
"Admire the columns of a Babylonian temple and scorn the chimney of a factory"
Do...
Act...
Patriotism
"A woman fined in Vienna for beating her Gypsy housemaid, upon returning to Romania, says: Oh, country of freedom, where I can beat people whenever I want."
Rap singers, misogynistic and violent lyrics.
Synecdoche, Mussolini, pornography (spelling of a prostitute), Parrhasius, the father of pornography.
When Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew, he declared that for the roles of priests and Pharisees, he would choose dull faces resembling fascists; in reality, they were members of the Communist Party and labor unions.
Gaze
Dick: "we have embodied the historical structures of virility order in the form of unconscious patterns of perception and appreciation";
Fist, Power, Racism, War, Realism;
Respect: "a police chief asserted that women beaten by their husbands should not call the police at night but wait until the next morning";
Robot: "an officer who fought in the Middle East declared that a war between robots would eliminate the human empathy of armed conflicts";
Ruins, Change, Selfie;
Sentiment: "why are we certain that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are despicable acts not connected both with and without the heart? Will we ever escape this stupid sentimental inquisition, the reign of heart's terror?";
Vanity: "99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct";
Rape: "55% of the respondents say that rape in certain situations is justified, such as under the influence of alcohol and drugs, if the victim is dressed provocatively or if they agreed to go to someone's home".
Third act
Professor Emi's trial before a jury of colleagues and parents.
Insinuations, vulgarity, allusions, righteousness.
Denialism: "the mask is the muzzle for slaves, they fill modern man with fear, turn him into a flock of sheep, dictatorship".
Children, students are traumatized by the porn video..., teenagers shouldn't visit adult websites..., what's indecent about a woman having sex with her husband?
The professor reads the erotic poetry of the great poet Eminescu.
Final act:
It was entertainment, a sitcom, a joke.
3 possible endings
The last one celebrates the film in all its power.
A deconstructive and cross-eyed puzzle
Shopping centers, ostentation of goods, bodies, consumption, archival images, documentary and historical footage.
Quotations, allusions, considerations, visions, documentations.
Fiercely political, ontologically critical, cynically realistic.
Culture, discrimination, racism, misogyny, populism, denialism, consumerism, conformity, ignorance, prejudice, propaganda.
Vulgarity as an atavistic structure, phallocratic symbolism, and fellatio as a device...
The oral, anal, and phallic-genital stages hold the adultization of humanity in limbo, destined to remain infantile.
Anthropological prehistory
The Relativity of Gravity:
What is obscene?
What is hypocrisy?
From farce to tragedy that turns back into farce
The viral Pandemic infecting Romania has no mask or vaccine that can hold... the director's bibliographic production is attested by the inexhaustibility of sources...
A country teetering between fascism and socialism, between the military and the priests, between capitalism and vulgarity.
A prologue, three episodes, and an epilogue
The protagonist is the thread of Ariadne to observe the territory, a sort of Google Maps of unruly customs, social, political, cultural, and economic contradictions: a tourist guide to the human merchandise that is sold and for sale.
A lucid and disillusioned gaze, chilling and farcical, points to the responsibility of an assertive and idiotic eye to tear through the veil to a gaze that does not reproduce but makes reality visible.
Diary of human bad manners, of unconscious hypocrisy, of reactionary righteousness.
A violent diary on human vulgarity.
How to judge ethics from an amoral pulpit?
Increasing immorality and vulgarity of the masses; the only possible Marxist redistribution of wealth is the generalized and fair fellatio, respecting the unconscious passivity of each individual.
From the Eucharist to sodomy: the becoming of the other leads from error to horror, that is, identification with what one becomes.
A deadly pandemic engulfs the world, and no Covid can withstand it: only the attentive gaze of an artist like Jude can project into the reflective mirror of cinema the deformation produced by the system/world, by the technique "that mutilates every satisfying desire".
Ethics, facing technology, becomes path-ethics: it has never been seen that impotence is capable of stopping a power. The age of technology has abolished the "humanistic" scenario, and the sense-related questions that arise remain unanswered, not because technology is not yet perfected enough, but because it is not within its program to find answers to such questions.
Thus, tragedy turns into farce that is overly tragic: the dialectic of an eternal becoming, the oxymoron of an unfolding in-finite, where the thesis of tragedy alternates with the antithesis of farce and then never fully resolves in the synthesis of both, celebrating their grotesque alliance.
The abundant gratitude that Jude expresses, in the end credits, to the distinguished intellectuals he has encountered reveals the erudition that accompanies the Romanian director's biography.
A didactic film, albeit openly rebellious, a tortuous and impassable journey, a fierce critique, a raw vision, completes its portrait: a pornographic gaze on an ontologically obscene reality.
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice
