Your discombobulation begins with the gnarled English of that title – Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn? It sounds like the text of a particularly inept Ukrainian phishing scam or something. Maybe it made sense in Romanian? The “or,” suggesting an equivalence between two awkward and not quite parallel old-timey-sex constructions, is just bad. Still, the more you pick at this word salad, and warm to its sense of acerbic skylarking, the closer you get to the crazy scheme of Radu Jude’s new film. It was made to test you.
That’s in more ways than one, starting with the opening salvo of real sex tape sequences, which are “real” insofar as the often-masked couples in them are enthusiastically fucking in iPhone selfie close-ups. Expecting another sardonic and/or dour Romanian New Wave film, you get spunk in your eye. You also hope that Romanian vets like Luminita Gheorghiu don’t show up; some things should not be seen. In any case, something like 20 minutes were cut for a U.S. release, maybe from this first act. Never quite as festival-awarded as several of his countrymen, Jude remains the Wave’s Godard figure, disrupting expectations, opening old historical wounds, and feeling free to forget there’s such a thing as a fourth wall. Bad Luck Banging is his most blatantly Godardian film, coalescing into a tripartite essay on contemporary Romanian society – like, all of it – and sex.
Part 1 is virtually a city symphony a la Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, as it follows Emi (Katia Pascariu) as she purposefully strides through Bucharest in a business suit and a mask (it’s the pandemic era) on a series of errands, and struggling via various phone conversations with the fact that a sex tape she’d made got uploaded onto a porn site. (We saw it at the top, though there’s no reason to think Pascariu was actually one of the masked humpers.) She’s a teacher, so it’s a scandal.
That’s about as much information as we get from her. Jude shoots her from various distances, the city hustling around her, and it’s the camera’s roving, curious gaze that becomes the film’s often hilarious running joke. As in, patient circular pans hold onto Emi’s fraught progress until they wander off, distracted by modern capitalist Romania: signs, shop windows, passing busses, arguments in traffic, phallic buildings, sexually suggestive billboards, dismembered mannequins on the sidewalk, people dressed up as promotions (a tomato, a rabbit), acres of garish consumerism, and so on.
There are dramatic exchanges, all of them hostile; at one point, an old lady in a mask simply spits, “Eat my cunt!” to the camera. The upshot is a kind of mute but amused inquisition, like a stunned visitor from the ancient past, looking around and silently saying, “really?”
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