Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
CRAZY, fun, wildly daring Romanian film by Radu Jude.
Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn (2021). Grade: B
So, we see a woman (Katia Pascariu) going about her daily chores on foot. She buys flowers for a friend/colleague who’s had a death in the family, delivers the flowers, talks about some problems at work (they’re both schoolteachers). She goes to a coffee shop and a pharmacy. Then there’s a meeting with concerned parents. Then the movie ends.
That’s it!
Oh, except the 25-minute interlude of random thoughts about everything in the world that ticks off the filmmakers.
Oh, and the opening scene of explicit sex. Which is NOT R-rated. It’s a hard X. There’s two people actually going at it.
The writer/director, Radu Jude, is a mad prolific Romanian filmmaker. Mad in the sense of “extremely,” and also mad in the sense of half-loony. Why not? It’s something he says right in the title here. This movie’s a little crazy, and very much in a good way. It’s usually either making you mad or making you laugh, and that’s not a bad combination at all.
Take that middle section, that 25 minutes of random thoughts. They’re actually not random, although they seem so at first. They’re all about the vast hypocrises in Romanian society — sometimes in all of global society. It’s a series of 50 or so (I didn’t count) short film clips, presented in alphabetical order. About how the Romanian Orthodox church embraced fascism in WWII and far-right movements today; about how the military did the same; about how capitalism embraces absolutely everything for profit. Jude shows us artwork depicting the French Revolution, and a box of French doughnuts called “Revolution” today — then he does so with the Romanian revolution and a fancy wine label.
Some of these film clips have aphorisms attached, like “Children: Political prisoners of their parents.” (While we see children singing a military fight song.) Or, devastatingly, historic photos of European “explorers” groping naked Native women, with text reading “Aboriginies: People of little worth who burden the soil of newly-discovered countries. They soon cease to burden; they fertilize.”
There’s references to former Romanian dictator Ceaușescu; there’s a clip where a British sweatshop manager yells at assembled Romanian workers “you f***ing peasants!” And, maybe my favorite, a comparison of “cinema” to the myth of Medusa. If you recall that myth, it’s about a goddess so fearsome-looking that anyone who sees her is turned to stone. She’s killed by the hero Perseus who avoids looking at her directly, he uses a mirror instead. Jude says that we refuse to see the horrors all around us; we can only look at them through the mirror of cinema.
That’s a very presumptuous position, in a way! (People in refugee camps don’t need to watch movies about refugee camps to see horror.) Although I think Jude would be perfectly willing to include himself in his criticism of our collective willingness to look away. I think he’s blaming us all. And that’s not completely wrong.
It’s very much the kind of thing Godard did in some of his films. And I usually enjoyed it there, too. And it’s very relevant in the middle of a pandemic, which is when this was shot! There’s one clip that starts on an impromptu tent set up by a funeral services provider… then the camera pans over to show us a hospital. The tent’s right outside the hopsital. Remember those days?
The first segment, where we see schoolteacher Pascariu going about her daily affairs, is partially about all the frustrations built up in the pandemic. (At the pharmacy, we hear one woman saying that incense cures diseases, and nobody’s ever gotten COVID from taking the Eucharist — yep, they have those people in Romania, too.) It’s also about all the frustrations of modern society in general, and Romanian society in particular.
As Pascariu is walking around, Jude (and cinematographer Marius Panduru) have the camera follow her, then pan aside or upward to show something else they find interesting. Which is often about the crass vulgarity and omnipresent commericialism of modern capitalism, combined with how many people are just struggling to get by. When Pascariu confronts a motorist whose car is blocking the sidewalk, he yells obscene insults at her for being a poor loser who can’t afford a car.
These scenes can drag a little, but not too much and never for too long. If you don’t care for one long take, you might be interested by the next one. And they’re making a point. When you’re showing the gap between what capitalism promises and what it delivers, you’re showing something more obscene than pornography. When you show the debasing sexualization of advertisements, or giant billboards promoting oiled-muscle goons doing ultimate fighting, you’re showing something more obscene than pronography.
Ah, yes, the pornography. You can skip it if you like, it’s not vitally important to the plot. Although it does get shown on a handheld tablet screen during the parents’ meeting at the end. And, there’s some explicit clips shown in the middle sequence. Basically, if you’re bothered by extremely frank nudity/sex acts and language, you’d better avoid this movie.
If you aren’t bothered by such things, but you don’t want to watch porn, feel free to skip to the 3:20 mark, that’s when the credits begin. And, again, you’ll see enough of the video for plot purposes later. All you need to know is, yep, they’re f***ing, and no, there’s nothing nasty or demeaning in it. Just two happy people going at it.
Katia Pascariu had a small role in Beyond the Hills, an interesting/conflicted 2012 movie about trouble facing a rural Romanian convent/monastery. This is a much bigger part, and she’s terrific in it. (Not to mention extremely daring, given that first scene.) She’s got to show feelings of extreme humiliation as parents watch her video; she’s also got to show feelings of extreme rage when they attack her personal life or her record as a teacher. And Pascariu manages both. AND manages both with a surgical mask on! That’s not easy to do.
While many of the people we see in the movie are non-actors, just passersby like you’d see in a documentary, most of the people in that parent meeting are actors. And this is probably because they need to emote with their masks on. Part of me wishes Jude had used nonprofessionals instead, but it’s not a big deal.
That whole sequence is pretty darn funny. It veers wildly off agenda, as so many meetings of people with passionate opinions tend to veer. And what the characters say will suprise you. After that middle sequence, where Jude was so angry about the military/church cozying up to fascism, you’d think a priest and a military officer would be shown as intolerant jerks. But they aren’t, not entirely. The priest even has an “I Can’t Breathe” mask on, presumbably in solidarity with the anti-police brutality protests. Oh, until the subject comes up of Pascariu teaching students about the Holocaust (and Romania’s horrible role in it). THEN they get furious with her. Still, the officer votes at the end to let Pascariu keep teaching. When accused of surrendering his principles, he says “the Romanian army never surrenders! It redeploys to strategic positions.”
This is very strongly a feminist film. Jude’s point isn’t just that we tolerate/ignore real-life things far more disgusting than pronography. It’s also how we regard the sexuality of women as a threat, as something that degrades them. As Pascariu points out, what she’s doing in the video, she’s doing with her husband, and they even got married in a church! Not that it should matter, as long as it’s consenting adults. And she didn’t choose to put the video on the internet, anyways. Yet some of the parents just think the idea of a woman enjoying sex with her husband makes her a debased degenerate. Good thing those people only exist in Romania!
Ultimately I think Bad Luck Banging is an interesting travelogue, a smart political statement, and a hoot of a social satire. Is it for everyone? Oh heck no! But here’s a screenshot for you of a cranky mascot:
If you find that funny, you might like this one. And I’m looking forward to seeing more movies by Radu Jude.
Wildly, almost right after we saw this, there was a real-life instance of the same controversy! In nice ol’ rural Wisconsin!
In December of 2023 the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, was fired from his position after almost 17 years at the job. He had planned to retire the following year.
What was he fired for? For making the Porn, that’s what! (And also because the U of W is fighting for its budgetary life.)
He and his wife (in their 50s and 60s) had been posting some videos online for a while. Called Sexy Healthy Cooking. The videos would have them interviewing a professional adult film performer, while cooking a vegan meal. Then they’d all have sex.
Nobody was watching the videos on sites where you have to pay to watch videos, so they put them on a free pornsite, and MILLIONS of people watched. (Including the author of this Slate article interviewing the former chancellor! For research, ya know. That’s dedication to an article! I dunno if I could interview somebody after watching their cooking-show-with-sex-in-it. Even if it is “pretty vanilla.”)
Unfortunately, the guy wasn’t just fired, they took away his tenure, which seems like maybe a bit much to me. Hopefully he still got his pension. In any case, he wasn’t using university money to make the videos, or showing the videos in class. Being a weirdo should just be YOUR business, right?
At least the Slate article has a little bit of a happy ending. (Not THAT kind, you sillies!) The guy’s mom was in her 80’s, and understandably a bit upset by all the publicity involving her son. But then she heard from one of HER friends that the friend liked the recipes. You know, the cooking-show-with-sex recipes. So, hey, if you need some cooking ideas…