Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn?

D- No real genre
Written and Directed by Radu Jude

This film starts with hardcore porn. A very happily-married couple are doing just about everything and enjoying it immensely. And yes, the sex is real.

Unfortunately, in the fiction of the movie, that video was caught on the husband’s smartphone, and somehow, it got onto the Internet. Emi, the woman in that couple (Katia Pascariu) is a teacher, and suddenly she’s in danger of losing her job. (We never see the husband again.) This is a Romanian film with English subtitles.

Then the movie becomes weird, as it splits into three sections. In the first part, we follow Emi as she shops and walks through Bucharest. Occasionally, she takes a phone call, sometimes about this problematic video. Writer/director Radu Jude and cinematographer Marius Panduru keep the camera a long distance from Emi, making it hard to tell how she’s responding. You never really get close to her physically or emotionally. At one point, the camera turns from her to studying rundown and badly kept buildings. All you know is that she’s a teacher with a serious problem.

Speaking of keeping distances, this is the first fiction film I’ve seen that acknowledged COVID-19. Most of the actors and extras are wearing masks. In one shot in a supermarket, a young man in line wears a Superman costume and a mask.

The second part of the movie has little or nothing about Emi, although it also contains hardcore sex – this time via very old, black-and-white porn. In this section, this fiction film becomes a documentary on recent Romanian politics and history. A narrator tells us that Romania fought with the Nazis, then against them. The country became one of the worst of the Soviet Union satellite states, ruled by the horrible dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Between the film’s title, some of the music, and the bright-colored intertitles that separate the sections, the movie suggests that this is supposed to be a comedy. But I rarely laughed.

As the second part was coming to an end, I was pretty sure that I would give Bad Luck Banging a rare grade of F. But when the third part opened, we finally get what should have been the center of the film: the kangaroo court where Emi must fight for the right to be both a teacher and a human being. Here we see the sickness still in society – a sickness probably left over from Ceaușescu. One male teacher insists that only whores give blowjobs. Others rant horriic racist and antisemitic insults.

Filmmaker Radu Jude had something important to say. But you’ll have to wait for two thirds of the movie until it gets to what the film really wants to say.

Bad Luck Banging‘s Bay Area opening will happen at the Roxie and Rafael on January 21.