Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Radu Jude’s corrosive and deliberately shocking social satire sees a teacher at odds with the parents of her pupils after a (very hardcore) sex tape she and her husband made finds its way onto the internet and goes viral. But that is only the half of it—Jude also sandwiches into the proceedings a potted history of Romanian abominations via an essay section he sarcastically labels ‘a short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders’. Not for the faint of heart (or those easily offended by hardcore porn), the work is possibly the first great pandemic art film…

‘The brilliance of “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”… comes from a most unusual combination by jamming together two very different kind of movies that shouldn’t work in harmony, but end up making perfect sense. The filmmaker’s bold approach suggests what might happen if someone spliced a late-period Jean-Luc Godard essay film into the middle of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” with such mesmerizing results that you just have to roll with it. One of European cinema’s most unclassifiable auteurs has delivered the bitter pill we deserve.’—Eric Kohn, IndieWire