Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn is one of the best movie titles in recent memory. The picture was directed by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude and was released in 2021. When confronted by something unfamiliar, the best critical strategy is to present an objective description of the baffling object. Perhaps, then, some critical analysis may be possible -- or, maybe, not.
The picture is divided into a preliminary sequence and four parts. Each part receives a Brechtian intertitle in cursive, stereotypical "female" handwriting against a hot pink background. The pink hue is the shade that one associates with the facades of Reeperbahn peep shows and whorehouses. The preface to the film is a home-made sex-tape involving lots of enthusiastic copulation, oral sex, someone wielding a whip and the like. We don't really see these proceedings because the film (at least in the version on Amazon Prime) is obscured by a cheesy-looking title bearing the words "Censored" and "Censorship = Money." Sometimes, a title describes the sex act occurring in the middle of the image obstructed by placard. We can see some blurred action around the edges of the title. At one point, someone in the next room shouts at the people having sex and they take a break to answer her. Part 1 echoes a title in Walter Benjamin's essays -- "One-way Streets". This is a literal description of the next 35 or so minutes in the film. From various angles, we observe a young woman in a business-like suit making her way across a crowded city -- apparently, Bucharest. She stops in several places that are full of people but not otherwise well-defined -- these seem to be either administrative offices or someone's home. From fragments of dialogue, we gather that the woman is Emilia Cilibiu, a married schoolteacher at some kind of private (and, presumably) expensive school We infer her dilemma from hearing one side of cell phone calls that she makes: the sex tape that we have seen shows Emilia and her husband, Eugen. The images were on a computer that he brought to a shop to be repaired. These images are now circulating on the internet. Eugen has tried to have the images "taken down" from Porn Hub where they were posted, but without any lasting success. Emilia is in hot water at the school where she teaches and certain parents have demanded that she be discharged. She may be on her way to a confrontation with school administrators (or parents) relating to this situation. The streets of Bucharest are a picaresque carnival of violent encounters between motorists, demented old ladies who call out "Eat my cunt!", a self-proclaimed wandering sailor who propositions Emilia, and various other colorful and menacing street people. Emilia goes to a used book store and purchases a copy of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology; the clerk wants her read Charles Reznikoff's Testimony which interests her but, strangely, the shop doesn't have a copy -- apparently, in Bucharest they have good taste in American literature. In the midst of all this chaos, Emilia goes to a pharmacy where there are more belligerent people (there was previously a fight in grocery store line) and buys one Xanax to relax herself. The next part of the film (Part 2) is entitled something like "A Short Dictionary of Signs, Wonders, and Miracles." This is montage of one or two shot scenes, each using a static camera for a single shot (or several related shots) or showing a historical picture. Individual scenes are labeled with words like "Revolution", "Cock", "Fist," "Blonde Joke" etc. These vignettes shown in rapid succession one after another are cynical and demoralizing, brief cynical aphorisms as it were about subjects such as war and racism and sex. We see a tour-guide describing the grandiose "House of the People", the enormous and hideous palace where the dictator Nicolai Ceausescu lived. There's an anecdote about Pasolini -- he told people that the non-professional actors persecuting Jesus in his Gospel according to St. Matthew were former Fascist cops and bureaucrats, but this was a lie -- he cast the parts with labor union leaders and good Communist comrades. A man gazes at pig heads in butcher shop and says that God created pigs for us to eat them. Some of this is disturbing; some of it is very funny. There is no perceptible order to the vignettes and they come at the viewer so fast that you can't keep them in your mind. We see revolutions, massacres, cell-phone footage of some British boss brutally berating workers through a translator who softens his cruel and savage words. There is other cell-phone footage of someone beating up a Roma woman and an image of a boy with a badly lacerated and bruised back coupled with a title that tells us over 60% of children in Romania are the victims of physical abuse. We are shown similar statistics about rape. Part 3 is called "Praxis and Innuendo". This sequence, also about thirty minutes long depicts Emilia's trial at the school. The proceedings occur in a garishly lit courtyard full of stone lions and other weird statuary. The participants all sit, socially distanced (Covid is ravaging Bucharest) and wearing masks so that we can't see the lower half of anyone's face; this includes the heroine, Emilia. The people sitting in judgement are all stereotypes -- there's a cartoonish fascist lieutenant in full uniform, a pearl-clutching dowager, some alarmed and semi-hysterical mothers and fathers, a pretentious intellectual who spouts Frenchified theory, a beautiful Czech woman who wears a clear plastic mask so her lovely features can be seen and speaks in her native language causing the other people to shout that she should present her position "in English" (which she does). A variety of arguments are advanced, although the participants in this quasi-judicial proceeding keep losing the thredt of their thoughts and deviate into all sorts of weird digressions about the State, politics, the persecution of the Roma and so on. Emilia defends herself vigorously. She is completely unashamed of the images on the video and suggests that she's just providing something akin to sex education for the students. (She provides a vehement vindication of fellatio, for instance.) There's some discussion of Romania's most famous poet, someone called Mihai Eminescu (whose plaster bust presides over the hearing): would he condone the sex-tape or not? (Emilia recites by heart an erotic poem by the writer). An Orthodox priest clucks his tongue. The discourse degenerates into anti-Semitic name-calling; someone claims that George Soros and Bill Gates are somehow sponsors of the sex-tape. Finally, Emilia is denounced with such vulgarity and rage by one of the women that the teacher loses her composure and the two women end up tearing out each other's hair and rolling pn the ground next to a baroque fountain lit in lurid green and red tones. The last section is called "Three Possible Endings" and true to its title presents three outcomes from which the audience can choose. Here the setting remains the theatrically lit courtyard. In the first outcome, Emilia is acquitted and keeps her job. In the second, she is fired. In the third outcome, she becomes a superhero, a figure something like Wonder Woman in a strapless bathing suit; in that garb, she projects a net from her fingers (like Spiderman) tangles up her persecutors in the webbing, and, then, proceeds to assault them with a robustly proportioned dildo. The sound track throughout is a combination of pop tunes, advertising ditties, Wehrmarcht marching songs, with an up-tempo version of "Lili Marlene" playing both during the porno scene at the outset and while Emilia dildo-rapes the people sitting in judgement of her in the courtyard.
I can't figure out what the movie is really about, all interpretation baffled by the section comprised of unrelated vignettes that don't seem to have anything to do with principal action involving amateur the sex-tape and its discontents. Even parts of the movie that can be easily described are constructed in peculiar ways. "One Way Streets" is simply a series of documentary-style images of busy streets. We learn to watch the sequence in this way: often Emilia isn't immediately visible and, so, the viewer engages in a game similar to the Where's Waldo books -- we scan the image closely to pick out Emilia who is sometimes in the remote distance or who, often, enters the frames (or departs) so that most of what we see is simply random traffic and pedestrians. Since our view of the porno film is obstructed, this first part of the movie presents us with similar problems -- we want (or expect) to see Emilia, but the shots don't really oblige; indeed, often the camera wanders off, ignoring the protagonist to show us advertisements or quarrels between people on the street (for instance, a car and a pedestrian are in a stand-off, screaming at one another until the car simply knocks the pedestrian down and out of the way.) The montage of vignettes has nothing really to do with the plot, doesn't cast any light on its themes, and seems resolutely indifferent to Emilia's dilemma. As far as I can determine, the montage demonstrates the moral and political wretchedness of Romania, a place that is depicted as rife with child abuse and rape, full of Fascists (we see nuns singing a Fascist anthem), and pretty much corrupt in all respects. I don't know what this exercise is supposed to accomplish although it is certainly persuasive that the denizens of Bucharest are in no position to make moral judgements about anyone, least of Emilia whose peccadillos are minor compared to the social decadence otherwise in evidence. The trial scene is wildly exaggerated, implausible, and theatrically lurid -- and, as with the vignettes, the participants keep slipping off the point and veering into other topics that seem irrelevant. The film maker is unwilling to provide a denouement, suggesting three endings, one of which is patently escapist -- but nothing that occurs at the so-called trial is realistically presented. These scenes feature disorienting alienation effects -- it's like Brecht composed by, and for, morons. Ultimately, I conclude that the film is a Dadaist provocation signifying that modern Romania is so completely dysfunctional that even a criticism of Romanian politics and education must be inevitably dysfunctional itself. The film's most obvious thesis is that Romania has defined sex as obscene while engaging in all sorts of moral and political obscenity that has true and disturbing significance. But this argument, advanced in the first sex tape scene -- namely that film makers can show a murder on-screen but not a blow-job -- is so puerile that the viewer hopes that this can't possibly be the movie's meaning.
(The version of Bad News Banging or Looney Porn shown on Amazon Prime is bowdlerized. I have made arguments about the censorship in the first section (censorship = money; why is this?). This is apparently an artifact of the way the film is available on Amazon. The sex scene at the outset of the movie is apparently not censored or obstructed in any way in the actual film as shown, for instance, at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. Furthermore, the crooks that run Amazon Prime want to hustle you away from the movie when it is ostensibly over -- thereby, making it difficult to watch the final credits which apparently contained interpolated quotation from people like Jean-Paul Sartre, Brecht, and Benjamin). I doubt that these additional features would clarify anything about the movie, but caution must be exercised about making judgements about the version of the picture on Amazon streaming.)
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