One could say, this film opens with a bang. A couple records themselves having sex, quite explicitly. The husband naively thinks that uploading the tape to a private fetish website will, in fact, keep it safe and secret. His cluelessness when it comes to the internet in 2021 causes severe problems for his wife, Emi Cilibiu played by Katia Pascariu, who teaches history at an elite Bucharest high school. Faster than she can get dressed, the homemade porn movie is seen by everyone: colleagues, the principal, students, as well as her own parents. At least the mandatory mask-wearing during pandemic times is a blessing for her as she can at least go to the supermarket without being recognized. But her problems have just started.
The film is divided into three parts. In the first called “One Way Street,” Emi wanders endlessly through the city and prepares herself for a meeting where her superiors will decide her professional future. Or if she will even have one. The second part is “A Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders,” which is a sort of alphabetic slideshow; and the third is “Praxis and Innuendos” where the sex scene from the beginning is intellectualized. This one, in particular, has a sitcom feel to it. The director, Radu Jude (who is known for his previous works Aferim! and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians) shot every character who has a punchline in a tight close-up.
It is Emi, however, that is the center of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, with the Romanian capital serving as its own character, a city caught between its communist past and its somewhat capitalist future. The noise is at times intrusive – the loud streets with drivers yelling at each other, the annoying elevator music in supermarkets, the sounds of buses and trams. And yet, in the middle of the urban mayhem, the director points the camera at a tiny flower growing in the cracks of the pavement. As if he wants to remind the viewer that there is hope yet – for our protagonist, for a political system, and a conservative school curriculum that is outdated as it is discriminatory. Because it turns out, the porn video is just an excuse for the parents and the high school administrators to put Emi on trial for teaching Romania’s real history to their children instead of the white-washed, government-sanctioned version of it. And this is where the film becomes more than a snapshot of a formerly Eastern block-country: the subject matter is the same as in certain US southern states where parents and lawmakers scream over Critical Race Theory being taught instead of the fairytale of a heroic Christopher Columbus.
Jude, who is also the screenwriter, throws in more timely topics, from COVID-deniers to conspiracy theorists, Nazi apologists to the brainwashing of the mainstream media. He calls his work “a sketch for a popular film,” and chooses a non-linear approach by his division into three parts, with one being in a documentary style.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival this year.