Bad Luck Bang­ing or Loony Porn – first-look review

Bad Luck Bang­ing or Loony Porn is the lat­est fea­ture from Roman­ian film­mak­er and Berlin Film Fes­ti­val reg­u­lar Radu Jude. With an out­landish premise and for­mal absur­di­ties to match its eye-catch­ing title, it’s a film that is con­stant­ly engag­ing in a dia­logue with itself, encour­ag­ing a kind of back­wards read­ing to open up its intri­ca­cies and vagaries.

Jude car­ries out an exer­cise in struc­tur­al play across three sec­tions. You’d be for­giv­en for los­ing faith 30 min­utes into part one, which moves abrupt­ly from a porno­graph­ic video to a wind­ing, repet­i­tive series of pan­ning shots fol­low­ing pro­tag­o­nist Emi (Katia Pas­car­iu) as she wan­ders around Bucharest. Emi’s tour of her locale is some­times errand-led, oth­er times aim­less; she appears on one road, then anoth­er, focus ever-shift­ing between her move­ments, a near­by build­ing or an amus­ing sign, and the snip­pets of argu­ments or greet­ings had between the strangers around her.

It soon becomes clear that she is already well-aware that the film’s open­ing clip of her and her hus­band hav­ing sex has been uploaded onto the inter­net, and that it is not an imme­di­ate issue for her, despite the threat it might pose to her teach­ing career. Still, she knows how it will be per­ceived by the soci­ety she is con­stant­ly encoun­ter­ing as she walks – an angry soci­ety, one that dis­plays self­ish­ness over patience, one that choos­es impo­lite­ness. The beliefs of these oppo­nents meets Emi’s proud, self-assured stance head on in the film’s third act, an are­na for com­mu­ni­ty prej­u­dice and hate that ques­tions the true mean­ing of obscenity.

It’s a whol­ly inven­tive and amus­ing film that crash­es soci­etal norms against one anoth­er with sharp humour and nav­i­gates its pol­i­tics with real bite and imag­i­na­tion. Sub­ti­tled as ​“a sketch for a pop­u­lar film”, Bad Luck Bang­ing or Loony Porn is a clev­er­ly struc­tured work that maps out its foun­da­tions as it pro­gress­es, show­ing its grid­lines and work­ings out to reveal the depths and scope of its design.

As the film grad­u­al­ly begins to look back on its own open­ing scene, the sec­ond part sheds light (albeit abstract­ly) on the more baf­fling styl­is­tic choic­es of part one. From A‑Z through a dic­tio­nary of cho­sen terms (“anec­dotes, signs, and won­ders” the title card reads), the sec­ond act forges con­nec­tions between pre­vi­ous images and ideas. ​“He admires a Baby­lon­ian tem­ple col­umn and scorns the fac­to­ry chim­ney” appears for the word ​“city” as a fuzzy cam­era pans once more up and over buildings.

For ​“cin­e­ma”, Jude refers to the tale of the Gor­gon Medusa who was slain by Perseus using the reflec­tion of a shield to pro­tect him from her dead­ly gaze; ​“the cin­e­ma screen is Athena’s pol­ished shield,” Jude’s def­i­n­i­tion goes, a site at which to view the hor­rors of the world from safety.