BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN is neither for the intellectually timid nor the prudish. Radu Jude’s romp through cultural hypocrisy and the human penchant for being not just cruel, but also idiots, is designed to confront and confound with savage humor and brutal satire.
Lest we have any illusions about the direct approach Jude will be taking during out journey, he starts with a couple making love. It’s not gracefully choreographed. The dialogue is not what can be described as inspired. It is, however, explicit. In short, what it lacks in eroticism it makes up for in the verisimilitude of a married couple behind closed doors trying to spice up their sex lives by filming themselves only to be interrupted by an offscreen voice bringing a childcare issue to their attention. And why does it begin this way? Because the woman is Emi (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher faced with her husband uploading the video to the internet with the predictable personal and professional consequences.
The film is divided into three parts. The first finds Emi wandering the mean streets of Bucharest, paying calls on the people deciding her fate, fielding calls from her husband, and otherwise taking care of the business of la vie quotidienne. Insults fly with wild abandon from motorists with little regard for human life, much less the niceties of driving etiquette, to people decrying the fascism of masking during the pandemic, to a supermarket line hurling abuse on Emi as she faces the consequences of poverty at checkout. The cross-section of humanity is situated squarely in a city that is disconcertingly hostile. It’s not just the once-elegant buildings fallen into ruins, nor the inherently depressing sight of the homogenized mall feeding the materialist imperative of capitalism at its worst. It’s not even the rows and rows of shabby shops she passes on her way to those that she could never dream of patronizing. No, it’s the way Jude places Emi in this space, a small, worried soul bravely carrying on while being swallowed by surroundings that patently don’t acknowledge her. Pascriu is arresting as an ordinary everywoman who has been beaten down by the system for so long that it no longer registers on a conscious level, yet still has enough innate grit to want to make her voice heard.
The second part concerns itself with a brief cultural overview using Romania as a microcosm of humanity. In a series of vignettes defining terms (intimacy involves a man verbally abusing a woman), and sharing facts from Romanian history, we also learn that the most looked-up word in the dictionary is “blow-Job”, illustrated by a woman vigorously demonstrating same, and the second most looked-up word is “empathy”.
It’s all in preparation for the third act, in which Emi faces the parents at a meeting (socially distanced, masked, and outdoors) where she will field questions, listen to their concerns, and be on view as they vote on her professional fate. The conversation becomes a dialectic on the definition of pornography, the purpose of education (which may or may not be inherently violent), and who is responsible when children explore the adults-only areas of the internet. It’s a disparate group, whose most straightlaced member is the one to show the group the video in question, thereby turning the occasion into either a porno theater or a fact-finding committee meeting. There are the usual right-wing religious fanatics, Holocaust apologizers who believe that Hitler was Jewish, and fascists without portfolio arguing the opposition who question whether nudity is inherently or only situationally wrong. Naturally, it’s complicated. Also, by extrapolating arguments into the extremes, the essential absurdity of trying to reconcile a society uncomfortable with sex with the fact that we are all sexual beings. The arguments can be nothing other than reductio ad absurdum.
There is nothing coy about the full-frontal nudity and sexual activity with which Jude confronts us. There is a scathingly clever slyness about it. During the second act, the visual for defining the word “cunt” is a perfectly posed, albeit beautifully depilated, live reproduction of Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”. Why, he is obviously asking, is former obscene while the latter is high art? By placing it in the context of the obscenity of crimes against humanity, also on display during that second act, and to a lesser degree in the other two, he forces us to question our assumptions, while also giving us a giggle.
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN does not break new ground with its targets or its conclusions . Instead, it scales lofty disquisitional heights with an earthy directness that reframes philosophy into a vibrant entity rather than a dusty engagement of abstract hypotheticals. It also has one of the best punch lines in cinema. Prepare to be shocked and delighted.
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