What films best capture the current moment in America? As so many films pretend like COVID never happened, it’s hard to see our modern moment reflected in pop culture. Kimi managed some of it, though it is more interested in the pandemic as set dressing for a story about tech paranoia. The Pink Cloud captures the boredom and loneliness of isolation, but none of the social aspect. To my surprise, the best film about life in America during COVID is actually Romanian: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.
Bad Luck Banging will be worryingly familiar to anyone following the news. From the way social distancing has introduced new complexities to in-person interaction to professional women under fire for leaked sex tapes or side sex work. The film even builds to a remarkable climax at a school board meeting, as a group of disconnected parents use the opportunity to spew conspiracies and grind axes against the education system. It’s a slow, harrowing, often funny film that is unlike anything else I’ve seen in ages — except, tragically, the real world.
“I have my tablet.”
Emi (Katia Pascariu) fucks. Before we know anything else about Emi, we know that she has a healthy, active sex life with her husband. The film opens on a sex tape the pair are filming at home. The tape is loving, passionate, silly. Like a lot of amateur porn, it’s filled with awkward angles and odd interruptions. At one point, Emi’s mother knocks on her bedroom door, forcing her to have a conversation about the pharmacy and her daughter’s toys while Emi tries to continue giving her partner a blowjob. It’s kind of sweet, honestly?
When next we see Emi, she is running errands. Quickly, we learn a lot about Emi’s life. Emi is a teacher. Her husband leaked the sex tape we saw at the beginning of the film. And now, parents and coworkers at her school have discovered what has happened. Now, Emi is worried about being fired while simultaneously dealing with the embarrassment of having the tape out there. She can’t get it taken down; it just gets reuploaded to PornHub and various blogs whenever she tries.
So Emi attends the school board conference. There, angry parents, raving about their rights, their kids, masks, and sexuality attempt to steamroll Emi. Emi stands up for herself. But can she keep her job and maintain her life, when everyone has seen this intimate moment between her and her husband? What does it look like to be put on trial for someone else’s morals?
“Lets all see the video.”
If you’ve watched Boogie Nights or Knife + Heart (or if you’re old enough), you might remember that porn used to have narratives. In between the fucking and sucking, there was plot and dialogue. It wasn’t, like, great, but it did provide some context for the sexual content. But with the advent of the internet, porn changed. Download speeds were slow, too slow for an entire film. But for a short scene? Later, the advent of ‘tube sites’, collecting tens of thousands of short clips in a single place, pushed that tendency for aggressive, immediate sexual content from a first-person male perspective even further. This ‘style’ of pornography became known as ‘gonzo pornography’.
What is the point of opening with a graphic, unsimulated sex scene? There’s a strange familiarity there. Not to get too personal, but I’ve seen porn before, and a lot of it today looks like… well, like this. There’s more intimacy here than normal (and more editing), but it definitely feels like writer/director Radu Jude wants us to inhabit the headspace, at least for a moment, of the parents. We don’t know who these two people are. The film has provided no character, no context for their relationship. It feels like porn. Hell, ‘porn’ is in the film’s title.
And yet, it isn’t porn. Jude creates and leaves in interruptions, as when Emi is forced to stop sucking a dick so she can ask her mother to leave them alone, only to get right back to it while her mom is still hectoring her. Contrast that with the opening scenes of Gaspar Noe’s Love, for example. There, Noe provides an artfully shot, beautifully staged handjob. And yet, the sterility of the moment, the inhumanity of it, feels more pornographic. Jude’s film, despite opening with a more explicit scene, feels tamer. Emi rarely feels posed; she feels in the moment. She’s in awkward, sometimes goofy positions. Bad Luck Banging understands what few other films of its ilk do; sex is funny.
Lately, we’ve seen more European films flirting with using unsimulated (or, in the case of Nymphomaniac, semi-simulated) sex scenes. None of them have been particularly successful, however, in part because the sex never feels necessary or narratively interesting. Bad Luck Banging, however, is absolutely interested in the contrast between the intimate sexuality at home and the sterilized sex sold as a commodity. As Emi walks around Bucharest running errands, we see sex shops not far from toy stores, provocative, sexual billboards, nude statuary. These fade into the background of city life. They are normal and accepted parts of our day-to-day, the same way cleaned-up and consequence-free violence is. Why, Jude asks here, is the commodification of sex and violence acceptable, while the earnest and enthusiastic sexuality of regular humans is repellent?
“So that everyone knows what we’re talking about.”
Bad Luck Banging is aggressively not for everyone. There are going to be people who fire it up, see an incredibly graphic sex scene, and turn it off. That’s understandable. This is outside the mainstream for American audiences in more ways than one.
But if you don’t mind a little loony porn, Bad Luck Banging is a shockingly insightful film. It breaks rules in odd and interesting ways. Scenes of Emi walking around the streets of often features people staring directly into the camera, sometimes even interacting with it unprompted. Are these actors? It certainly doesn’t seem like it. What about the bookstore clerk who clearly breaks his lines, forgetting what he’s supposed to say and laughing at odd moments? Why go with that take?
The film creates an almost documentarian aesthetic at times, which makes its frequent reminders that this is a scripted film all the more jarring. How do we reconcile the unsimulated sex and the long, languid shots of Bucharest with the film’s lengthy montage in the middle, which combines Romanian history and culture, poetry, and seemingly random jokes?
To me, the feeling I got watching this film was one of whiplash. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It never felt accidental, or random. Instead, like Emi’s sexual encounter, it felt playful. At its best, Bad Luck Banging feels like a film that wants to make a serious point without feeling like a lecture. It wants you to simultaneously understand that you are watching real people and that this is a fiction, a joke.
In short, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a capital-e Experience. But in my opinion, it’s an experience worth having.
a note
It should be noted that, while Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is currently streaming on Hulu and available to rent on Amazon, both versions are heavily censored. Because the film opens with a graphic, unsimulated sex scene, streaming services have opted to censor all the film’s sexual content. The censorship is a giant, ugly block of colors and moving text, like a 90s Angelfire website, covering enormous portions of the screen. It is quite ugly — I suspect because writer/director Radu Jude did not want to make censoring the film an appealing process. I cannot recommend people watch the censored version.
It’s also worth noting that Nymphomaniac aired uncensored on Netflix. Love aired uncensored on Amazon Prime. Both films are (purposely) more pornographic, and yet neither film was censored the way this one was. What does that mean? No idea. But it’s certainly interesting.
Currently, only iTunes carries the uncensored version of the film for American audiences.