Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – first-look review

A leaked sex tape threatens the career of a school teacher in Radu Jude’s wry social commentary.

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.

Published 2 Mar 2021

Tags: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn Berlin Film Festival Katia Pascariu Radu Jude