Bad Luck Banging, the Riotous Berlinale-Winning Film About Amateur Porn

When we first meet Emi, the protagonist of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, she is at her most exposed – in all senses of the word. In the wince-inducing opening sequence, we see her sex tape with her husband (played by adult-film actor Ştefan Steel) unfold against jeering music and mock-grave title cards. Though the fate of this video is at the core of Radu Jude’s latest film, the director explains, “much more important was what was behind the story than the story itself.”

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, inspired by the rule-breakers of the French New Wave, is a film that resists falling neatly into any category. Steering clear of traditional plotlines, the film is broken into three parts: in the first, teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu) deals with the fallout of the sex tape being leaked online; in the second, archival material and fragmentary footage is spliced together with reimagined dictionary definitions; and, in the third, Emi is at the centre of a farcical trial in which parents of students vote on whether she keeps her job. “It started with a real news event,” Jude explains. “It seemed not a good story in itself, but a good story from which to analyse what is behind or what is around these images. It’s a film not about a porn video but all the connections between this with other things like morality, obscenity, body versus politics, freedom and society.”

While plans were in place to shoot the first part in a documentary style, by the time filming was due to begin, Romania was in the thick of lockdown. Masks are worn throughout and, as Emi drifts through Bucharest’s streets, Bad Luck Banging captures the bizarreness of the pandemic world. Petty arguments erupt between strangers, shoppers fret over the state of government, and an advertisement for Covid-19 tests is emblazoned with the slogan: “I like it deep”. Jude explains the reasoning behind the documentary aesthetic: “I made a few films using history before and then eventually I decided to make a film about contemporary life in Romania. But with the case of the teacher, I wanted to concentrate on it as already existing as a historical object.”

Filming in the pandemic was not without its challenges. “I wanted to protect the actors as much as possible, so we did all our rehearsals on Zoom. Generally, you don’t have control of timing, of volumes, and of course any blocking. It was also difficult because of the delay: when you have a Zoom with 20 or 30 actors, some have a delay of 50 seconds.”

Modelled on the three-part structure of Hermann Broch’s novel The Sleepwalkers – which provided the original title for the film – Bad Luck Banging aims for a prosaic, sketch-like style. Three years of foraging for quotes and observations culminated in the dictionary montage section of the film, where Jude’s trademark dark humour is given full reign. Cinema is also proposed as a tool for revealing true profanity, since without it “we do not and cannot see actual horrors”.

The film, like his others, spotlights the obscene antisemitism and racism that still blights Romanian society. “I’m not Jewish but I belong to a generation that tried to understand what happened in Romania historically – what is historical and what is not – because a nation is always built on an image of its own history,” Jude says. “After the revolution, when I was a teenager, I wanted to know what our real history was and what was behind all this propaganda that we were living in.”

Misogyny is also rife, which Pascariu expertly portrays through the trial of the unshakeable Emi. “She’s acted in a lot of political-feminist-social-educational theatre. I knew her from casting sessions from my previous films, and always admired and wanted to work with her. This film was somehow written with her in mind. After I finished it, I sent it to her and said: I don’t want a casting session, I just want you to play it. That was it. It was a perfect collaboration.”

Though Emi is on trial, it is the ugliness of her parents’ views that is ultimately laid bare. In the film, younger generations are shown to bear the brunt of these polarised opinions, with children redefined as “political prisoners” of their parents. “The educational system is a mess all over the world and in Romania especially,” says Jude. “It’s classist, it’s underfunded, it’s badly organised, it’s really a crime what happens in the Romanian education system. 25 per cent of Romanian children abandon school.” On whether he hopes Bad Luck Banging will do anything to counter this, he is cynical: “A film cannot change anything, it can just show a bit of the problem. It’s politicians who can change, it’s society that can change. But it’s not happening.”

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is released in the UK on November 26