Unfortunate sex or porn madness, the review of the film Golden Bear 2021

For Emi (Katia Pascariu) life as a teacher in Romania besieged by the virus it is not so bad, quite the contrary. Among the most esteemed teachers of her school, she manages to get by in a country where the violence that characterizes society now seems to have no limits.
Everything changes when an amateur sextape of hers, filmed with her husband at home, ends up on the net, no one knows how. Recognized, she is found to be accused by the teaching council and by her parents.
Lost, wounded and angry, while wandering around a metropolis where intolerance and violence towards the weakest, the lack of respect for women and children, Emi will find herself having to choose whether to give in and hope for the clemency of the ” court “or fight for herself and her dignity, while around her the worst of sick society rages, addicted to sex but unable to admit it.

The portrait of a country in full moral decay

It also arrives in Italian cinemas Unfortunate sex or porn madness, the film awarded the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. A decision that was not welcomed by critics, who did not like the audacity of the jury led by Jeremy Irons – who bravely married the power of a work that has little or nothing canonical.
The first five minutes is a full blown sextape, with little to envy to the millions who crowd the porn databases all over the world. Already from that incipit it is clear that Jude has no intention of making viewing easy for the viewer. Or maybe yes?
Doubt advances when the narrative iter finds itself broken, disharmonious, absolutely distant from the supposed drama of a person process, as much as connected to a puzzle in which we follow the protagonist in her terrible day, while wearing that mask he wanders in supermarkets, in the streets, in the alleys.
Jude as an insert tells us about his country, of this Romania where women are worth less than zero, where 60% of minors suffer violence, where denial of crimes against Jews and gypsies is on the agenda, while the pompous army parades through the streets of a country that is the Mecca of porn and prostitution in Europe.
Unfortunate sex or porn madness goes beyond the mere single case of revenge porn, of deprivation of a woman’s privacy and dignity, becomes the totem of the backwardness of a nation that has known both extremes, but has not managed to break away from either of them.

The autopsy of the hypocritical modern society

The xenophobic and nationalist priests, the rich macho and depraved, the superstitious old ladies, the petty bourgeois locked in their pathetic uniforms … reality and fantasy come together and merge in a work that we discover much more linked to irony, to the grotesque even Fellini’s, than to realism.
The final trial, a farce in which the director places the individual representatives of a morally retarded country in the dock, embraces the theatrical, metaphorical dimension, is connected to the everyday, invisible evil, mirror of a country without freedom because it never has truly conquered, it just waited for the tyranny to go away by itself.
But the film also does more than lash out at xenophobic and semi-medieval Romania. Unfortunate sex or porn madness tells us about our society, of the concept of obscenity, of how by now these definitions and limits have been cleared from the web, which has taken away the modesty that we would like to impose on our children, destroyed the training work of schools.
What is obscene? Seeing sex on a screen? Or pretend that such a practice is not natural to cling to a bigoted and hypocritical religiosity? Isn’t it more obscene to make your children sing fascist songs? Denying the pro-Nazi past? Bribing public officials?

The female body is not free in this film, nor is it in our 2.0 society, that of social media, of bullying that uses technology, the one that has brought more possibilities, more opportunities, but no more empathy or open-mindedness.
The exemplary editing of the film shows us all this, while Emi avoids maniacs on the street, takes sexist insults, has to do with mascots in supermarkets where a simple line that slows down is the casus belli for angry and cruel people.

A portrait of an era based on hate

Divided into four chapters, Jude’s film is striking for how it knows how to connect with everyday reality of a West that has not yet managed to progress as it would like or as it would have us believe.
The case of the teacher from Turin (substantially identical to that of this film) is there to prove it for our country, which is also polluted by the same male chauvinist and bigoted religiosity.

Everything is sex in our society, but nothing can be openly, because when it is real, tangible and daily, it exercises a request for tolerance, for empathy, which is in contrast to the times we live in, worsened by COVID-19 from which certainly (Jude seems to be telling us too) we will not get better, not even for joke. The ending between fantasy and parody is the consistent closure of a brave film, brilliant in its own way, in which we witness the defeat of reason, of knowledge, at the hands of that ignorance that thanks to the web has found so much space.
This is the era of hatred as a flag, of individualist and collective opposition. Emi takes revenge by disguising herself as Wonder Woman, one of the strongest symbols of feminism, she marries that desire for violent revenge that assails her as it assails us during this film, which scares us and makes us entertain at the same time. But it is bitter fun, as only the mirrors of the most terrible reality can give.

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