Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) Movie Drinking Game
Do a Shot: every time Emi calls to check the status of the uploaded porn video
Take a Drink: every time the camera alights on something absurd yet real
Take a Drink: for every misogynistic advance or judgment
Do a Shot: whenever anyone spouts a conspiracy theory
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
Radu Jude has gotten the reputation as an international provocateur, and certainly Bad Luck Banging and Loony Porn will do nothing to dispel that.
In it Katia Pascariu plays Emi, a teacher at a prestigious private school whose sex tape with her boyfriend leaks online, inflaming parents when inevitably it is discovered by her students. She has to face a tribunal of those parents with different perspectives to decide whether she will keep her job.
A Toast
Jude clearly has an interesting enough story to tell without resorting to structural ingenuity, but it’s clear that he’s not interested in making the movie you think he’ll make. To wit, the movie starts with the porn video in question, fully, unabashedly explicit, shot exactly as pretty much any amateur pornography out there that definitely neither you nor I have ever laid eyes on (nor anyone we know, to be clear).
From there, the film segues to a literal walk around Bucharest as Emi attends to her daily errands while trying to deal with the growing firestorm around her on her phone. Jude has a droll comic eye for absurdities both staged and clearly not around the streets of Romania’s capital city, with the necessity of COVID clearly mothering some invention here.
The second section “is a playful essay on obscenities” per the press release, and while obscenity certainly figures in, here’s the section that prompted one reviewer to call Jude “the world’s least patriotic filmmaker”. It’s fixated on the shallow-buried hypocrisies and historical atrocities of his nation, both in its not-so-distant Nazi & Soviet-influenced past and the still COVID-wracked present. At one point Jude’s subtitled philosophical ruminations positions cinema as Athena’s polished shield and our historical past as the monstrous Gorgon, a mission statement if I’ve ever seen one.
The third and final section is poor Emi facing off against a host of student parents grilling her on the video and advocating for her removal. This spins into more philosophizing, discussions of educational theories, unmasking of various backwards opinions and worldviews, and even some flawed forward-thinking ones. It’s a comic dramatization of many of the concepts introduced in the second section, and a viciously observant and insightful one that casts a light not only on modern Romanian society, but your own as well, no matter where you hail from (the underpinnings of the issues on display here are certainly not unique to Romania, after all).
To conclude, he provides us with not a single, but rather three separate endings, because of course he did. Call me Team Ending #3, which ends things on the perfectly profane, gonzo note.
Beer Two
Particularly the first part of the film can feel rather drawn out, and one wonders how much footage of Emi strolling the streets was actually shot and cobbled together into this section. The festival version runs 106 minutes, whereas the American release at least (if not full international release) somehow found 20 minutes to lose in arriving at 86 minutes, I’m guessing principally from this section. I don’t think that degree of cutting was necessary at all, but likely some middle ground would be just about right.
Honk
Verdict
I need to be doing some archaeology on Radu Jude’s filmography, because Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn shows he’s a singular satirist operating in an eye-catching register.
