Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Leave it to mischiefmaker Radu Jude to begin his latest film with hardcore sex and end it with Wittgenstein. The Romanian writer/director excels in fashioning delightfully disturbing deconstructions of his country’s history, from a film crew re-creating the 1941 Odessa massacre in I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, to the 2020 doc Uppercase Print, the story of Mugur Călinescu, a student fatally detained by Communist officials for his anti-authoritarian graffiti. It’s a methodology combining the horrific with the absurd, blending academic inquiry with farcical social critique, à la Buñuel. But with his new atrocity exhibition, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Jude casts an eye on a wider view of our current state of affairs (masks and hand sanitizers included), even while his gaze never strays from the beautifully beleaguered city of Bucharest.

Still with me? Oh good, I feared I lost you there for a second. Back to sex, then. Specifically, the act as it is performed and filmed by a husband and wife for their enjoyment, and the enjoyment of subscribers to the adult website to which they uploaded the video. If only that was where it stayed. But in a cruel twist of narrative drive, the homemade video has leaked all over the internet. For Emilia (Pascariu), a history teacher at a private school, this means facing down a group of outraged parents in a socially distanced, makeshift tribunal to decide her occupational fate.

But like Emilia herself, Jude isn’t in a hurry to get there. The first third of Bad Luck Banging sees Emilia negotiating the streets of Bucharest: running errands, meeting up with the headmistress to discuss the impending meeting, fielding phone calls from her husband regarding the video’s continued online resurrection, and grabbing a quick coffee in a cafe. As the camera follows Emilia, it quickly becomes clear that she is but the White Rabbit, leading us in and out of various scenarios depicting the physical and psychic erosion of the 21st century. There’s a flare-up at a grocery store checkout line, repeated conflicts between pedestrians and drivers, a story heard here, an argument overheard there, the camera pointedly examining the husks of buildings and abandoned architecture, pondering Disney backpacks and lurid billboards. It’s an odyssey of juxtapositions.

Prior to Emilia’s reckoning, there is an interlude, a short segment of “anecdotes, signs, and wonders.” It is Jude’s updated version of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of morosely ironic definitions, proclamations, and satiric signifiers. Efficiency, for example, is defined by a funeral parlor stationed across the street from a hospital. This section lays bare Bad Luck’s theoretical worldview (if there was any lingering confusion) before Emilia finally arrives to face the parents whose children have been exposed to the now infamous video.

Filmed as theatre, as spectacle, as a circus gone utterly off the rails, Emilia’s trial begins with “think of the children” hand wringing before digressing – at every turn – to nearly every conceivable cultural schism eternally up for debate. Not only does Jude successfully capture the utter pointlessness and impossibility of contemporary discourse, he does so in such a way as to leave you breathless. It’s the comment section of any regional news website writ large and come to life: smug, bitter, venomous, inexplicable, and deranged. It also happens to be exhilarating and, yes, cathartic. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a frustratingly brilliant (and brilliantly frustrating) experience that formally doesn’t really have a contemporary cinematic referent, an eyeball-slicing polemic by a bomb-throwing provocateur.