Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, this film by prolific Romanian writer/director Radu Jude is a mixed bag of satire, realism and surrealism, and porn. Let's get that out of the way - as one character says, "It's not porn because there's no transaction taking place", but he's IN the film, we're watching, having paid the ticket price. Confused? The first few minutes of the film are taken up with a shakily-filmed, clearly amateur sex-tape - and it's extremely graphic - 'featuring' a Romanian school teacher and her husband. Said tape (or video file) somehow finds its way onto the internet and pretty soon, outrage occurs.

The film is broken into three distinct chapters. The first is basically Romanian New Wave, with a meandering camera following Katia Pascariu's Emilia around Bucharest while she attempts damage control. As she makes her way to the apartment of her school Headmistress (Claudia Ieremia), she fields calls from her husband regarding the video, all the while dealing with toxic humanity in the streets. This section, as prosaic as it sounds, is nonetheless fascinating, giving us a weirdly voyeuristic angle on the life of a city. The camera often seems to forget it's trained on Emilia, instead lingering over some unimportant signage or a decrepit building façade. 

The second chapter is less accessible. It's basically made up of dictionary entries, all of which have something to say, but admittedly, many of which went sailing over my head into Bay 13. Each one is subtitled with explanatory text (oddly without vocals, meaning they were written in Romanian originally?) and accompanied by what seems like stock footage. These are all reasonably short but they add up to a fair old chunk of the film, and I feel this is where 'art' and comfort parted ways slightly.

The third section is the parent/teacher meeting, and I hope I never have to go to one like this. Emilia is forced to sit at a desk outside - masks are worn and social distancing is being observed, making this one of the first COVID-era films I've seen - while receiving insinuations and insults from her students' parents. It's a fine example of where we're positioned as a society - hypocrisy, self-interest, perceived affront and faux-outrage, it's all here. Also present are the aggressive, intolerant, wildly right-wing views of some self-proclaimed community leaders. Checked off the roll are misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Romaphobia (anti Gypsy sentiment) and just pure fuck-headed-ness. And we all think this shit only goes on in Eastern Europe.

This is a depressingly common story of bigoted attitudes that Jude has decided would be best served up as blackly comic farce, with some explicit sex to act as the motivating agent. Not the greatest film of the year, but almost without peer in originality. It's unlikely you'll see anything similar anytime soon and for me, that's a win.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens at Luna Cinemas on Nov 25th.

See also:

I'll suggest two more Romanian films here, firstly, the excellent Collective (2019), directed by Alexander Nanau, and secondly, Police, Adjective (2009), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu.

SPOILERS (AND PORN TALK) IN POD!!