“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” the latest film from Romanian director Radu Jude, has won the coveted Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The win comes six years after Jude received the Silver Bear for the historical drama, “Aferim!” No slouch in terms of controversy over the years, Jude’s film, shot and set during the COVID-19 pandemic, follows what happens after secondary-school teacher Emi has a sex video uploaded online, and the backlash that ensues at work because of it.
Opening with a literal bang, the private sex tape of a masked Emi involved in kinky sex with a younger lover as her she tried to fend off calls from her husband in the other room— Jude stamps his well-known cinematic “bad boy” reputation into this movie instantly. The sex is hardcore and graphic. The repercussions turn out to be far worse than Emi ever imagined as Emi finds her career and reputation under threat because of the leaked tape.
Split into three parts, the film first shows her wandering around Bucharest in anticipation of an evening meeting she will be having with the school parents, dreading what fate holds for her position at the school. This is where Jude builds the dread and tension by not necessarily focusing on the sex tape, but life as we know it during the pandemic. Jude uses documentary-style observational sequences to build up a mood that we are now all-too familiar with, but laces it with scaring comedic wit.
Filmed last summer in Romania, where businesses were mostly opened and mask mandates were a necessity, Jude manages to give us the most comical and incendiary portrait of life under lockdown; the grocery stores, and public transportation and other forms of daily rituals are stages for people to act outrageously both in fear and in defiance of COVID laws. As the city around her is laced with profanely panicky pandemic-era behaviour, obscenities can be found everywhere as we see Emi walk past a slew of closed down business, performing a series of frantic phone calls over the leaked tape with her work, parents and husband.
The second part of Jude’s film is a brilliantly conceived, but static-inducing montage of visuals and quotes which provide an identity to his messaging: the unsaid history and psyche of Romania. Titled “a short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders,” Jude quickly skims through Romanian history wielding together an assortment of racist, antisemitic, and sexist events in his country’s history. He also tackles Communist-era corruption and fascist collaboration, including his country’s complicity in the Holocaust. It’s not just the past that’s indicted, Jude also includes contemporary “viral” video clips showing how the past has a way of repeating itself. Narratively speaking, it all feels like a bizarre interruption in the film, but, as we come to understand, one implying that with Romania’s shameful past and present, these convalescing forces of history and ideology, will soon come calling for Emi’s head at the school meeting.
Jude brings it all home in the third and final chapter, an absurdist farce that represents a masterstroke of COVID-era bewilderment. Forced to meet the angry parents who demand she be fired, Emi refuses to write a resignation letter. Her refusal to surrender to the mob makes her an almost heroic figure. The surreal meeting, where the history teacher faces her class's bigoted and masked parents in a mock trial, set in a socially-distanced outdoor setting, has a torrent of tension that soon turns bad; hypocrisies, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic rhetoric lead the way as Emi is relentlessly and weirdly judged for her actions on the tape. Outraged parents demand a vote to seal her fate, as her reputation is repeatedly attacked with conspiratorial commentary.
Katia Pascariu, in the role of Emi, is verbally abused almost the entire movie. Jude seems to be saying that with the online world, our own private actions, in the comfort and privacy of our own home, can still manage to leak out and destroy our lives thanks to the advent of social media. There’s also nasty bits of Anti-Semitic sentiments thrown throughout the film, with the director not letting go of his country’s horrific treatment of Jews during World War II and the continued hate towards them in today’s Romania.
Jude means to provoke with his incendiary mix of irreverent humour and political commentary, so much so that he sometimes overdoes it. His fervent efforts to piss us all off has its temporal limits and that will no doubt divide viewers of the film. A mix of fact and fiction, explicit sex, low-brow language, and indecent comedy, the film is messy in its passions and ambitions, but there has been nothing quite like it before. You might feel like you need a shower after watching it, but it’s impossible to scratch it off your mind. Art is art, as Jude seems to imply.
SCORE: B