Let’s get this out of the way out front: Yes, the Romanian film “Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn,” winner of the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlinale, opens with about three and a half minutes of hardcore pornography. Teacher Emilia (Katia Pascariu) and her husband Eugen go at it on digital video, complete with a little light flagellation, porn-informed dirty talk, and unsimulated oral and penetrative intercourse. This might, in certain jurisdictions, be considered “obscene”—but, argues writer-director Radu Jude, not nearly as obscene as Romanian society as a whole. (To paraphrase the title of a landmark queer film by Rosa von Praunheim: It is not the tabloid-anointed “Porn Teacher” who is perverse, but the society in which she lives.) Following the grubby historical picaresque “Aferim!” and the very impressive and depressing inquiry into historical memory, “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians,” this new film makes the case for Radu Jude as the least patriotic filmmaker now working—he’s so disillusioned with his homeland, he makes Nadav Lapid look like Peter Berg. A COVID-era period piece in which Emilia faces a professional reckoning after her sex tape finds its way online, climaxing in an extended P.T.A. auto-da-fé which exposes a national ethos of hypocrisy, ignorance, and malice, “Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn” is a film of nihilistic hilarity and total structural abandon, invoking Ludwig Wittgenstein and PornHub in practically the same breath. It’s the work of a man desperate to speak his truth before security escorts him out of the building, like a hostile interloper crashing a press conference to recite a manifesto—or throw a pie.
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The main body of the film is divided into three main chapters, each introduced with a sarcastic title card against a pink background and a bouncy music-hall tune. In Part I, Emilia, dressed in a modest and unimpeachably professional gray pantsuit, walks through Bucharest running errands, fielding calls from Eugen (unseen in the film except on the sex tape) as they try to scrub the sex tape from the internet, and preparing for an upcoming meeting with a group of concerned parents at the elite junior high where she teaches. As Pascariu walks past, extras will sometimes look at the camera with mild curiosity, in a nice approximation of Emi’s viral infamy. Emi, like most bystanders in this neorealist section, is masked; the pandemic provides a plausible justification for her to not take public transit, and so what we get is a lovely daylight walking tour of the city’s different neighborhoods. Wide shots swivel to take in architecture styles from medieval and Eastern Bloc to malls and high-rises, and pan in insistently to highlight vulgar (maybe even pornographic) advertisements, political placards, shabby shops, and sight gags (a shopper wearing a flesh-toned fanny pack that looks like a roll of blubber hanging over his waistband is one highlight). Emi overhears conversations and arguments, COVID misinformation and displays of road rage and haughty entitlement, and has to maneuver her way around oversized SUVs parked on seemingly every sidewalk. It seems significant that the section ends on the neoclassical façade of a shuttered movie theater, suggesting a vanished capacity for self-reflection.
The idea of cinema as a mirror is Jude’s metaphor—it comes from Part 2, which is described as a “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs, and wonders.” Arranged alphabetically (in Romanian), it offers entries on the Romanian Orthodox Church, “truth,” Ceausescu, “empathy” and so on, illustrating the concepts with clips from newsreels, archival video, stills, social-media clips, and staged vignettes, mixing images of historical atrocities with the scatological. (One such explicit entry, improbably, recalls a joke from Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking and Screaming”: “Cool! A dictionary! I’m gonna look up’ blowjob.’”) The definitions, mix sarcasm, sincerity, quotation, and absurdity, though the dominant mode is the arch, bitter worldliness of Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary”: one key entry defines “Children” as “political prisoners of their parents.” Many definitions begin as stories, about “an officer” or “an American accused of killing”—vague viral anecdotes, to be taken out of context to prove a point or reinforce a prior, and which, amidst a rush of apocalyptic concern about climate change, coronavirus, consent, and colonialism, give the section a frantic arm-waving everything-is-fucked momentum. The dictionary also works as exposition for an international audience, planting info about Romania’s shameful historical mistreatment of its Roma and Jewish populations for viewers who missed the history lesson of “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians.”
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In Barbarians, a theater artist, Mariana (Ioana Iacob), faced mounting resistance and frustration in staging a performance piece about the genocide of Romanian Jewry carried out by Nazi-aligned war hero Marshal Antonescu (who, after the fall of the Communist dictator Ceausescu, became an at least guardedly admired figure in Romania for his opposition to Stalin’s USSR). With Emilia, ‘Bad Luck Banging’ has another central woman—a history teacher!—who is admirable in her convictions, heroic in her adherence to them in the face of pressure, and enviable in her articulacy and command of the relevant facts. Mariana shakes her head ruefully and Emi argues righteously; they don’t want to be pedantic, but they can’t help but bang their heads against the wall of their fellow Romanians willed historical ignorance and narrow-mindedness.
In Part 3, Emi attends a meeting, held in her school’s courtyard due to COVID protocols, in which her students’ parents discuss her sex tape and debate her professional fate, and which illustrates the paradox of the internet: every embarrassing moment is preserved forever in a place that breeds totally blithe ahistorical arrogance. I love a good tribunal scene, and like the ones in Peter Watkins’ hippies-vs.-hardhats docudrama dystopia “Punishment Park,” ‘Bad Luck Banging’ presents an almost parodic cross-section of society, with half the parents dressed for work in uniforms out of a Richard Scarry book: a military officer, a priest (in an “I Can’t Breathe” mask), a pilot (who calls masks “the muzzle of slaves” before slipping his on). With the parents arranged in a semicircle of folding chairs facing Emi (and Pascariu emoting furiously behind her surgical mask), the proceedings become progressively more surreal—neon lights keep flickering on to add another garish accent to the proceedings; torches are lit; custodians pass through to shine the statues, and someone keeps laughing like Woody Woodpecker, always from offscreen.
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This is an IRL digital commons, with discourse as coarse (or coarsened) as in any anonymous below-the-line comment thread. After the most overtly Helen Lovejoy-ish mother (with mask in the colors of the Romanian flag) insists on replaying the entire sex tape on an iPad, what follows from the parents is endless saintly invocations of their absent children, wild accusations, and disregard for the evidence of their own eyes, brutish prudery and casual misogyny and constant sniggering (“she said fellatio”). Jude, not afraid to repeat himself, allows the proceedings to digress past a number of key points from ‘Barbarians’: Isaac Babel and Hannah Arendt, Antonescu and anti-Semitism and anti-Roma prejudice and flag-humping.
Parents’ phones ring constantly, in an aggravating invocation of digital distraction and an exaggerated depiction of exactly the kind of behavior they’d harp on their kids for. People pull up quotations on their phones to make a point—echoing Phaedrus, Emi recites a theorist’s defense of memorization, as a mechanism to reinforce mental habits against the digital outsourcing of thought. She’s met with vague conspiracy theories about Soros and Israel and salacious rumors about her own proclivities; the cumulative effect is of total epistemic closure. Post-Communist Romania is notable for its culture of political corruption, as evidenced in Alexander Nanau’s documentary “Collective,” but ‘Bad Luck Banging’ will ring true to residents of other neoliberal cesspools.
This is a COVID-era story of backseat drivers leveraging a viral crisis (an illness or a video) to take issue not just with one aspect of its handling, but with the very notion of expertise itself; we see an Overton window muscled towards the reactionary by opportunists hostile to act of critical thinking. Radu Jude’s genius is to dramatize not just the dynamics of this process, but the sheer shrill panic of it. Where the pre-pandemic “Barbarians” was infuriating, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” is hyperbolic, surreal, and, yes, obscene. Its over-the-top ending meets the moment at its own fever pitch—it’s a true masks-off moment, in more than one sense. [A-]
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