Film theatres are closed, Netflix viewership is up and pandemic rages on. Radu Jude’s most recently released film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn to be premiered at 71st Berlin Film Festival soon meditates on these elements, life under pandemic with a juicy story of a schoolteacher Emil Katia Pascariu whose private sex tape is leaked online. The film draws the attention right from the start and throws in many hard questions that could make the audience around the world juggle memory and their brains for any answers.
Jude’s narration of the story takes place in three episodes, with the first One Way Street and third Praxis, Innuendos focusing on the private and public life of Emil and the people around her. The second episode is a montage of historical images of Romanian society and a visual essay on its own rights. The combination, as much as it is captivating but meditative at the same time. The formal features are aptly infused to convey the moral dilemma and interwoven themes. In the first episode, the camera is mostly shooting exterior scenes of the city, which scanned the urban fabric slowly but meticulously. In a sense, the camera leaves us with the question that privacy has no meaning in modern life and every detail of our lives can be exposed, captured, and screened. You can learn and absorb so much about the Romanian pandemic lifestyle that, it could be overwhelming and breathtaking. The limousine, currency exchange, erotic billboards, arguments in public spaces, and depreciated urban architectures; life goes on in Emil’s city, slowly and ghostly pastiche-like. The other aspect is how Ema is portrayed in the first episode. The amateur porn scene sets the tone for the rest of the film. She is wild and outwardly in private but walks anxiously from place to place in public after knowing that the tape is out and leaked even in Pornhub. The camera follows her from a distance and this non-judgemental stance is a venue for viewers to see her angst and stress before craving to know more and make a one-sided judgment. The first episode could be seen as being too stretched but it is decent enough to show what one may endure under such a privacy violation.
The second episode Short Dictionary Of Anecdotes, Signs, And Wonders, and footage of historical images from Romanian history can be more of Jude’s personal addition to providing a background to the story and the turbulent nature of events. Jude comments that he sees the present and past in one continuum and what he showed earlier in episode two makes one better understand the dialogues in the last episode. Romanian history has been turbulent with many episodes in which human decency and morality were pushed to the limit. In a sense, one of the other unique aspects of this film is seeing all these events including public shaming and the question of how morality boundaries are defined not just on what happens to Emil but why it happens and the precedents for it. In the second episode, we barely notice any mask, social distancing, and mundane existence under corona but instead, history and its episode is poured into our views as pandemic has engulfed us in the past year or so.
Jude is a veteran of the Berlin Festival and one of its admirers, especially for its openness to allow unconventional films. In the roundtable on the film, he illuminated more the difficulty of shooting under pandemic (as shorter breaks), fascination with history, ethics of cinema, state of education in contemporary Romania, and use of pornography. Interestingly, Jude views chaos as an element to be capitalized on in filmmaking the same way Andy Warhol’s paint utilizes that aesthetic in painting. In that framework, the second episode is not a distraction and, indeed a unifier of the whole film, but in addition to enabling the context of ethics and obscenity to be better positioned in the context of Romanian culture. In watching the film, it is not too difficult to see the sociological take of Jude on cinema that is not purely formal and afraid to get into gray zones in rather a confrontational manner as opening porn scene and intense court scene.
The last episode provides closure to Emil’s ruined life. She faces the parents who question her morale in allowing the tape to be leaked even to the adult website. The dialogues, more inquisition style, and brutish make us grind teeth and wonder if she could have been questioned in a different manner. Despite this, the episode is rich in its democratic subtext and discourses around the themes of parenthood, responsibility, ethics of pornography, and philosophy of education. In less than half an hour, the critique of the entire traditional sexuality and educational system is offered. Emil is punched in the corner of the cinematic boxing ring, but in doing so, she/Jude brings to light many aspects of ethics in cinema and why cinema is so powerful in peeling the layers of culture and tradition mostly unquestioned. The themes of violence, obscenity, privacy, and morality dominate the film in its entire 105 minutes. The characters wore masks and pandemic scenes are ubiquitous but the mask of the unethical side of human nature is aptly peeled off and portrayed.
Grade: A-
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.