Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn review – mind-numbingly misanthropic sex comedy

If you're one to view the movies as escapism, Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is likely to send you running for the hills. Here is a film that grasps at every current hot-button issue it can find, from misogyny to digital privacy to the culture war around COVID-induced mask mandates, and skimps on the thoughtful, coherent, or funny (this is a film billed as a comedy) examinations. The end result is less provocative than it is downright insulting, an interminable mash of misanthropy and edginess that isn’t even half as clever as it thinks it is.

It certainly opens arrestingly enough, with five minutes of entirely unsimulated sex between lead actress Katia Pascariu and her character Emi’s husband, who is filming the encounter. This tape then leaks, leading to Emi’s humiliation and a showdown with the parents of the kids she teaches, who want her fired from the school. What looks set to be a debate about privacy, sex-positivity, and the role of parents in an increasingly digital world is soon derailed, though, by Jude’s constant reminders of how awful all people in general are.

We spend a long time just following Emi on her walks through Bucharest, carrying out errands and meeting consistently vile people, whether they’re having a screaming match at a supermarket checkout or parking their oversized trucks directly on the pavement. It holds your interest for a bit, but as the background characters descend further and further into verbal depravity, you swiftly become numb to Bad Luck Banging’s provocations, hardcore porn and holocaust denial deployed in cynical but still ineffective ways.

Jude’s camera is constantly wandering away from the action to settle on nearby billboards or toy displays, and this patience-testing technique is tripled-down upon in the second act, the entirety of which is made up of 26 A-Z dictionary entries describing all the cultural and societal forces that have led up to Emi’s current predicament. Ranging from “War” to “Agriculture” to “Cunt,” these entries are almost all done through stock footage with explanatory subtitles, unless there’s an opportunity to humiliate a nude woman, in which case Jude shoots the footage himself.

It’s a staggeringly boring sequence, like someone has filmed a student’s essay plan by mistake, and the realisation roughly six entries in that this segment is going to drag on all the way until “Z” was one of the most heart-sinking moments I’ve had in a cinema all year. The return to Emi’s story doesn’t improve things much, the final showdown with the parents dominated by nonsensical, aggravating chatter and characters reading entire Wikipedia articles to one another in smug monotones. Jude’s choice to have all his actors wear their masks for every dialogue scene at least adds a neat visual quirk, but it also further alienates us from caring about anyone involved.

It’s not often that you feel justified in calling a film a waste of time – such a dismissive term can feel antithetical to judging art – but I was so infuriated by the end of Bad Luck Banging’s endless 108 minutes that it's hard to find a more fitting label. A truly dismal piece of work that, in trying to have a Hot Take on everything, ends up saying absolutely nothing.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in the UK on 26 November.