Start with a bang
WINNER OF BERLIN FESTIVAL’S TOP PRIZE ENDS WITH A WHIMPER
FILM REVIEW Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Cast: Katia Pascariu Director: Radu Jude
Duration: 1 h 46 m Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is playing in Vancouver and Montreal, with other cities to follow.
I don’t know what they were smoking during this year’s Berlin film festival, but I want some the next time I need to sit through a Transformers movie. The winner of the festival’s top prize, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens with three minutes of VERY explicit sex (the porn), and concludes with the line: “The film was but a joke, and here it ends.” (The loony, I guess.)
In between, a hundred-odd minutes of Romanian art-house comedy. Emi Cilibiu (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher in Bucharest, has made a sex tape with her husband that somehow got leaked to the internet. Now her colleagues and her students’ parents are in an uproar over whether “porn teacher” should be stripped of her job.
If the premise rings a bell, it’s because it bears passing relation to Sex Tape, a 2014 comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel that has a 16 per cent rating at rottentomatoes.com. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is sitting at 89 per cent, which suggests that if Romania wanted to remake one of Robert De Niro’s raunchy-grandpa comedies, it might be able to salvage something even there.
Still, count me in the 11 per cent minority for this one. The film is divided into three parts, with the first, One-way Street, following Emi through the streets of Bucharest, where we watch her argue with a guy whose truck is parked on the sidewalk, and witness various other forms of road rage, queue rage, etc.
Part 2, Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders, lasts about 20 minutes but seems endless. Reminiscent of late-career Godard, It also marks the film’s biggest departure from American movies on the same subject. Take the following line: Is it from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, or 2008’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno? “The contemplation of history is more likely to inspire, if not contempt for humanity, then a sombre vision of the world.” It’s a stumper, I know.
Part 3, Praxis and Innuendoes (Sitcom), is the closest the film gets to a traditional narrative structure, as Emi
sits down to face her accusers. Writer/director Radu Jude shot his film during the pandemic, so everyone is socially distant and masked, although (true to life), a few characters have the whole I-don’t-need-to-cover-mynose attitude. The debate is interesting if a little unfocused, finishing with a vote on whether to expel the teacher, played out in three alternate conclusions. None of them is a happy ending. ★1/2