Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021, Radu Jude)
Monday 27th of March, 6:15pm in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104)
Join us on Monday the 27th of March at 6:15pm (doors open at 6pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104) for a screening of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021, Radu Jude). The film is 1 hour 46 minutes long, so the screening will finish at around 8pm.
(This will be our final regular screening of the spring term, but join us for a special three-part screening of The Battle of Chile on Saturday the 1st of April in the cinema from 12pm to 6pm - full information in the announcement here. Our programme for the summer term has now been decided and will be published here soon.)
Better than any introduction we could possibly write for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is this review from the roland barfs film diary by Andrew Key:
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is an extremely bizarre and eccentric film, which is hugely enjoyable and deeply irritating and provocative and challenging, and is exactly the kind of film that I find it easy to just not pay any attention to. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (subtitle: Sketch for a Popular Film) is an unruly Romanian New Wave film about a primary school teacher, Emi (a really incredible performance from Katia Pascariu) who gets in trouble at work when a sex tape she films with her husband is discovered online by her students. It opens with the filming of the sex tape, in one of the most explicit sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a cinema. I mean, it looks like an amateur sex tape. It’s pretty surprising, to put it mildly. The film is then split into three parts: 1) Emi wandering around Bucharest feeling anxious about an upcoming parent-teacher meeting to discuss the tape, shot as a series of encounters set against the backdrop of the aggression bubbling away in Romanian society during the pandemic, as well as the vulgarity and tawdriness of advertising and everyday consumer culture; 2) a series of alphabetically arranged definitions and anecdotes about Romanian history, literature, sexual politics, political politics, economics, sociology, which all have a focus on hypocrisy and the horrors of the twentieth century (this section prompts one of the very few audience members to walk out of the film with a look of unparalleled disgust on their face; it also reminds me mostly of the fiction of Alexander Kluge, if he had a scatological sense of humour and was more disgusted by the world), and 3) the parent-teacher meeting, in which Emi is accused of a variety of sins by a bunch of stupid hypocrites. In almost all of these sections I feel by turns thrilled, bored, irritated and horrified. Some parts, particularly during the parent-teacher meeting, are excruciating. At one point it devolves into something like a below-the-line section on a tabloid newspaper, as a series of anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the Holocaust, national culture, the pandemic and various other topics come out of the parents’ mouths. It feels somewhere between Brecht and Buñuel, but with a real consciousness of the absolute sewage that flows through the digital public sphere. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a parable about the total mediation of contemporary life, and the seepage of hatred from the internet into everyday life. … I really like it, and I think it is one of the very few films I’ve seen recently which really seem to be immersed in and comprehending of the current social conjuncture. This is a film made by people who know what it’s like to be alive in 2021.