Film Review: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Images courtesy of Potential Films.

Very few films can be so bad that they force you to sprint from the theatre afterwards and re-evaluate what is really important in your life. Bad Luck Banging is one of those films. 

The opening scene thrusts the viewer into various explicit sexual acts by a couple in their bedroom, shown through the recording of their video camera. This scene is very eager to show every part of the human body to the point where actual pornography is probably more conservative. A child’s voice echoes from the background, only to be ignored by the parents who continue the consummation. The sub-text is evident within 30 seconds that there is some kind of parental negligence here.

Although, any shred of intellectual subversion is erased as the graphic nudity lasts for at least another 10 minutes. To some extent, it does elicit shock value, especially for someone watching the film first thing in the morning at Cinema Nova, as I was. However, it very quickly also induces boredom as the sex scene proceeds with endless moaning and groaning that borders on the absurd. 

From this point on, director Radu Jude abandons focusing on traditional elements such as plot and character in favour of pointless lingering shots of traffic, street signs, flowers and whatever else took the director’s fancy on the day, accompanied by bizarrely absent sound design.

The premise on paper is at least vaguely interesting – a high school teacher named Emi (Katia Pascariu) has the aforementioned sex tape leaked online and is spread amongst the school. To keep her career afloat, she has to convince the staff and parents of the children at the school, as well as her own family, of her reputation and that it was not her that posted the video. So, what promises to be an interesting commentary on the role of pornography and even the ubiquity of the internet within society, as well as expectations of adults, instead resorts to self-indulgent montages of definitions and demonstrations of sexual positions mixed with a completely irrelevant history of different political revolutions and religions through archival footage that somehow comments on the overload of misinformation in society. Go figure.

If this train had not derailed enough, the final act returns to the so-called story where Emi is frog-marched in front of her colleagues and peers at the high school to make herself accountable. Any threat of serious storytelling is immediately undercut as one parent decides to get her tablet out and show the explicit video of Emi once again for all the parents to guffaw at. The idea that Emi has to suffer through humiliation from her fellow parents is ironically replaced by the humiliation the audience feels when they have to watch the sex scene in its entirety again despite having already seen it. 

From here, conversations fluctuate from civil to violent belligerence in the, no pun intended, climax. Until, lo and behold, the film cuts away to a title card that says, “Three possible endings”, and offers alternative outcomes for the film. There is no use spoiling the ending, but the final title card for the third ending reveals “the film was but a joke…” A terribly unfunny joke that reeks in its own sleaze.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is showing in select Victorian cinemas from the 25th of November.