Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: It's my New Favorite Movie, and You're Going to Hate it

It won the top prize this year at the Berlin International Film Festival, but if you prefer multiplex fare, stay far far away.

Katie Pascariu as Emi Cilibiu in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

I am, unabashedly and (hopefully) without pretension, a huge fan of Romanian New Wave cinema.

Here’s why.

Without the stifling influence of Big Money, without the strong-arming of an organized film industry, Romanian directors like Cristian Mungiu (the surreal yet harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Beyond the Hills, Graduation), Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cigarettes & Coffee), and Radu Jude (The Happiest Girl in the World, Aferim!, Scarred Hearts, and now Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) are forced to do something that hasn’t been done on a broad scale for years in Hollywood, and that’s tell a f****g story.

Amazing what brilliance can occur without a greenscreen, CGI, and the financial incentive to cater to moviegoers in China whose tastes tend toward the crude and exciting.

If you sense any bitterness here, you wouldn’t be wrong. In the United States, we’re taking a hundred years of gorgeous filmmaking and throwing it down the toilet. We don’t make movies anymore. We churn out Marvel Comics’ franchises, embedded product placement, and merchandise tie-ins. With so much money on the line, with so terrifying a gauntlet of producers, investors, and accountants to placate, with so much volatility within the industry itself (are movie theaters even a thing anymore?), we don’t color outside the lines because we can’t afford to.

There’s a world of difference between the preservation of a revered yet lumbering institution like Hollywood, and the scrappy but sad-eyed and sardonic realism of the Romanians. Romanian cinema is on its way up until it, too, becomes a relic like Hollywood, a tradition to be preserved instead of innovated.

For more on this, see 90% of Italy.

That’s why Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is such a punch in the face. Trust me when I tell you that you’ve never seen a movie like it, and there’s a good chance you’ll not only hate Jude for making it, you’ll hate me, too, even though I’m telling you—no, ordering you—not to watch it.

Ten seconds into the first scene, I almost turned it off. Initially, I thought I was streaming the wrong film. The opening is full-on, penetrative, holy-mackerel-is-that-an-erect-penis “loony porn.” Me, as a nice American lady—well, American, anyway—had to put one hand over her blushing eyes and peek through her fingers, it was that raunchy. Because of our wildly antiquated ratings system in the U.S., we just don’t see X-rated set pieces like this followed by a single continuous shot of the same woman, sans pink party wig, running errands. It’s the juxtaposition of these two worlds that gives Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn its startling cinema verité. Who among us hasn’t performed some truly spectacular sexual hijinks and then waited in line at the Whataburger for a diet Coke?

The premise is this: Emi Cilibiu (brilliantly acted by Katia Pascariu) is a history teacher at a well-respected Romanian junior high school. On a lark, she does an amateur porno with her husband, Eugen, who naively (?) uploads the video to a private site, where it quickly goes viral. Her students’ parents soon discover her “immoral conduct” and pressure the staff at Emi’s school to fire her. The movie itself, which is structured into three acts separated by hot-pink title cards, ends with Emi being pilloried at a Covid-aware, socially distanced, outdoor parent-teacher conference where every awful, misogynistic name is thrown at her. Emi’s contention—that what she does in her private life has no effect on her work as a teacher—falls on deaf ears.

It’s startling to see a movie full of people in Covid masks. Equally startling to see the now-familiar incivility of people pushed to the breaking point by the pandemic. The movie may have been filmed in Romania, but it could be anywhere, and that’s the point. The rapacious consumerism and vile amounts of misogyny are the real global disease here.

I’ve never watched anything that gave me a raging case of ADD before or such a virulent disgust for my own species, and it’s not because Jude’s camera work was janky or that he too ardently drove home that point. It’s the deafening noise, the video poker salons, the banality of the sex, the cacophonous contempt for women (Jude carefully leaves dismembered mannequins laying about to illustrate his theme), the relentless commercial signage, the big box stores, and the message itself: women are both feared and hated. Not only by men who want to sleep with them, but by women who see them as a threat to their own security. By combining the horrific with the absurd, Jude slowly, deliberately tears tiny bits of your brain apart like polyfill from a puffer jacket.

Lest you’ve remained in ignorance on the State of Things, this scenario (attractive young teacher supplements her income on OnlyFans or sends a nude selfie to a boyfriend and then gets canned for “immorality”) plays out almost every day in America. We can’t help ourselves. Unfortunately, the same men that light up Twitter in defense of such women are sometimes the very ones that trawl the most depraved, female-degrading porn sites at night, a distinction Jude is set on making with one of the “progressive” daddies in the third act. He may be able to spout high-minded philosophy, but all he wants to do is get inside Emi’s pants.

There is nothing approximating linear storytelling in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. The second act isn’t even part of the movie. It’s a Ambrose Biercean menu of encyclopedia terms that reveals the film’s darkly ironic worldview. Like most New Wave directors, Jude is allergic to editing tools, and the forty-minute third act goes on ten minutes too long. That, too, was a conscious decision made to underscore Emi’s plight.

Like I said, don’t watch it. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn isn’t a movie so much as it is a Rorschach test. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to go spelunking inside their own psyches to find the creepy crawlies. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, or that every woman on the planet hasn’t felt those crawlies creeping all over her at one point or another.

When you’re female, they’re almost impossible to miss.

Are you a fan of Romanian New Wave or any foreign films? Care to share your opinion? I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below.