This is a Romanian critically acclaimed film that opens with an explicit amateur porn scene so it’s definitely not for the faint hearted. Perhaps even more daunting is a montage in the middle that amounts to director Radu Jude offering his thoughts on a series of loaded words. To me this film certainly makes for a strong artistic statement but I can’t say that I like it all that much. I do appreciate it for providing an excellent window into what modern Romanian society is like and I was even stunned by how similar the Romanian language sounds to French!

A home video shows a couple enthusiastically having sex. They use a whip, engage in oral sex and call each other names. Afterwards we learn that the woman in it is Emi Cilibiu, a secondary school teacher. As she walks around the city doing various errands, she fields phone calls that tell us what is going on. The man in the video is her husband Eugen who subsequently uploaded it to a private website. From there it leaked to the wider Internet and into the phones and computers of the students at her school and their parents. Naturally this leads to a scandal and calls for her dismissal. As she makes her way around the city, the camera zooms in on advertising billboards, statues, news headlines and so on which reveal to us some of the character of contemporary Romanian society. Then we cut to the montage sequence which is basically the director mocking things like nationalism, sexism, how the teaching of history is manipulated to fit the political needs of the present, the shallowness of the consumerist mindset and much more.

Viewing this as any kind of conventional film, this is difficult to like. At first, I was happy to see Emi walking around the city as it gives us a close look at daily life in Romania. Then I realized this is indeed all that the film intends to do as she walks and walks and then walks some more. Speaking as someone who walks quite a bit, she really does an unrealistic amount of it as part of a normal routine. This allows the director to keep up a running commentary on Romania without actually narrating anything. Many of the references are too specific to Romania for me to really get and much of the rest seems straightforward and obvious. Some are worth some chuckles especially as they pertain to the COVID-19 protection measures in place at the time, such as enforcing social distancing while doing a traditional folk dance. I can’t say that any of this is terribly original but what does come across is the director palpable sense of outrage and willingness to employ extreme measures to shock the audience out of complacency.

As a polemical film that is all about expressing the director’s anger and frustration with the state of Romanian society, the film dispenses with character development or plot. A later scene presents us with reactions to the home sex video from a broad cross-section of Romanians. Somewhat surprisingly there are plenty of people who support Emi’s continued employment as well as those who insist that she be immediately dismissed. But as a dissenter points out, some of those are men who are probably only hoping that Emi will have sex with them. Similarly the debate spirals off to the conservatives being upset about her teaching of history and includes progressive types who quote extensively from experts on education. It’s fascinating but not terribly engaging on an emotional level. I would also say that it’s too scattershot and random to be intellectually engaging as well.

I did appreciate how this focuses a brutally honest lens on modern Romania. It’s fascinating to see that American memes and frameworks of discussion of contemporary political and social issues are present in Romania too. At the same time, they of course still wrestle with their own distinctive prejudices and longstanding problems. I also learned how similar their language sounds to French which was a revelatory lesson to me. Still I would find it difficult to recommend this to most people. It’s just so single-minded about wanting to shock audiences and it’s all about the director’s personal outrage. No bad thing for the director but not something that will resonate equally with audiences.