Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: Body/Choice, by David Bax
Whatever vestiges of punk rock provocateurism still exist inside me are telling me not to do this but I must admit the responsible thing is to offer a warning right up front that the second half of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn‘s title is not meant figuratively. Radu Jude’s new film opens with a stretch of actual, non-simulated amateur pornography (and don’t worry; we’ll see most of it a second time later). So amateur, in fact, that it’s awkward; you can hear other members of the household shouting through the closed bedroom door. As a brief comedy of erotic errors, it’s both bracing and hilarious, which makes it a fitting introduction to the movie as a whole, even if most of the rest of it includes no fellatio or penetration.
In the first of Bad Luck Banging‘s three sections after that introduction, we follow Emi (Katia Pascariu) as she runs errands and visits relatives. She is clearly perturbed. Soon, we come to understand that Emi is the woman from the sex tape we’ve just seen (different actor, same character). She’s a schoolteacher and the clip has been leaked to the internet. A parent-teacher conference has been called. But, until then, she still has things to do. As we follow her down sidewalks and through marketplaces, the camera occasionally seems to get distracted, turning to gaze up at a building or lingering on cheap, branded merchandise (The Emoji Movie, Paw Patrol, etc.) that Emi has walked past. There’s no leisure on her mind, understandable given the threat to her job that hangs above her head. But it’s also if she’s just trying to spend as little time among the citizenry as possible, hiding behind her mask (yes, this is a COVID-era story) even as they wear theirs under their noses or not at all. The only time she has to stop is when someone has parked improperly, blocking her way and brazenly refusing to move. Jude gives us a portrait of the present, a time and place where civility is not just absent but its very notion mocked.
Then the second section puts our narrative on hold for an extended history lesson of sorts, a tongue-in-cheek documentary told in slides, most of them dealing sardonically and graphically with the violent, racist and otherwise repugnant aspects of Romania’s past and the ways they have been accepted and commodified, like the brand of cigarettes named after a bloody revolution. A lifetime of watching movies from all over the world has taught me that there’s a pitch black sense of gallows humor that often sprouts from living under oppressive dictatorships. In this portion of the film, Bad Luck Banging displays both that as well as the feeling–probably more immediately recognizable to Americans after November of 2016–of feeling like the place outside your front door is not your country.
Bad Luck Banging‘s third and final chapter is the parent-teacher conference, held on the grass outside the school with masked attendees seated on folding chairs six feet apart. It quickly devolves into a kangaroo court, with most of the participants only interested in self-serving moralizations and shame-filled recriminations. It’s a barrage of puritanical ire that only gets worse when Emi tries to point out that these people have no business throwing the first stone. It’s angering and, again, familiar here in the U.S., where resistance to self-examination is a problem both of psychology and policy. And through it all, someone’s phone keeps ringing. Civility and decorum are not respected even by those who have come to cast judgment.
This is a furious film but it’s also a consistently funny one. Why not? Our current situation–the one that’s been going on for almost two years now–is as likely to make us laugh as scream. Bad Luck Banging is not, strictly speaking, about COVID-19. But, in reality, it is very much about it, about the memory of that brief time at the beginning when we were “all in this together” and about the fact that so many people fervently believe the opposite. The pandemic did not unite us. It metastasized our suicidal solipsism.
