As his old compatriots dabble in as far flung places as comic noirs (The Whistlers) and über-dense period symposiums (Malmkrog), it’s interesting that Radu Jude has lately emerged as the most contemporary minded of Romania’s great generation of filmmakers. Even when dabbling in the past (Aferim!, Uppercase Print) his films are intrinsically linked to the here and now. In attempting to address the current moment, his latest, titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, is amongst the first of what can only be a limited amount of significant films to be made both in and of the pandemic.
It premiered at the online Berlin Film Festival and it’s pleasing to think of couch-bound film critics across the globe scrambling for their television remotes as Jude’s film opens on an amateur hardcore porn video. (That the director has the sucking, whipping, doggie, etc. play out to the sweet strings of Lily Marlene—that most loaded of German lullabies––must have caused no shortage of consternation amongst my long-suffering Berlin neighbors.) Alas, had it been in a cinema it would have brought the house down.
The smartphone video acts as Loony Porn‘s tonal and narrative starting point: funny and provocative, and the reason why Emi (our downcast heroine, an excellent Katia Pascariu) must traipse across a sunny Bucharest to the school where she works. (The video has leaked and gone viral so a group of parents and fellow teachers must gather to decide her professional fate.) Jude’s unconventional structure (similar in some ways to his experimentations in I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians) splits the film into three parts: Emi’s little odyssey across the capitol as part one; a sprawling video essay (of, tellingly, more serious obscenities than DIY porn) as part two; and lastly her hearing, a debate in the courtyard of the school that gets a little deep into word-sludge but ends with a satisfying bang.
It is an incendiary, playful, and wonderfully exasperated piece of filmmaking that shows a director trying to draw some threads of sense from our current malaise. Aside from the occasional cat call, Emi’s trek is relatively uneventful (grocery shop, pharmacy for Xanax, etc). The street scenes––filmed in the director’s favored medium shot––instead allow Jude the opportunity to look away from the story and to linger on everyday absurdities as well as artifacts of the city’s pre-Covid days: a poster for a Romanian MMA contest; pseudo-spiritual murals; dead restaurants and coffee shops; the sight of masks under protruding noses, and so on. Jude carries it all off with a wry smile.
There is much more meat to be had in part two. Jude has said that the film came about from arguments he was having amongst friends about actual teachers losing their jobs for similarly banal indiscretions. Titled “A Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders,” the second section of Loony Porn is a series of more significant provocations and uncomfortable truths. Why bother being sanctimonious, he seems to say, if all this stuff is still very much around you? The clips come quick and fast, in a confounding wave, with blunt titles like “Church,” “Military,” “Blonde jokes,” “Penis,” and “Cunt.” Some are simple images and videos (for instance, a tour guide explaining the slave labor behind Ceaușescu’s palace to disinterested tourists), others are accompanied by quotes or the director’s own thoughts (“mathematics is what there would be, if there was anything at all”). What emerges is a confusing, occasionally farcical, yet powerfully moving stream of consciousness on modern Romania, toxic masculinity, and our wider global malaise.
No clear solutions or conclusions are proffered (Jude ends his film with two possible outcomes), but there’s an energizing anger and disillusionment to it all—akin in some sidelong distant way to the worrying documentaries of Adam Curtis (though far funnier). The relatively more sober events of the film’s latter third suck much of the momentum (if not the ending itself): attendees of Emi’s kangaroo court sit socially-distanced quoting poetry and academic papers off their iPhones while they debate her future. (This does, however, give Jude the opportunity to play his porno again in full.) Having shot Loony Porn in late summer last year––directly in the eye of the Covid storm, as the second wave approached––it offers a time capsule of city life in 2020 and, in that remarkable middle third, of the anxiety-ridden mood. It should be cherished.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.