For any film buff interested in script analysis, Romanian Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn will be an absolute pleasant surprise. The film becomes even more important, if someone takes into consideration the way the cinematic milieu has been shaped up in recent years. Well-polished Hollywood dramas and political correctness are stealing cinema of its genuine madness and free-spiritedness. Radu Jude, the director behind some of the most groundbreaking movies of his country over the last decade, along with his avant-garde point of view towards the cinematic medium, seems to experiment throughout his career with a wide range of genres. Having said that, Aferim! (2015) pays tribute to the iconography of classical Hollywood western, while psychological drama Scarred Hearts (2016) fascinates the spectatorship with its rawness, Marius Panduru’s visionary cinematography (many of his frames remind of Rembrandt’s paintings), and Jude’s ability to extract from the thespian’s truthful performances, as if we were witnessing an Ingmar Bergman psychodrama. 

Having been awarded the 2021 Golden Berlin Bear for the Best Film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was recognized by the European Film Academy with Radu Jude winning two nominations (European Director, European Scriptwriter) as the auteur of this unusual mixture of political satire and social commentary. By solely watching the very prologue of this idiosyncratic film, the spectatorship dives into the deep end. What someone witnesses in the opening sequence are hardcore sex scenes that may cause embarrassment, especially before it is revealed to the audience who is capturing such a private moment with their cell phone and why. As in the great scriptwriting anything matters, this exact opening sequence of great shock value has been put within the first minutes of the film to draw the attention of the audience by creating what Russian formalists would call Estrangement (Ostranenie). Simultaneously, the sophisticated audiences are wondering whether such an imagery is really shocking to the younger generations; generations that are addicted to consuming adult videos to the various online adult platforms. 

Anyways, as we head towards the first of the three parts of the movie, we learn that the protagonist of the opening sequence video is a teacher. In actuality, the video was leaked online, and now the woman will be called to apologize in front of the parent and guardian association of her school. It is undeniable that such a plot could offer to the cinephiles another corny/didactic melodrama. Still, Radu Jude reserves for the whole subject a genuine management, blending avant-garde techniques with inspiration from the Aristophanean cosmos of John Waters winding up to a script that should be considered from now on as the absolute definition of how an original screenplay looks like. 

In Bad Lack Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude emerges as a profound artist that he does not seem to forget that a person of his kind, a modern scriptwriter as he is, is first and above all a social observer. Thus, his typewriter and the consequent camera movements are impressed by the current reality and state of things. It should be underlined that Radu Jude created one of the very few art works that amidst the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had the courage to capture and depict on the silver screen the empty streets and the grouchy people that should be absolutely attributed to this exact unprecedent situation for the entirety of the humanity. Still, Radu Jude seems to be not monolithic. Observations that on the first level give the impression that have to do exclusively with the everyday life in Bucharest, end up expressing the questions of modern scholars and cineastes. Radu Jude’s camera, as if it is inspired by the camera-stylo concept, wanders at the streets spotting the fake material goods of shopping centers, the passing anti-vaccinators, the mysterious shop windows and the general aesthetics of the city. Like a modern Pausanias, like a flaneur as Jude dares to be, he captures everyday street incidents that someone would claim that they could easily find their way into a cinematic work of art. On the other hand, Radu Jude’s point of view brings to the surface actions that we usually do not choose to observe closely, or think they are too unimportant to find their way to the luminous cosmos of the cinematic medium. Radu Jude, the man with a movie camera as he is, is able to discern amidst the urban commotion and garbage of the street a flower blooming on the edge of the sidewalk, exactly like his tortured central heroine. 

From the urban observations of the first part of the film, the masterful montage conceived by Radu Jude shifts the story into its second chapter. This chapter exposes to the international audiences the history of Romania in a satirical way. While someone may claim that this part has nothing to do with the central story of the movie’s heroine, we could claim that offers more depth and internal coherence to the actions and the final resolution of the plot. It is in this speedy second chapter that Radu Jude makes a sharp comment on the relationships of the orthodox church with fascism while expresses his notions on the ways his compatriots educate their children. Retaining always the satirical-paradoxical tone he is determined to follow throughout the duration of his film, Radu Jude speaks of children who are political prisoners of their parents and mixes sayings from Ancient Greek Mythology with snapshots from the birth of the cinematic art. The impact this chapter has to the spectatorship seems to compete or even surpass the imagination of the most provocateur artists of the modern avant-garde. Someone could comment on the film editing and playful tone of the second chapter that presents a certain kinship with the video art of Arthur Jafa. Both artists wish to wake up their audiences by exposing the vulgarity of contemporary politics and the disorienting role of commercial art. Instead of consuming an imagery full of superheroes that are going to save the planet as if they were messiahs, the spectators of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn are being triggered to explore the mysteries of Romania’s modern history. The avant-garde techniques used in this film are of paramount importance because they are working in an unconscious way into the minds of the spectators. Eventually Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn talks about history, without ever becoming a pompous historical epic. On a second level, this chapter is calling for our attention on how historical periods define certain nationalities and human behaviors. The intolerant individuals presented on the third chapter of the film are nothing else, but a reflection of their country’s historical past and their misogynistic ideas reaffirm our suspicions that it takes time, volition, and proper education for the seeds of fascism to get extinguished. 

The last picture of the second part of Jude’s script is really important on how the writer-director chooses to perceive the human condition as. Radu Jude obviously has reached the conclusion that life is not either tragedy or comedy, but these two elements coexist within the circle and unexpectedness of finite human life. It is this intellectual openness that allows the film to be a cataclysmic experience to the spectators’ senses. Again, working in an unconscious level, the movie in its own fashion teaches all of us that life has innumerable possibilities, no limits, and the only way to enjoy it is to remain stoic observers and awake intellectuals.  

Eventually, the culmination of the movie’s plot is its third and last act. According to Radu Jude’s imagination, in this part the female teacher apologizes for the video in front of a bunch of middle-class, fascists parents who are pointing the finger towards her. The plasticity of the set decoration during this part of the film brings to the surface some certain affinities with the art of theatre, as the spectator is given the impression that whatever s/he witnesses is taking place in a huge stage scene. While the first act of Radu Jude’s film seemed to draw inspiration from the vivid but minimalistic and calculative world of Jacques Tati, the third act of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn also reveals Jude’s ability to write dialogue-driven, long sequences. 

The oral confrontations between the heroine and the parents could not but remind the modern scholar of the structure of the Ancient Greek Tragedy, in which usually a hero is antagonizing the representative of the Chorus (that part being called “agon”). Understanding “agon” makes us able to understand the zenith of Ancient Greek Drama, within a democratic historical context in which all the different voices were given the ground to get noticed. As in the Ancient Greek Tragedy, so in Radu Jude’s film, the prosecutors speak first while the defendant has the second but-as we witness-last word. Moreover, like in Ancient Greece, so in this modern-era surrealistic film, the discussion leads to nowhere, the chasm between the two competitors deepens and the resolution is violent. Even if this is not a conscious choice on behalf of Radu Jude, it is a small but significant proof of how the Ancient Greek Drama continues through the centuries to influence the history and practice of dramaturgy. 

Discussing on the theatrical influences someone can discern on the third act of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the whole idea of this bizarre courtroom could be part of the cosmoses Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett created. Especially when coming to Samuel Beckett, as in major works of his, like Happy Days or Waiting for Godot, so in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn the spectator senses the pulse of a whole community by solely looking at a small group of entrapped human beings. As for the heroine’s outburst during the very last sequence of the movie, that should be discussed once again through the lens of the history of comedy. Simultaneously, such an iconic outburst proves that the heroine is not any more an apathetic victim of patriarchal violence, but she is more than able to establish herself and the moral order. Brandishing a dildo, with the looks and the attire of a super heroine the protagonist becomes the complete antithesis of her previous behavior (thus her super-heroic costume is now a vital part of this transformation), reversing the sexual roles and restoring the decadent moral values of her compatriots while reprimanding and punishing them. Such an explicit epilogue brings to one’s mind the satirical comedies of John Waters (especially Multiple Maniacs and A Dirty Shame) but also its shocking imagery refers us back to the teachings of Aristotle in Poetics: 

To consider whether tragedy is fully developed by now in all its various species or not, and to criticize it both in itself and in relation to the stage, that is another question. At any rate it originated in improvisation—both tragedy itself and comedy. The one came from the prelude- to the dithyramb and the other from the prelude to the phallic songs which still survive as institutions in many cities. 

(Poetics, 1449a) 

Conclusively, Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn triggers a wide range of discussions, from modern history to avant-garde cinema and the transgression of the Aristotelian archetypes in contemporary cinema. And exactly there lies its uniqueness and excellence as a work of modern European cinema.