Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – the insane pandemic Berlin Golden Bear winner (review)
A video goes viral. It shows a man and a woman having sex while wearing masks. The woman is, nevertheless, identified. Too bad she is a teacher and supposed to be a role model. And this, moreover, in the post-socialist country of Romanina, but ultimately in any society that is about to get lost in a social network discourse of would-be healing squeaky-clean attitudes, pseudo-political knowing-it-all, sanctimonious chauvinism and grotesque conspiracy theories. Everyone has an opinion. The debate turns into a tribunal – about consensual sex, pornography and more, with the fate of the teacher to be decided.
Radu Jude probably had lots of things to think, and lots of time to do so during quarantine. He decided that this film will be a satire on modern Romania, but also the world, but he ultimately divided it in three different film gernes each one for three very different with each other film chapters.
The first one feels like a modern arthouse drama, that follow the teacher on the streets of Bucharest, during shopping and other visits, as she learned that her sex tape is accidentally online. Jude along the protagonist, follows people that she passes, like kids that seem so happy they were at the mall, pharmacy customers that discuss COVID-19 or cars that park on the sidewalk. Apart from people he focuses also on store signs, big commercial sexist billboards, as well as what seems as endless construction sites on the strees of the big city. All those pictures and characters mirror a society that the teacher will have against her during the third part of the film, the school trial of whether she will be fired after that video.
But before part 3, the film becomes a documentary – like collage of news reels, youtube videos and pictures from every-day Romania that depicts everything that is ill-minded with the country and in lots of cases with the world, or at least with the Balkans (as a Greek at least, I could totally relate). The power of the church, the antisemitism, woman objectification and sex inequality, the Tsausesku dictatorship and its fall and the indifference of the civilians on the state and its laws are among, but certainly not limited to the issues.
And then comes part 3: the trial, where Jude handles as a comedy, with caricature characters accusing the teacher and being eager to watch the whole sex tape as proof. And certainly this thing shouldn’t work. The characters seem unreal and manipulated to fulfill the directors masterplan, and the changes in pace as one part follows the other seem weird if not surreal. On the contrary, it miraculously works and all those pictures and characters from the first two parts find their voice during the farce of a trial, essentially questioning, based on what we have seen on the state of the Romanian society, if the characters are actually exaggerated or if this could actually happen.
The film is ultimately a cry for attention and change on the morals and ideas of modern Romanians, and Jude finds the ideal setting of the pandemic, with everyone’s psychology and nerves being tested. Therefore he doesn’t follow the rules and lets his film to channel all the crazy of 2020 and make the viewer think about it on another level. The film’s grand finale is equally surreal, dramatic and funny, with Jude essentially screaming that he cannot take what he is living anymore.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Berlin Golden Bear on the 71st Berlinale
Grade 4/5
