Just now, controversial Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is having a spotlight moment with BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN/’21, a film that opens with an extended hard-core non-simulated ‘amateur’ sex scene that’s been leaked to the internet, a provocation for the political & social upheaval that are the film‘s main topic. It makes a tough watch. Perhaps a better place to start is this bio-pic based on the short tragic life of Max Blecher, taken from his autobiographical ‘novel’ about his time at the sanatarium where he was treated for ‘bone tuberculosis.’ The film, challenging and compelling, is also beautiful & funny, as Emanuel, played by a freakishly thin Alex Bogdan (he makes POWER OF THE DOG’s Kodi Smit-McPhee look stocky), takes the cure under the care of a positive-thinking doctor (Serban Pavlu), while stretched out flat in bed wearing a half body cast to hold his spine in place between procedures. Yet what a lively life he manages to lead in this unusually open sanatorium, as much 1930s spa as clinic. Not only discussions & friendship, but sexual affairs & his writing. Excerpts from these (strikingly wise, mysteriously poetic) providing literary bridges between scenes. He even manages a few adventures lying flat in his hospital bed, carted like some pasha to a date in town, a visit to the beach. Or sidling over from ‘his’ bed to ‘her’ bed for sex in a fellow patient’s room. And always choosing intellectually stimulating women for company. Fascinating stuff, matched in Jude’s execution with mostly static shots (as if the camera were stuck in one of those hospital beds), rarely out of mid-range. A large-screen showing might be revelatory. And while the end is all but ordained (Blecher died at 29), the film is terribly sad without being a downer.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: An earlier Radu Jude film, AFERIM!/’15, shot in WideScreen b&w as opposed to SCARRED’s Academy Ratio color, is even better, richer & more mysterious. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/aferim-2015.html
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