Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Katia Pascariu

Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a Romanian art film guaranteed to polarize audiences. The plot concerns Emi (Katia Pascariu), a teacher at an exclusive secondary school, whose life is upended after a sex tape she and her husband have created is uploaded to the internet. The prologue of the film, which consists of the (seemingly) hardcore footage contained in the video, is enough to send some viewers scurrying to the exits, but they will miss one of the more remarkable films of 2021.

Even besides the sex footage, Jude has fashioned a film to try the patience of mainstream audiences from Bucharest to Boston. The first section of the film eschews drama and shows Emi going about on a typical day, mostly walking to and fro down the boulevards of Bucharest. Jude presents enough signs and signifiers during the course of Emi's travels to give us a startling portrait of modern day Romania. The architecture of Bucharest, shown in graceful pans, documents its layered history. Classical architecture from the era of the Romanian monarchy stands uneasily next to Soviet monstrosities from the Ceausescu era and capitalist era kitsch. 

Emi's plight recedes even further into the background in the second section which consists of a "dictionary" of Romanian history. This provides Jude an opportunity to give a sardonic take on his country's troubled legacy. Romania's history of totalitarian rule, both Communist and Fascist, is touched upon, as is Romanian complicity in the extermination of its Jewish and Roma citizens.

Jude returns to Emi in the third and final section which depicts the meeting with the school children's parents intended to decide her professional fate. After the kinetics of the film's first two thirds, the lack of dynamics in the third section drags the film down a bit. Still, this section displays that the culture wars being fought in American education are not isolated. Both Putin and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have cited the decadence of Western influence as a factor in their attempt to "liberate" the Ukraine republic. Jude demonstrates in Bad Luck Banging... how the shadow of intolerance and xenophobia has never left the Balkans despite the fall of the Iron Curtain. 

Emi mounts a heroic self-defense at her meeting with the parents and Katia Pascariu is up to the challenge. Jude succeeds in offering an ambivalent portrait of his homeland under COVID. His mix of sex and politics recall the films of Dusan Makavejev, particularly WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. Bad Luck Banging... is confrontational art cinema that will not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it to be an invigorating look at a troubled land.