Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)
Jude's satirical and formally daring interrogation of shame in contemporary Romania
Country: Romania
Director: Radu Jude
Time: 1 hour and 43 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($4.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Flaubert and Benjamin collaborating on a study of pornography
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a darkly comic film about shame—what should shame us and what does shame us—dressed up as a film about a piece of pornography and its consequences. Or, perhaps, dressed up as a film channeling Walter Benjamin doing an impression of Sergei Eisenstein as a director of comedies interested in erotica. It is also a film interested in form—from various forms of filmmaking like montage and documentary, to the broader cultural forms and formats that socially determine and bound the acceptable. Of course, pornography too has formal constraints and criteria, alongside conventions and tropes. As with porn, with all things: context matters, particularly when it comes to designating the indecent and deviant. After all, a urinal is not a urinal when Marcel Duchamp brings it into a gallery. Then again, unlike its more debauched cousin, perhaps we don’t always know art when we see it.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn begins with a homemade sex tape featuring Emi, a teacher at a prestigious secondary school in Bucharest, and her husband. (The current Amazon rental version playfully censors the visuals, but the opening scenes of the film’s original cut featured actors having penetrative sex. This censorship is silly, since the bracing nature of the sexual acts implicate us as voyeurs and upend our expectations in ways that benefit the film.) We soon come to learn that Emi and her husband created the film for their personal viewing pleasure. After taking her phone to a repair shop, the video got uploaded and shared on the web. Emi’s students and their parents have seen it, unleashing outrage and pearl-clutching that will culminate in a planned public “trial” at which parents will cast votes to determine whether Emi should resign her position. Throughout this rather mortifying set of events, Emi remains almost heroically stoical, which naturally allows others to project their desires and fears onto her.
Radu Jude’s film comes in three parts, minus the prurient prologue. “One-way street,” the first part, features Emi running errands throughout Bucharest prior to the parental tribunal. As she moves throughout the city, the camera lingers to catch various individuals treating one another with casual forms of cruelty: an argument over a parking spot results in the threat of sex acts against an interlocutor’s mother; a person without enough money to pay at a store gets yelled at by others in line; a school administrator notes that it would probably be easier for everyone if their ill mother just passed away. Amidst these scenes, Emi remains surrounded and surfeited by various forms of crass consumerism. In particular, the camera focuses on children’s items for sale: t-shirts featuring kamikazes, shiny branded backpacks, an amusement park, cheap trinkets and baubles designed to entertain briefly before being summarily discarded—the opiates of the (young) masses have become producible and purchasable in bulk! In one scene, Emi pulls a children’s toy off a shelf featuring a seemingly endless number of inane toys (buy! buy! buy!), the camera subsequently panning to pregnant dolls (with baby doll accessories included) on offer. What, precisely, constitutes indecency? What, precisely, should evoke shame?
The film’s second part, entitled “A Short History of Anecdotes, Signs, and Wonders”, features a montage of different terms (from “Bookshelves” to “Blond Jokes” to “Patriotism”) juxtaposed with images and statements from Romanian history (as well as recent global history). It’s perhaps easiest to conceive of this portion as an update on Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, with bits of sociological, anthropological, media studies, and gender theory peppered throughout. The final part, “Praxis and innuendos (sitcom)”, centers on Emi’s “trial”, offering her accusers ample opportunity to very hilariously embody the ideologies, noxious nostrums, and historical grotesqueries paraded in the film’s second part as they pass judgement on her and everything she has come to represent for them. (Many of the expressed viewpoints will feel familiar to the American culture wars—movies and the language of politics both being major US exports—but they remain anchored in Romania’s history and politics, where the legacies of Antonescu and Ceaușescu seem to linger just beneath the surface.) True to its nature, the film features three endings played sequentially, which capture the work’s devious exuberance and leave the future very much open-ended.
In discussing Police, Adjective (2009), I have written about how many absurdly good Romanian films have been made over the past twenty years. Radu Jude, whose own protean filmography has encompassed everything from the social realist (Everybody in the Family, 2012) to the “period” piece (I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians, 2018) to the archival documentary (The Dead Nation, 2017), has produced a hilarious, iconoclastic, absurdist satire of contemporary mores and behaviors. What the film occasionally forgoes in subtlety, it makes up for in surprise. Throughout, the aim remains less to point out the sheer pervasiveness of hypocrisy within Romanian society—after all, this is hardly an interesting subject—but rather the ways in which various societies contour and legitimate certain forms of hypocrisy, while rendering others ripe for opprobrium and the scaffold. At its most powerful, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn highlights the latent contradictions extant within all sanitized versions of history—particularly Romania’s twentieth-century history—alongside the ways in which contemporary societies (through their cultural productions and consumerism) de-sensitize members to the ubiquitous acts of very real indecency that surround them. Rarely does serious provocation come this funny, outré, and barbed.
Go Down The Radu Jude Rabbit Hole With:
Radu Jude — I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018)
Radu Jude — Uppercase Print (2020)