These are fascinating windows into a distant country, and troubling mirrors of our own. “I Do Not Care …” dramatizes a rancorous debate about which version of a nation’s history should be taught, and how it should be commemorated.
(“Bad Luck Banging,” which won the top prize at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, is Romania’s official submission to the Oscars’ international film category.) “Aferim!,” a western set in 19th-century Walachia, is about how law enforcement upholds caste and racial inequalities in a slave-owning society. The legacies of anti-Roma and anti-Jewish racism, of Nazi collaboration and of the Ceausescu dictatorship are unavoidably connected to complacent, consumerist 21st-century Romanian life.Īn American viewer may be startled at how close to home these “foreign films” can land. In his recent films (notably “Aferim!,” “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians” and “Uppercase Print”), Jude has dug into the ways the atrocities and tragedies of his country’s past continue to afflict its present. Someone else - an unseen heckler at a gathering that teeters between learned seminar and barroom brawl - shouts “Fox News!,” a clue that “Bad Luck Banging” is not only about Romania. (He may actually be on Emi’s side, but with an ally like that, who needs trolls?) Someone invokes the name of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet of the 19th century, and Emi responds by reciting one of his lesser-known bawdy poems. The indignant parents include an airline pilot, a military officer, an Orthodox priest and a hipster intellectual who reads long passages of sociological theory from his phone. Some of that information will be on the exam - or will at least resurface when Emi faces her accusers in an open-air, socially distanced inquisition in the courtyard of the school. With grim humor, they glance at ugly facts of human existence - war, misogyny, household violence, racism, workplace exploitation - and pay special attention to Romania’s complicity in the two major forms of 20th-century totalitarianism. Taking a break from Emi and her plight, Jude compiles a “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders.” The entries run from “August 23, 1944” (the date Romania left the Axis and joined the Allies in World War II) to “Zen” and consist of brief skits and snippets of archival and social-media video. In the scheme of things, this may be a minor catastrophe, but it segues into a litany of disasters that make up the film’s essay-like middle chapter.
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This dissonant city symphony ends on a somber note, in a shot of a closed-down movie theater with a “For Rent” sign in the window. ‘Drive My Car’: In this quiet Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”.‘Passing’: Set in the 1920s, the movie centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white.
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