“Radu Jude's tale of a sex tape gone wrong jams two very different movies together for a bold, hilarious take on society's awful state.” — Eric Kohn, Indiewire
It’s a daring and hilarious cinematic gamble that gives a justifiable middle finger to the sheer inanity of the Western world – and it’s also an unpredictable blast, and an angry editorial cartoon that invites us into its outrage.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2021
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn 2021
Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc
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A cheerfully explicit (and mildly kinky) homemade sex-tape is the peep-show opener from where this story unravels. When said sex-tape quickly ends up on the internet, schoolteacher Emi is vilified – as much for having enthusiastic sex with her husband as for ending up on the net.
Spinning into a joyously experimental realm of archive footage, Romanian auteur Radu Jude contemplates fragments of the 20th century and dives down etymological rabbit holes that ponder the power of the word. He returns to us in a tremendous third act, documenting Emi’s plight: her community have placed her on trial, with archetypes from mid-century master Bertolt Brecht creeping in from the wings, their protest placards left just off-camera but voices loud and strident. Under cross examination, Emi provides a voice of reason in the rising cacophony of hypocrisy amid salacious demands for replaying of the ‘evidence’; an extreme instance of institutionalised slut shaming. Ionesco’s Bald Prima Donna would find a kindred spirit in the beleaguered Emi, while we might find too many echoes of modern life lurking just below the surface of the strange. It’s no coincidence this blistering absurdist provocation was shot in Covid-outbreak Bucharest: the city where Ionesco, the father of the avant-garde Theatre of the Absurd, came to manhood.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear for Best Film in February, perhaps in part because it captures the chaos of our global zeitgeist. What happens when a broken society unsteadily clawing its way back from the ravages of authoritarian dictatorship is then struck down by a global pandemic? Watch and find out. — Marten Rabarts