NYFF Review: Radu Jude’s subversive ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ is a sex tape satire with an explosive climax [Grade: A-]

Watching the beginning of Radu Jude’s new film, you have to remind yourself that it’s not really porn. There is actual sex on screen, but it’s for shock value, and watching Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn in a theater full of other people will trigger laughter, gasps, and nervous tittering from everyone you’re packed in with elbow-to-elbow. By the time you’re wondering whether sex for shock value in a feature film with plenty of non-sex scenes is still, in fact, pornography, Bad Luck Banging moves on—whizzing through Bucharest in a haze of Jesus, architecture, and non-sexual nudity.

Fresh off its Golden Bear win at Berlinale, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn follows schoolteacher Emilia (Katia Pascariu), who finds that the elaborate sex tape she made with her husband—featuring masks, wigs, a whip, and an interruption from a relative mid-act—has made its way to the phones and computers of her community. The tape was meant to stay on a private, adults-only site just for Emilia and her husband, and Emilia thus sees its contents as wholly separate from her professional life and any effects it may have on her students. The first segment of Bad Luck Banging follows Emilia through Bucharest as she decides what to do about the tape and her upcoming parental disciplinary hearing, with frequent close-ups of Bucharest’s architecture and cityscape. It’s a bit on the nose: There’s nudity in classic statues atop buildings; there’s oily half-naked bodybuilders on a gym advertisement and a model eating an ice cream bar with the copy “I like it deep” on another; there is nudity and sexuality everywhere, in all things and at all times, and Emilia’s personal life is not so different from any other element of Bucharest. This framing is somewhat obnoxious at first—you get the point rather quickly—but becomes only the background of the film’s vast canvas of hypocrisy in Romanian society.

“It’s never anyone’s fault. We’re all innocent,” a woman at the grocery store snaps at another customer trying to sort through her welfare forms and figure out what she can buy as Emilia waits in line. Rather than helping each other, or even just refraining from voicing every mean thought in our heads, the characters of Bad Luck Banging can’t help but shove each other down. In this aspect, the film echoes Întregalde, another Romanian entry at the New York Film Festival that focuses on the moral choices we make when we tell ourselves we’re good people. Bad Luck Banging takes this idea a step further with an extended “dictionary” sequence mid-film, exploring artistic and sociopolitical movements of Romania before devolving into comedy and more pornography. The sequence manages to make fun of the arthouse film itself while still shedding light on the issues of sexual repression and liberation at play in the story; though the second section is perhaps too long, it doesn’t feel overly pretentious. Jude is instead mocking his own pretentiousness, his own tendency to point out the obvious, with his commentary on social hypocrisy.

At her parental show trial and public humiliation, Emilia alternates between defending her right to a private life and flinching in the face of harassment. The film’s third section packs in punches as quickly as the characters can name them: Emilia is accused of being a Jewish propagandist of the Holocaust, a sex worker, discriminatory against the church and mainstream Romanian society, and, somewhere in there, a decent teacher. One mother insists on playing back Emilia’s sex tape for all to see, and the framing of an older man staring down the laptop as Emilia sits rigid in her chair is striking; the moment feels like sexual assault conveyed with the aesthetics of something that began as consensual. “Out of the libraries emerge the butchers,” warns one of the dictionary entries in the second part of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. The butchers, it seems, have congregated at Emilia’s school, ready to peel the skin from her bones.

Armed with multiple alternate endings, the film reaches a crescendo of lunacy that justifies its previous self-indulgent forays in too-obvious storytelling. Jude’s subversion of crude humor ends in a final shot that mocks the stiffness of the Romanian church, echoes earlier conversations on consent and violation, and is also just hilarious. Speaking after the film’s first NYFF screening, Jude claimed that digital memory—film itself, whether Emilia’s sex tape or the screen we were gathered to watch—is passive, while living memory is active. But digital memory can at least spur us to activity, and there is no more active ending than the final one in Bad Luck Banging. It does not matter whose fault the tape was, or whether Emilia can even find out how it went viral. Even with her life in the hands of bitter parents, the one thing you cannot accuse Emilia of is passivity.

Grade: A-

This review is from the New York Film Festival. Magnolia Pictures will release Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn only in theaters on November 19.