‘Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn’: Berlin Review

Dir. Radu Jude. Romania /Luxembourg/Croatia/Czech Republic. 2021. 106 mins.

The New Wave in Romanian cinema was once identified with sombre zero-frills realism, but that was a while ago – and among the directors most responsible for broadening those parameters is the mercurially versatile Radu Jude. In recent years, he has made historical films (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts), archive documentaries (The Dead Nation) and self-reflexive fictions about Romanian politics and society. In the latter bracket came 2020’s experimental Uppercase Print (one of two Jude films in last year’s Berlinale), now followed by Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. It is subtitled ‘A sketch for a popular film’, although that’s one of the many knowing ironies underlying the piece, since even among adepts of Romanian cinema, Bad Luck Banging is unlikely to be that popular – and while it adopts a brashly cartoonish tone, there’s little here that remotely resembles commercial comedy. Admirers of Jude’s restless audacity will applaud it, at least in principle, but the film is likely to figure as an awkward outlier in his unpredictable career.

The real pornography that has overrun Romania, it seems, is the obscenity of capitalism

This polemical investigation of pornography and social hypocrisy is a fiction-cum-essay in an altogether conceptual mode – by turns teasingly indirect and rather leadenly on the nose. The film is a triptych of differing parts, preceded by an introduction, showing a couple’s very explicit sex video – any arousal factor considerably undermined by the choice of ‘Lili Marleen’ as musical accompaniment and the noise of neighbours in the background. The first chapter proper follows a woman, teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu) as she walks around Bucharest on a busy day in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, occasionally stopping off at shops or making anxious phone calls. A visit to the flat of her head teacher (Claudia Ieremia) reveals the cause of Emi’s panic: the video made by her and her husband has found its way online, to Pornhub, Facebook and personal blogs alike, and is now freely circulating around the school.

The second chapter, not obviously related to the first, is billed as a ‘dictionary’ - a brief anthology of terms, anecdotes and social commonplaces. This section ironically presents and demystifies key terms, each defined by images (still, archival or, presumably, shot specially) and accompanied by text in subtitles. The terms cover a bewildering range, including ‘Military’, ‘Patriotism’, ‘Pornography’ and ‘History’, as well as ‘Blonde Jokes’ and ‘Blowjob’ – the most-looked up word in the online dictionary, we’re told, ‘Empathy’ being the second. There are also some chilly revelations: under ‘Family’, we read that six in 10 Romanian children are subject to domestic violence. The overall slant is national: as in a clip of tourists being shown the ‘marvel’ of Nicolae Ceausescu’s palace.

The mode shifts again for the theatrical third part, identified in a title card as ‘sitcom’. Here, Emi faces the accusations of her school’s parents at a meeting held, because of the pandemic, in a courtyard bizarrely lit in ripely artificial colours. This section echoes the heightened stylisation of Uppercase Print, but is more like a filmed courtroom farce. Its sharpest moment is a bit of visual deadpan as Emi, masked like everyone else, glumly stares ahead as her colleague holds up the supposedly incriminating Exhibit A, an iPad showing a close-up of Emi’s buttocks in action; the assembly cluster round to watch closely, exchanging ripe banter.

While Emi mounts a strong defence of her private life, the hypocrisy around her is blatant – perhaps too blatant for real satirical effect. Emi is accused of exposing the school’s children to impropriety, when really she should be teaching them about national heroes; but then, even revered national poet and banknote star Mihai Eminescu, she points out, wrote erotic verse. Representatives of the Army and the Church are present to accuse her – and just beneath the surface of their moralistic disapproval, virulent anti-semitism soon reveals itself.

The social critique has more than made its point by the time this over-extended sequence reaches its three alternative conclusions – the last of which is beyond broad.

The message is more subtly conveyed in the film’s first chapter, shot in a detached street-realism style. It explores Bucharest in long takes, the camera alternately following Emi and pausing to scan the city’s absurdities – vistas of Disney-style kids’ merchandising, a billboard for a ‘Superkombat Academy’, a monster truck that dwarfs its diminutive owner. The real pornography that has overrun Romania, it seems, is the obscenity of capitalism – an all-pervasive visual, aural and spiritual noise.

Some of the film’s most effective comic touches come in this section, because they are pitched so casually. For example, an elderly passerby suddenly turns to the camera and utters an incongruous obscenity, or perhaps only appears to, as she’s wearing a mask (the use of anti-Covid masks creates a pointed distanciation throughout).

While some of the film operates in a crashingly obvious register, at other points it’s harder to unpick the plethora of literary references – mentions of Edgar Lee Masters’s book Spoon River Anthology, an epigraph from the Mahabharata, allusions to Hannah Arendt and assorted other thinkers. This all makes for a slippery piece, its manifest intellectual seriousness offset by the use of glaring pink title cards and a bouncy French chanson. Jude’s lesson about establishment dishonesty may itself be simpler than the elaborate satirical machinery the film is built on, although in the end the thornier nuances of a contemporary debate about free speech, sexuality and self-expression get swamped by farcical brashness.

Whatever the film’s flaws, this is certainly the most unrepentantly confrontational work we’ve yet seen from Jude - and perhaps from any Romanian director. And, as the beleaguered, improbable figure of scandal at the centre of it all, stage actress Pascariu impresses with a crisply reserved performance; ironically, her only other previous film role, in Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, was as a nun.