Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021) (Patreon)

With his 2018 film, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians," Radu Jude introduced a style of self-reflexivity and Godardian disruption that I quite liked in theory. Not many people are making films like that anymore, since so much international art cinema has instead gravitated to the slow cinema / master-shot approach, one that favors large slabs of presumably revelatory realism. In execution, however, "I Do Not Care..." struck me as disorganized and confused, as though Jude were trying to cram too many ideas into one frame without giving them the requisite breathing room. His film from last year, Uppercase Print, was a substantial improvement, since Jude focused on one particular historical incident and streamlined his formal interventions, applying a stagebound artifice and a flat, declarative form of acting and mise-en-scène.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is not quite as successful as Uppercase Print, but it is certainly more ambitious, and for the most part its ambition pays off handsomely. Using a leaked sex tape as its prime narrative mover, the film moves out in multiple directions but remains anchored to a set of basic, almost inarguable propositions. We are in a prudish cultural moment, in which sex panic and puritanism are used as bludgeons against the weak and marginalized, while the powerful are given a free pass to do as they like. Although one senses from Jude's film that such moralizing has a particular historical trajectory in Romania -- Ceaucescu's Communist repression replaced by racial and religious intolerance -- Bad Luck Banging certainly speaks to a moment when a man who gleefully admits to sexual assault can become a U.S. president and a moral hero to evangelical Christians. 

In other words, Bad Luck Banging is a "film for our moment," and Jude knows it. Not only is the film distinguished by the prevalence of COVID-related facemasks (and the self-important rhetoric of those who refuse to wear them). In its essential structure, Jude's latest explores cinema's capacity for playful didacticism, using old techniques in new ways in order to combat the post-Internet glorification of strident ignorance. Emi (Katia Pascariu), the history teacher at the center of the sex scandal, sums it up in her private conversation with her school's headmistress (Claudia Ieremia): "the more ignorant the viewpoint, the more it matters."

Jude comes right out of the gate with all guns blazing, so to speak. Even before Bad Luck's first title card, we are treated to Emi and her husband Eugen (played by Ştefan Steel, a Romanian porn actor) engaged in raw, enthusiastic sex. By all appearances, the "banging" is unsimulated, although one cannot be sure, and besides, who cares? The sexual behavior between Emi and Eugen is notable for its playfulness, and the fact that both partners are thoroughly enjoying themselves. In the film's final third, this will become a primary point of contention, since Emi's frank sexual pleasure invites opprobrium from her students' parents, particularly the women. ("We all did that and more, when we were 20. But she's a teacher.") 

As if to underline Jude's point about moral double-standards, Bad Luck Banging has a bit of difficulty attaining an American distributor, even after its Golden Bear win. While someone will undoubtedly pick it up (hi, Neon!), the film's reception only highlights the prudishness of the cinema world outside Europe, where sex is taboo but violence goes great with popcorn.

Part of the success of Bad Luck Banging can be attributable to Jude picking up a new, more sophisticated set of tools. Formally speaking, the most direct antecedent for the film is the work of Serbian "Black Wave" director Dušan Makavejev, whose Marxist-Freudian surrealism combined comic anarchy with high philosophy yielded such sui generis efforts as W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974). Like Makavejev, Jude adapts various Brechtian strategies for his intellectual bawdiness. This includes blackout comedy, extensive quotation, as well as using the film-world as a laboratory in which common ideological positions collide with one another. That chorus-of-voices approach is most evident in the film's third and final chapter, "Praxis and Innuendos (sitcom)," which takes place at the open-air, socially distanced parents' meeting where Emi must face the wrath of the masses.

But in fact, this final section is probably the least convincing part of Bad Luck Banging, in part because Jude tries to jam-pack as much ignorance and hypocrisy into the scene as he can. Shout-outs to Fox News and COVID-related conspiracies ("wear your mask, sheeple!") edge toward overkill, since the previous two chapters, especially the first one, are remarkably subtle, demanding that the viewer actively forge connections between seemingly disparate cultural forms. Part one, "One-way Street," is influenced by Walter Benjamin and his notion of the dialectical image, a set of seemingly random details from everyday life and the built environment that, when actually attended to, can show us the deeper nature of ideological social formations.

Against a background of capitalist saturation (malls, convenience stores, fast food) and spatial disruptions (road work, blocked alleys, improperly parked cars), we see Emi traverse Bucharest on foot, encountering almost comic levels of pandemic-era aggression. Cats screech, men issue obscene catcalls, and drivers run into pedestrians as if for sport. Section one is like a combination of Masao Adachi's A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) and Ernie Gehr's lyrical structuralism, as seen in films like Still (1971) and Signal: Germany on the Air (1985). There's also just a dash of Jonathan Nossiter (Signs and Wonders, 2000) thrown in.

The second chapter, actually titled "A Short Dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders," is Jude's most deliberate attempt to exit conventional narrative film. Recalling Godard's Le Gai Savoir (1969) and Frampton's Zorns Lemma (1970), this section consists of alphabetically arranged mini-entries of various historically and culturally charged keywords: Holocaust, Christmas, patriotism, cock, cunt, children, etc. Although they are all quite different, these snippets all emphasize Jude's primary point: language (including the circulation of images, in cinema and elsewhere) is unavoidably freighted with dominant power structures. Although Bad Luck Banging is quite different from Porumboiu's Police, Adjective (2009), thematically they are kindred spirits.

And although this didactic segment serves as a proper lead-in for the parents' meeting, where definitions of sexuality, morality, and pornography are explored ad nauseum, it's hard not to be a bit disappointed in where Bad Luck Banging ends up. Most of Jude's film is a highly unique, rather dispassionate inquiry into 21st century stupidity, rendered with humor and experimental flair. The conclusion, by contrast, gives an ironic but exhausting platform to all those idiotic ideas, and in doing so suggests that cinema really can't extricate itself from the braying ignorance of our times. Jude's probably correct, but still, you hate to see it.