Romanian Katia Pascariu, the leading actress from “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” was nominated by the New York Times among the best actresses of 2021.
After becoming the big winner of the Berlinale, but also Romania’s Oscar nomination, Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” also gives puts its leading actress on the list of the most important names in the industry.
The 37-year-old Romanian actress from Bucharest caught the attention of the New York Times, which included her in a select company on the list of the best actors of 2021, along with names such as Joaquin Phoenix, Benedict Cumberbatch, Will Smith or Kristen Stewart.
Katia Pascariu plays the lead role in “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” , embodying a female teacher, Emi, whose life is turned upside down after a XXX clip goes viral.
NYT points out that, “if the greatness of some of the other performances lies in their achievement of intimacy, Pascariu’s is great because she defends Emi’s privacy and preserves her dignity, reminding us how much we don’t know about her, even if we think we’ve seen everything”.
Katia and the other actors noted by the New York Times were posed individually and a special chapter was dedicated to them in the list.
“Emi, in “Bad Luck Banging,” is ensnared in the consequences of a performance that found the wrong audience. A sex tape that she made with her husband finds its way onto the internet, causing a scandal at the school where Emi teaches. The first three minutes of the movie consist of that tape, which means that Pascariu, like Emi — Pascariu as Emi, though we don’t know that yet — is introduced in a state of maximum physical exposure. For the rest of the film, she is fully dressed and almost always masked, which removes some of the usual resources of screen performance.
There are barely any close-ups, no visible smiles or grimacing, so we try to read her mood through her eyes and the crease between them. At the end, she confronts a hostile audience of parents who watch the naughty clip in her presence and then enact a theater of shaming and bad-faith argument, both for and against her,” says the NYT chronicle.
Katia Pascariu is known especially in the world of theater, but also for her work as a trainer and cultural manager. She graduated from the Faculty of Theater and has a master’s degree from the University of Bucharest, in Anthropology and Development.
In 2007, she was nominated for a UNITER Award for her debut role in the play “Vitamins”.
Since 2016, Pascariu has been performing at the State Jewish Theater in Bucharest. She is attracted to the independent theater, collaborating with the Macaz and Replika centers, where she was discovered by director Radu Jude.
In cinema, she also played the roles of Mother Sevastian, in “After the Hills”, by Cristian Mungiu (2012) and Ana, in the film “Sketch of an End”, by Georgiana Madin (2011).