Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN ***1/2
Radu Jude2021
IDEA: A primary school teacher faces the wrath of society when a sex tape she filmed with her husband inadvertently winds up on the Internet.
BLURB: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is perhaps as close as 21st-century world cinema has come to the transgressive audacity and excoriating political satire of Eastern European art films of the 60s and 70s. It’s a film designed to slice right through the equivocating bullshit, a vivisection of a mass culture warped and degraded by the shared toxins of capitalism, nationalism, racism, anti-intellectualism, moral fundamentalism, misogyny, and social media, a COVID-era Idiocracy if Idiocracy had teeth and aesthetic daring. While Jude’s utter contempt for the current cultural and political climate (and Romania’s in particular) is astringently apparent, Bad Luck Banging… is more than a one-note polemical instrument. Following the vérité observations of the film’s first third, a promenade through the crass maze of commodity signs swallowing modern Bucharest, Jude launches his best and most rhetorically ambitious formal exercise. Suspending narrative with liberating abandon, he enumerates a glossary of terms, many of which he trenchantly relates to shameful chapters in Romanian and European history. Baldly - although with tongue in cheek - addressing injustices past and present, it’s a sardonic, sobering kick-in-the-pants of a school lesson, the kind that so panics the benighted conservative parents in the film’s culminating, screaming outrage circus of a PTA conference. Tellingly, this dictionary portion ends on the word “Zen,” which it defines as an attitude of regarding life as both a tragedy and a comedy. This underlies the general philosophy of Bad Luck Banging…, a barbed time capsule that invigoratingly reflects and refracts what is horrifying, vulgar, and mind-bogglingly ludicrous about the state of the world circa 2020.
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