Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porno: Dirty Talk About Romanian History
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
An appropriate provocation for the spirit of the age, Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is Romania’s Oscar submission, and winner of The Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival.
Such a pedigree does not prepare you for the film’s opening, an explicit three-minute homemade porn video with a couple, who employ dirty talk, a mask, wig and flogger.
The scene is not gratuitous. The amateur porno ends up on the internet which triggers the plot of the rest of the film. The intro is followed by three acts, each in radically different tones.
The first is the most rewarding act, running around 40 minutes, or a quarter the length of the film. The woman from the video, Emi (Katia Pascariu), spends the day in Bucharest. Now dressed in a modest grey jacket and long dress, she is shot from a distance in long takes, walking, talking on her phone and doing errands.
The camera pans over garish billboards and storefront advertisements (an image of Jesus next to ads for the Emoji movie), clogged streets full of construction. COVID masks and protocols are in place, but civil behaviour is in the gutter, and there are constant confrontations between angry strangers yelling obscenities at each other.
Emi goes to meet the director of her school (Claudia Ieremia), who is living in a crowded apartment with her incontinent mother, to discuss the video which has somehow been leaked. The board of her school and various parents demand to have a meeting to decide the teacher’s future.
The second act, described as a a “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders,” is an alphabetically arranged series of sardonic definitions with accompanying clips and images, archival and staged. The segment is stuffed with literary and historical quotations (Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer), reminiscent of the later essay films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Much of it focuses on Romania’s history of fascism, Catholic dictatorship, anti-semitism, which also forms the theme of the film’s third act.
The final act, identified by a jaunty pink title card as a “sitcom”, involves Emi’s trial, in a socially-distanced outdoor courtyard in the evening, where parents, several with mouths drawn on their COVID masks, peer at the offending sex video and comment on it. There is also a collection exemplary social types — a nationalistic military officer, an Orthodox priest and an academic who reads tedious passages of sociological theory from his iPhone.
Their comments are, censorious, sociological and sexually confused. (That’s not anal, just “doggy-style” someone explains.) Emi, glowering stoically behind her mask, listens to them berate, defend or mock her.
Given a chance to attack the teacher, the privileged parents’ group lets loose. Soon the discussion broadens from Emi’s sexual performance to her work in the classroom. Given a chance to vent, the parents spew their own pro-fascist, anti-Semitic attitudes, beleaguering the educator for teaching an accurate history of the country.
One can’t miss that the “obscenity” on trial is not just the history teacher, but the grotesqueries of history itself, that the moral panic about Emi’s porn tape is about the façade of propriety and collective denial.
The epilogue offers three possible outcomes, including one that spins into absurdity.
Bad Luck Banging, subtitled “a sketch for a popular comedy,” is more diatribe than satire, and despite its intellectual trappings, never less than obvious. It’s also self-congratulatory, though arguably, it has some good reason to be so.
Bad Luck Banging and Loony Porn. Directed and written by Radu Jude. Starring: Katia Pescariu, Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Olimpia Mălai, Nicodim Ungureanu, Alexandru Potocean and Andi Vasluianu. The film is currently showing theatrically in Vancouver and Montreal, will open in other Canadian cities through the fall and winter.