Review: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn Takes Satiric Aim at Romanian Society

Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is every bit as strange and overstuffed as its title. The film is a kind of fire sale of Jude’s observations on everything from life during the Covid-19 pandemic to Romania’s dark history of fascism. Its dominant theme is the socially constructed nature of obscenity, explored through the story of a school teacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), dealing with the potentially career-ending fallout that ensues after a raunchy sex tape she filmed with her husband is leaked online. This premise might have served as the basis for a mainstream sex farce—a point that’s winkingly acknowledged by the film’s subtitle, “A Sketch for a Popular Film”—but Jude takes it primarily as a jumping-off point for some playful formal experimentation and bitterly satirical jabs at Romanian society.

Divided into three roughly equal parts—each executed in a completely different style—with a sexually explicit prologue and three so-called “possible endings,” Bad Luck Banging is an ever-shapeshifting beast of a film. It opens in medias coitus, with a lengthy excerpt from Emi’s grainy homemade porno. Shot from the POV of her husband, who remains unseen except for when his lower torso and erect penis enter the frame, the tape could easily be mistaken for any number of amateur videos on PornHub. Opening a festival-ready art film this way is no doubt startling, and it is that instant feeling of shock and surprise that Jude interrogates.

The nature of our discomfort will be confronted head-on in the third and final section, but first Jude takes us to the streets of pandemic-era Bucharest, where (nearly) everyone’s wearing a mask and Covid is the ubiquitous subject of overheard small talk. In the first section, we watch as Emi runs errands and evinces a subtle yet palpably increasing anxiety. It’s gradually revealed that her video has been uploaded to the internet, where it’s been passed around by students and faculty at the school where she teaches. Jude films these scenes as if Emi’s being surveilled, mounting his camera in a fixed position at a considerable distance and following her movements with ominous pans before drifting away to observe seemingly unrelated details of the city—a church, a billboard, some street art. Bad Luck Banging recalls other Romanian New Wave works like Cristi Puiu’s Aurora and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, turning the mundanities of everyday life into an kind of opaque, existential mystery.

Jude, however, is less of a philosopher or psychologist than either Puiu or Porumboiu and more of a historian and social critic. It’s not surprising, then, that Jude is, in the film’s first section, less interested in Emi’s predicament than he is in everyday Romanians navigating changing social mores in the face of the pandemic. We hear people discussing superstitious stories about Covid, like the idea that a Eucharist spoon can kill the virus. In one scene set in a pharmacy, an older woman pulls down her mask to start speaking, causing someone off screen to yell at her to keep it on. These now all-too-familiar scenes of etiquette and public health colliding in the streets are oddly cathartic to watch on screen, perhaps because they remind us that even in this purgatorial liminal zone of the pandemic, art can and will emerge.

Just as Emi’s storyline is heating up, Bad Luck Banging enters its wildly discursive second section, “a short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders,” which gives us what its title promises: a collection of ruminations on sex, Covid, Romanian history, feminism, literature, and numerous other topics arranged as a lexicon of terms, like “French Revolution,” “Change,” and “Robots.” This stretch of the film finds Jude continuing to excavate the submerged horrors of Romanian history as he’s done previously in films like Aferim! and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, targeting, for example, the Romanian Orthodox Church’s close relationship with dictators and the slave labor that built the Palace of Parliament. While no single theme orders the reflections contained in this section, Jude returns again and again to the maltreatment of women, closing in a segment ironically titled “Zen,” which informs us that 55% of Romanians believe rape to be justified in some circumstances.

This horrifying statistic looms over the film’s final section, entitled “Praxis and Innuendos (sitcom),” a parent-teacher association meeting-cum-show trial that plays like a cross between Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako and Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” In contrast to the obliqueness of the film’s first section and the eclecticism of its second, this third movement is often bewilderingly blunt. Filmed in the open-air courtyard of a school in a deliberately stagy and exaggerated fashion, it pits moralistic parents and community members against Emi, who defends herself with exasperated conviction. This section is mostly an occasion for Jude to satirize, in surprisingly broad strokes, the moral hypocrisy of Romanian society. But while it’s often fun to see him take aim at anti-Semites, misogynists, and crypto-fascists, it’s hard not to feel like he’s shooting fish in a barrel. That sense is driven home by the trio of alternate endings, the last of which in particular offers a bizarrely outré moment of catharsis that underlines the smug sense of superiority that infects this section.

Jude is a filmmaker deeply engaged with the history of his homeland, its very essence, and his exasperation at Romania’s self-serving nationalistic myths practically radiates off the screen. But whereas I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians expressed that indignation with supremely controlled fury, Bad Luck Banging resorts to clownish caricatures. Jude’s willingness to experiment with form is exciting throughout, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film’s all-over-the-place structure is ultimately a product of his failure to fully work through his ideas, as if the sheer quantity of different things happening here would excuse the fact that they don’t fit together in any coherent way. A film with too many ideas is preferable to one with too few, but unfortunately, all of Bad Luck Banging’s stray thoughts, formal strategies, and satirical sideswipes never add up to more than, well, a “sketch.”