by Jason Adams
Emi (Katia Pascariu) is having what you might call a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. A respected and talented history teacher at an elite Romanian private school, she's just been notified that an amateur porn video she made with her husband has been seen by her entire classroom of students, their parents, her co-workers and principal -- basically everybody, sitting as it does spread-eagled there on the world wide web for all to take a good long look at. After making some phone calls and visits to involved parties she's forced to sit down in front of an angry mob of parents and teachers and defend herself in order to keep her job. And this is what you would call the "plot" of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian provocateur Radu Jude's latest film which won the Golden Bear in Berlin earlier this year and is screening at NYFF this week...
The experience of sitting and watching Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, on the other hand, stretches that simple synopsis to extremis... You can actually get a better idea of what you're in for if I share the subtitle for the film (yes the title gets longer), which is "A sketch for a popular film." Split into three chapters (following a pre-credits view of Emi's graphic amateur porn, that is) each chapter is manically determined unto its individual scope -- the film is a playfully bonkers cinematic disintegration of sorts, where what in retrospect sounds straightforward in action plays anything but. Each container is chaos, bleeding only due to our mental efforts into the next, and the one before. Which is to say it sort of makes sense by the end... until it really really doesn't. And then loops back again!
The first chapter follows Emi as she walks, and walks, and walks, and walks, around Bucharest. Shot during the pandemic it's hard not to clock the mask etiquettes of a foreign city the same way I do walking around here in New York -- the folks with masks on their chins, the ones without. And the bursts of seething rage that boil up in small city-life interactions which compound, one after the other, making a trip from one place to the other an obstacle course of mounting tension, of course. The film plays with this tension expertly -- a scene inside a grocery store feels like something we've all seen happen twenty times over the past year and a half -- using it alongside Emi's own more personal frustrations over how all of her efforts through this day lead her no place fast. She walks, and walks, and walks, and walks, yet gets nowhere, with only swollen feet and a pounding headache to show for it.
The second chapter of the film is the strangest and most difficult, giving us a randomized encyclopedia of phrases and terminology that it proceeds to define visually, one after the other. We learn that the "Romanian Revolution" is actually a cheap bottle of wine for instance, or that a "blowjob" is, well, that one is exactly what you think it is. Some of the moments in this montage feel like tossed off incongruous gags while some feel more squarely aimed at the "story" we've managed to piece together from the first part of the film. But as the sequence goes on, and on, and on, our brains of course begin to make further associations -- the entire point of montage. Jude basically dumps all of his themes onto the floor like a great big overturned box of toys and coerces our brains into coming up with connections as the ideas ping-pong off of one another, finding some kind of meaning out of madness.
The final third of the film returns to Emi and finds her at her school facing down the furious crowd of parents who've been forced to now explain anal sex to their adolescents. They want her fired, but Emi stands her ground, dissembling each person's sanctimony in turn -- it must be said here that Pascariu gives a firebrand performance, especially in this last act, where the tensions of the day (the same ones the film has aggressed us viewers towards by its needling self-presentation) explode in lengthy condemnations of sexism, homophobia, and moralizing hypocrisy. You can see why Emi is the great teacher she's been praised as, sex-tape aside, and all pretense of pious Romanian culture seems to crumble under her articulations and accusations. And maybe a few good punches for good measure.
Like its title Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn asks a lot of its viewers, starting with that opening sequence where its most amateur of amateur porn in all its braying gaudiness is thrown straight into our faces -- the film truly revels in its share of ugliness and annoyance. And yet it's ultimately more human for it? Us at our worst, least Hollywood selves, cussing out strangers on a sidewalk, welts on our knees. I don't know if I'd choose to sit through Bad Luck Banging a second time but it's a hell of a film to think about after anyway. Once you've spilled out its backend you can see the whole beast for what it was, what it is, take stock of the winding journey through entrails you've just experienced, and then wipe yourself down and get to work!
Bad Luck Banging or Loon Porn screens at NYFF on September 25th and 26th.