Anticipation.
A new work from a brave and unruly filmmaker whose next direction is always unknowable.
Enjoyment.
Moment by moment this seems chaotic, but by the end all of the parts come together.
In Retrospect.
Unpredictable, irreverent, and frequently infantile, but also somehow very erudite too.
Filmed at the height of the pandemic, this new film from prodigious Romanian satirist Radu Jude follows a school teacher facing scandal after a sex tape appears online starring herself and her husband.
The video’s appearance raises a number of questions: Where lies the line between public and private, and what issues arise when the distinction is shown to be unclear? What is to be defined as obscene or immoral and who gets to dictate this? Are there situations in which censorship is justifiable, or is it a slippery slope to greater suppressions?
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With a narrative split into three sections, Jude doesn’t attempt to resolve any of these questions, instead it prods and pokes at each, opening up further provocations and lines of inquiry. The first part sees the teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu) wander around downtown Bucharest, attending to various chores and becoming increasingly flustered by the varying pandemic-related impediments, arguments, and frustrations she encounters, all of which are usurped by the more immediate problem of a parent teacher association who want to see her imprudence met with punishment.
Skipping to the third part, we see the staging of a kangaroo trial wherein the parents of Emi’s students debate the exact nature of the transgression, deciding whether or not she should keep her job. Bisecting these two dramatic sequences is a bravura essayistic midsection that sees Jude cycle through an A to Z of Romanian words of his choosing.
In this, quotations, trivia, one-liners, visual gags, and other non sequiturs are accompanied by a mix of archive materials, social media clips and new short sequences filmed using the actors from the other parts recast into new transient roles.
All the sections are different but each offers something to chew on. The first exposes tensions within Romanian society, seeing citizens inciting and insulting one another, aggravated by a pandemic that has brought previously sublimated social and ideological stratifications into plain sight.
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The second charts historical injustices, using ironic detachment to present a probing record of human wrongdoing, hypocrisy, and exploitation over time. The last part uses its characters as avatars to display the prejudices of people of all sorts of systems of conservative belief, and challenge the idea that individual acts of impropriety should be condemned when corruption and violence at a state or church level is permitted to continue.
An overflow of energy and ideas, what it all amounts to is never exactly clear. This is no issue though, as this is an experimental film in the truest sense of the word. Here, faced with many barriers, a director is experimenting with the film form itself, taking apart all the tools at his disposal and smashing together their raw components to forge something new.
