Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn
Schoolteacher Emilia Colibiu (Katia Pascariu, "Beyond the Hills") has a frisky sex life with her husband Eugen (Stefan Steel) who gets even more turned on by when his video camera is too. Unfortunately for Emi, a very explicit video gets uploaded to the Internet and she is called before a gathering of outraged parents to determine whether she will be allowed to keep her job in the 2021 Berlin Gold Bear Winner “Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn.”
Laura's Review: B+
Romanian writer/director Radu Jude’s ("Aferim!," "I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians") latest film is the cinematic equivalent of Pussy Riot, a bold, experimental and bawdy comedy about some very serious subjects. On its surface, it’s like the overworked debate on how sex in the movies is more harshly rated than violence, but Jude is going much deeper here, stacking up all the outrages humanity has to offer versus consensual sex and asking just which is obscene. Jude uses examples specific to Romania (the film was their entry for the International Film Oscar, but Academy members apparently blanched as it didn’t make the shortlist) but Americans will be horrified to recognize our own country as well.
The film is broken into three chapters, each announced with a bright pink background featuring flowery script and jaunty music. A prologue consists of that hardcore sex tape, a jolt to the system, and an equally sexual, albeit humorously fantastical, coda proposing three possible outcomes to Chapter 3, the last imagining Emi as a superhero attacking the self-righteous with an oversized dildo.
Part 1 features Emi in clean-up mode, striding about Bucharest in a severe gray suit as she makes phone calls, drops in on her Headmistress (Claudia Ieremia, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians") and visits a pharmacy in hopes of calming her nerves. Jude uses long shots giving us a walking travelogue of a city in social collapse under COVID, rudeness and aggression ascendant.
Part 2, titled ‘A Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders’ is a series of images and short films interspersing such concepts as Romania’s Orthodox Church’s collusion with fascist authoritarianism and its shocking statistics on child abuse with examples of live-cam sex and blow jobs. In furthering his theme, Jude includes ruminations on the poems of Paul Celan, discussing how Truth can sometimes be too horrific to gaze upon directly, and that just as Perseus used the reflection in his polished shield to slay Medusa, so cinema allows us to absorb the horrors of fascism. Over images from a 2020 Mussolini calendar(!), Jude tells us ‘H. Broch states political indifference is closely related to moral decay, in that people who are politically innocent are morally suspect, and that the Germans never felt responsible for Hitler’s coming to power because they saw themselves as apolitical.’
Part 3 is the socially distanced, outdoor tribunal where Emi faces the parents, first having to endure her and her husband’s video being shown in full on an iPad to undue interest. Mr. Otopeanu (Andi Vasluianu) kicks things off with racist comments about Arabs, anti-mask sentiments and how Emi’s indoctrinating their kids by teaching them about Romanian collusion in the Holocaust (shades of CRT!). Only one parent, Marius (Alexandru Potocean), allows that science has never confirmed exposure to pornography harms a child’s development. When Emi points out the myriad hypocrisies of one outraged mom, the battle turns physical.
With “Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn” Radu Jude pulls another cinematic rabbit out of his hat while continuing to reflect on history to confront today’s ills.
Robin's Review: B-
Magnolia's "Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn" is now available for home viewing.
