Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Unaware that “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” starts with a few minutes of hardcore porn, I mistakenly began it on a big television in a house with teenagers. This is ill advised as it could lead to something like what happened in my house, where I scrambled for the remote control to turn down the volume and then shut off the picture entirely. “It’s art!” I yelled to the rest of the house, which thank God was populated by different floors. “Art!”

As it turns out, this is the sort of scene that could have appeared in this wry feature from Romanian director Radu Jude, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The main character is Emi Cilibiu (Katia Pascariu), a high school teacher whose porno video made with her husband at home escapes onto the Internet (as such videos tend to do).

The exact circumstances are hazy I think the husband uploaded it to a private server and some unknown third party downloaded it and put it up where everybody can see but they don’t matter for narrative purposes because while the movie concerns whether Emi will lose her teaching job over the video (the whole film takes place in advance of her inquisition) it’s all just means to an end: showing contradictions and hypocrisies of Romanian society.

Jude goes about that task in a spirit akin to filmmakers like Robert Altman or Richard Linklater, who often made so called “network narratives” (a term coined by great film scholar David Bordwell) that avoided conventional storytelling techniques and took more of a hanging out approach, following one character or characters from one place to another and seeing what happens during either journey or destination before picking up those characters or others and following them somewhere else.

Altman was especially good at coming up with storytelling devices that would carry you through to whatever point of interest came next; Nashville had its roving sound truck and Short Cuts had its fleet of helicopters spraying Los Angeles for medflies. Here, we have Emi herself. Much of the film consists of shots of our heroine dressed in her chosen outfit for tomorrow’s hearing as she walks around Bucharest going grocery shopping then visiting sympathetic but concerned family members until eventually arriving at a social distancing compliant COVID-19 pandemic filmed real location hearing room.

Along the way there are encounters that subtly demonstrate arrogance entitlement and misogyny among men within this society a sidewalk illegal parked car driver confrontation here; an older man attempting rose gifting small talk there.

Whether he recognized her from his video watching or if that’s just what clueless older dudes sometimes do isn’t clear either but again none these ambiguities matter so much as overall vibe somehow inexplicably feels like life

The people around us watch porn, and sometimes in real time. And the porn comes from currents within the culture that the filmmaker er, exposes by watching his main character perform her commonplace daily routines.

Most of the people Emi interacts with are unaware of how the video impacted her reputation and career standing. It’s probable that those who do know about it don’t think of her as a person with an identity and agency (which were disregarded in this instance) but rather as a body placed on screen for their voyeuristic pleasure. (Would the film have been as effective without showing us the video? I cannot decide.)

Purposefully aimless is how I would describe this movie; it feels scattered and meandering but not debilitatingly so: purposefully aimless. At times, we’ll follow Emi with the camera and then move away from her to capture another bit of business involving other people like when a woman looks right into the lens and invites us to eat her out (was this scripted or just something that happened while filming in public?) or when a pedestrian is seen berating at a motorist who almost ran him over at a crosswalk and demands he go ahead finish what he started.

There are also many moments where we move above ground level entirely as our camera prowls up along face of some storefront or apartment building showing us its architecture instead. This could comment on big city life’s anonymity or simply be that whoever is operating wanted to show off more buildings for their own amusement.

This is an unusual style film which might turn off viewers unfamiliar with such conventions or overly concerned about whether every moment onscreen reinforces whatever points they believe it’s trying to make rhetorically speaking. More likely than not though this seems like discovery rather than statement type filmmaking where one follows different people only briefly before abandoning them again elsewhere seeking insight into things by looking through them instead of just at them.

Watch Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn For Free On Gomovies.