Romania’s entry into next year’s Oscars, Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn comes on strong from the get-go. Radu Jude’s provocative, subversive drama-meets-film essay starts with three minutes of hardcore gonzo shagging that feels like it’d be more at home on Pornhub than Curzon. It’s the nub of a simple premise — a respected teacher’s career is threatened by a sex tape leaking online — that could be played out like an ITV drama starring Joanne Froggatt. Jude’s approach is the polar opposite, a freeform work mixing fiction, documentary and avant-gardism that doesn’t completely hang together but has powerful moments and a thrilling sense of ambition.
After the porno prelude, Jude divides his flick into three distinct sections that never really coalesce into a coherent whole. The first follows teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu, on striking form) walking round the sweltering streets of Covid-era Bucharest, passing closed shops, empty buildings and faded posters for entertainments that never happened. As Emi wanders around, dealing with the aftermath of the leaked video on her phone, the camera often drifts away from her, capturing confrontations between people shouting obscenities, a city in meltdown. If it’s part of Jude’s desire to make Bad Luck Banging… an up-to-the-minute state-of-Romania address, the approach thwarts any engagement in Emi’s plight.
While it’s hard to join the dots between the second section and Emi’s narrative, it’s an engaging, arresting, entertaining diversion.
That’s partly because Jude has other things on his mind. The second section goes even further away from its protagonist’s predicament. Introduced by a chapter heading, the film becomes a “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs, and wonders”, an alphabetical list of modern-day terms (it suggests “blowjob” is the most looked-up word in the online dictionary) and ideas, surfing anti-Semitism to communist corruption to child abuse to sexism. Jude also draws power from contemporary video footage of a bus driver attacking a Roma woman and a bullying boss berating his foreign employees. While it’s hard to join the dots with Emi’s narrative — is it an index of factors that have contributed to her predicament? — it’s an engaging, arresting, entertaining diversion.
The film’s closing chapter circles back to Emi’s story as she is thrown into an open-air kangaroo court of parents baying for her head — well, her resignation — over her seen-by-everyone erotica, shown again here to the crowd via iPads. At this point, Bad Luck Banging… becomes a satire of responses to obscenity, delivering a full-on set-piece that gets even more intense when Jude delivers three alternative endings that end on a moment of John Waters depravity. Fingers crossed the Academy loves the death-by-oversized dildos finale.