The latest two films from Radu Jude, who gave us 2016's "Aferim" and was assistant director on the groundbreaking 2006 Romanian film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu":
UPPERCASE PRINT (B+) - Mugur Calinescu was a teenager who in 1981 sprinkled pro-Western messages around his hometown, drawing the interest of the secret police. Director Radu Jude takes a droll stage play based on surveillance transcripts from police files to tell the boy's story, flavoring it with historical patriotic videos from the Ceausescu era that would last another decade before the fall of communism.
Actors playing Mugur and his family, friends and interrogators stand on bare sets, address the camera stiffly and speak in monotone as if to emphasize the bland matter-of-fact reporting they are reciting verbatim from the Securitate files. There's a woodenness akin to a '60s episode of "Dragnet." It is the theatrical version of signaling to us the banality of evil.
To put this all in perspective, Jude knits this narrative together with vintage clips, including many songs extolling the virtues of Romania's socialist paradise and the kindly paternalism of Ceausescu's iron-fisted rule. Mugur's graffiti was mostly inspired by reports he heard on Radio Free Europe, mainly the workers' Solidarity movement in Poland. As the story unfolds, Mugur's predicament slowly grows more dire, as even his own parents (split by divorce) are afraid to be on his side. A coda reveals a tragic aftermath, and Jude's timeline stops short of the overthrow of Ceausescu or any belated recognition of Mugur as a hero. It's enough for Jude to unsettle us with the threats of fascism and the horrors of a life without free speech.
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (C+) - It's not clear what Jude is going for here, besides taking a short film and padding it out to feature length. This is the story of a school teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu), the unfortunate victim of having her amateur home porn session leak out to the community, putting her job in jeopardy.
The story is told in four parts. First, we get a few minutes of the actual graphic porn -- full-on banging, no censorship. Then we get about a half hour of Emi walking around Bucharest and occasionally talking on the phone, mostly with her partner as they try to get their story straight and squeeze the video back into its PornHub lockbox. It's as if Jude is conducting a sociological study of life and architecture in the 21st century. Then there a dramatic detour -- about another half hour of Jude waxing philosophical and cynical over Romania's communist past and humanity's nihilistic present. He does it through a series of word definitions that betray the writer-director's horrified view of Our Dumb Century.
Finally, in the last half hour, we get to the meat of the matter, so to speak. Emi sits before parents and colleagues) to face the music and make the case for saving her job. The group includes prudes and conspiracy theorists. One off-camera voice at the meeting, a sort of one-man Greek chorus, injects crude comments and an occasional Woody Woodpecker cackle, for some reason. Emi makes good points, as do a couple of others. Jude cops out by offering multiple endings. But that is in keeping with his odd approach to the subject -- throwing at you pure porn, documentary-style camera prying, dialectical diatribes, and finally that reckoning. It's all a mish-mash, and if you don't walk out during that meandering first half hour, you might kick yourself for staying.
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