For This Sex Satire, the Pandemic Built a Perfect Set

BUCHAREST, Romania — Romania’s capital seems almost ripped apart by social division in the movie “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” by the director Radu Jude, which won the top award at last year’s Berlin Film Festival and is screening in theaters across Europe this winter.

Jude also wrote the screenplay for the movie, an acerbic satire about a moral panic that erupts when a history teacher’s sex tape is uploaded to the internet. That was before the pandemic hit, but instead of delaying production, he shot the movie on Bucharest’s streets during the summer of 2020, incorporating the era’s hygiene measures and heightened anxiety into the film. In “Bad Luck Banging,” the city’s frazzled citizens sling foul insults at one another on small pretexts, with medical masks around their chins.

“‘Bad Luck Banging’ really fits with what’s happening now,” said the Romanian film critic Andrei Gorzo. “The masks and the paranoia, the hysterical people, the aggression and hostility, and the culture wars.”

Romania has one of the lowest rates of coronavirus vaccination in the European Union, with only about 41 percent of residents fully inoculated. Its hospitals were overwhelmed in the fall, and Covid deaths per capita were among the world’s highest. As the Omicron variant surges, many still harbor doubts about vaccine safety and efficacy.

Lack of faith in the government has remained strong in Romania since communist times. The country was ruled from the 1960s by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose police state was among the most repressive in the Eastern Bloc until he was toppled in 1989. The horrors of his rule and its lasting impact on the national psyche are recurrent themes in Romanian cultural output. Such works have been successful abroad in recent decades, for instance in the cinema of the Romanian New Wave, such as Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, or in the novels of the Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller.

Yet while the pandemic has inflamed culture wars everywhere, in Romania, where the trauma of life under authoritarian rule is still raw, government measures like lockdowns and mask mandates have played into anxieties about freedom and control. Artists and intellectuals in the country have compared resisting public health initiatives to the struggle against dictatorship.

In November, more than 70 prominent figures, including the filmmaker Cristi Puiu and the writer and theologian Mihail Neamtu, signed a highly publicized open letter condemning a proposed law to make Covid-19 vaccination mandatory in workplaces. The letter compared the plan to the communist pressure on farmers to collectivize their land “under the threat of the bullet.” (During a protest against the proposal, demonstrators waving Romanian flags and chanting “freedom” tried to storm the Parliament building in Bucharest. Support for the measure within Romania’s governing coalition collapsed, and the draft law was dropped.)

Puiu, whose satire on the failure of Romania’s medical system, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” helped start the Romanian New Wave, has questioned measures against the coronavirus before. In August 2020, while introducing his film “Malmkrog” at the Transylvania International Film Festival, Puiu described the event’s mask requirement as “inhuman” and reminded the audience that rule breaking brought down Romania’s dictatorship in 1989. Puiu did not respond to interview requests for this article.

Neamtu, a Romanian intellectual and the author of “The Trump Arena” (2017), a book praising Donald J. Trump, said in an interview that coronavirus restrictions recalled the “excessive control over powerless citizens” that he experienced growing up under communism.

“Everybody who has read Vaclav Havel’s ‘The Power of the Powerless’ has glimpsed the possibility that a new form of totalitarianism could emerge if we don’t criticize the government,” he said, referring to a 1978 essay on communist persecution by the Czech dissident who would go on to become his country’s president.

Other Romanian artists rejected those views. In an interview, Jude, the “Bad Luck Banging” director, called it “ridiculous” to say that protesters against coronavirus measures were reviving a past spirit of dissent. “Romania had a string of really horrible dictatorships, and most people complied very well with them,” he said, referring to Ceausescu’s rule and the fascist dictatorships that preceded it. “All of a sudden, now, it’s compensation for those who slept for 100 years to say they are taking revenge against the dictatorship of the masks and vaccines.”

Jude explored the repressive terror of Ceausescu’s dictatorship in another movie, “Uppercase Print,” based on the secret police file of an anti-regime teenage graffiti artist. But Jude is also known for addressing historical subjects that are still taboo in Romania, such as the enslavement of Roma people in the 19th century (in “Aferim!”) and the country’s massacre of Jews during the Holocaust (in “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians”and “The Dead Nation”). Those films made him a contentious figure in his home country.

Jude sometimes collaborates with Adrian Cioflanca, a Romanian historian, to make movies that excavate archive images and shed light on the atrocities committed in World War II under Romania’s fascist dictatorship, headed by Ion Antonescu. A short film by Cioflanca and Jude about that period, “Memories From the Eastern Front,”will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this month.

Cioflanca said in an interview that a new wave of right-wing populists in Romania had hijacked the national rhetoric around the pandemic, using references to the safeguarding of human rights and liberties to gain wider appeal. “What is scary today is the capacity of extremist voices to influence the mainstream,” he said. “When we compare it to previous versions of populism, we see a better capacity for them to appear as what they are not.”

Protesters against coronavirus measures from younger generations “didn’t live in communism, so they don’t have personal memories and a personal attitude related to the communist regime,” Cioflanca said.

Dan Perjovschi, a cartoonist and visual artist who has made the impact of the virus on society a frequent subject of his drawings, is old enough, at 60, to remember life under Ceausescu. He noted in an interview that, compared to that time, resisting the government carried little danger now. “It is so easy to be against things now, and go to protest — nothing happens to you,” he said.

“I agree with that,” he added. “But if you have freedom you also have some obligations.”

Nonetheless, he said that, while he was “on the vaccinated team,” he could empathize with those in Romania who questioned the authorities. “People don’t believe in laws and organizations here, they believe in their own family, and that’s the only strategy they have. Thirty years of democracy were not able to establish trust,” he said.

Mona Nicoara, a Romanian documentary maker now based in New York, said by phone that the situation led to “a kind of magical thinking.” Many people in Romania now hold “their own personal cocktail of conspiracy theories” about the coronavirus, she said, adding that, even when their ideas contradicted one another, “as long as there is mistrust as the base layer, they get along.”

Artists can encourage critical thinking, which sometimes leads to divisions — but that isn’t always a bad thing, Jude said. He was pleased, for instance, when “Bad Luck Banging” stirred strong reactions in Romania. “It’s good that a film divides people, because it’s an illusion, or utopia, to think that important issues will bring people together,” he said.

“They won’t,” Jude added. “There will always be people against things, and the pandemic merely accentuated this.”