No one can accuse Romanian film director Radu Jude of false advertising. His 2021 film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, definitely begins with a bang. The bang in question is a sex tape featuring Emi, a schoolteacher in Bucharest. Potential viewers should not delude themselves that Jude has reproduced the sort of soft-lit, tasteful “erotica” of 1990s premium cable: this is unabashedly raunchy porn showing a couple talking as dirty as they are doing. The sex appears unsimulated, featuring that taboo organ banned from erotica: the erect penis. What is missing is the face that is (indirectly) connected to said penis, as the entire video is from the husband's POV. But lest we be tempted to see Emi as the passive victim of the male gaze, Emi herself is quite clear to all who berate her: this was her choice, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
But Emi has a problem nonetheless: somehow, the recording got uploaded to the Internet, and has been viewed (and re-viewed) by her colleagues, neighbors, students, and their parents. To the extent that Bad Luck Banging has a conventional plot, its main intrigue is Emi's future at her school. In a section the filmmaker calls a “sitcom,” Emi is confronted by angry parents demanding that she be fired.
Bad Luck Banging is not a sitcom, however, even if the general contours of the parent/teacher drama are familiar from years of American network television. The difference is not just the graphic sex and salty vocabulary (the latter deployed by just about everyone Emi encounters), but the film's formal structure and historical setting. Bad Luck Banging was shot during what optimists call the height of the COVID-19 epidemic, and so the meeting with the parents is an outdoor, socially distanced affair. Masks are ubiquitous, and, as in real life, their absence says something about the characters’ temperament and worldview.
The masks are a truly uncanny effect of this film. On the one hand, they are painfully familiar to all of us. On the other, seeing them on film is still jarring. It reminds us that we all may as well be in a stage play whose director is taking full advantage of every possible alienation effect. It is also a showcase for Katia Pascariu, who plays Emi. The sex tape focuses on Pascariu's body, but the rest of the film is a star vehicle for Pascariu's eyes and forehead. Somehow, Pascariu is endlessly expressive without ever mugging for the camera.
It is not just the masks and the acting that elevate Bad Luck Banging from the level of the public school problem drama or the stagey simplicity of outraged argument a la Twelve Angry Men (1957). Jude denies his viewers the comforts of conventional cinematic narrative. After the sex tape, the camera follows Emi as she walks through the grubby Bucharest cityscape, lingering more on the buildings than on the star. Nearly half an hour is devoted to a series of documentary-style short illustrations of terms in alphabetical order, whose connection to the plot is tenuous even as the thematic through-line is clear. Jude is not simply telling a story about contemporary prudery, or even about the pandemic; for him, both are connected to currents of fascism, racism, and general misanthropy that he uncovers across Romanian history and culture.
One might expect a drama of sexual expression and censorship to be Freudian, but Bad Luck Banging is more Reichian in its diagnosis of the political ramifications of sexual repression. Indeed, the film that Bad Luck Banging most resembles is Dušan Makavejev's 1971 WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which combined documentary material about Reich's life and work with parodies of socialist realist cinema. The film was banned, and Makavejev indicted (leading to his emigration from then-Yugoslavia). If there is any justice, both Bad Luck Banging (Romania's official entry for the Academy Awards) and its director will have instead what pornography usually guarantees: a happy ending.
