Starting a serious art-house movie with an amateur porn video might seem bold, but for Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn it was a winning move.
The jury of the 71st Berlinale picked the Romanian drama, in which a schoolteacher is caught up in a scandal after a homemade sex tape with her husband (that video we see at the top) gets posted online, for this year’s Golden Bear as the best film of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival.
Reviews have jumped, so to speak, on the graphic sex in Bad Luck Banging, but Jude’s real focus is the obscenity of public discourse.
The film is split into three parts. After the porn video we watch, docu-drama style, as the schoolteacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), now dressed in a sensible gray suit, wanders the streets of Bucharest. We observe the casual nastiness of everyday incivility and the hypocrisy of a public morality set against a flood of misogynistic and hyper-sexualized imagery. (“She likes it deep” runs one billboard slogan. For a COVID-19 throat swap kit.)
For the movie’s middle section, Jude switches styles with a quick-fire montage through Romanian history and folklore —touching on the racism, antisemitism, Nazi collaboration, and Communist-era corruption, while still managing to get in a joke on blow-jobs—”The word most commonly looked up in the dictionary” the subtitles point out.
Part three of Jude’s triptych returns us to Emi, now in a public confrontation with parents furious a woman who was seen to have sex should be allowed to teach children. The set-up is closer to a play or a sitcom and is made all the more absurd by Jude —who, rather than wait, shot the film under strict COVID-19 protocols— requiring his actors to wear face masks and maintain social distancing.
In its statement, the Berlin Jury said Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn “captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence…It attacks the spectator, evokes disagreement, but leaves no one with a safety distance.”
Radu Jude spoke to The Hollywood Reporter‘s European Bureau Chief Scott Roxborough shortly after his Golden Bear win to talk about shooting during lockdown, how he combines horror with humor in his films, and why he sees obscenity everywhere, it just has nothing to do with sex.
Your film seems perfectly attuned to this moment in time, right down to the anti-viral masks the actors are wearing. Were you planning the film before the pandemic hit?
Radu Jude: It was planned much before the pandemic. Years before, actually. It took us a while to find financing. After the [first] lockdown, we had to decide if we wanted to wait or make it right away. We didn’t know how long it would be postponed —I know about projects that have been postponed a year because of this epidemic.
I decided to do it faster than we were intended. The ended here [in Romania] at the end of May. I said: “let’s do it now.” Which meant one month and a half of preparation. In August, we were already filming. Everything was done very, very fast. And because I thought of it as a film about contemporary European civilization —if we can consider Romania a part of European civilization—I wanted to keep all the elements of the time in which we were shooting. For it to be like a document of our times.
I changed some things in the script accordingly. The first part of the film is shot with a documentary background, with what was in the streets. That all became part of the film. I also included the masks to protect the actors from the virus. Some were very afraid and were vulnerable. Some had relatives or family members who were vulnerable. I didn’t want to risk anybody’s life. But now distributors are saying: “This is such an easy film to dub!” [because the actor’s lips are covered]. I’ve strongly opposed to dubbing but everybody is saying: “this is the perfect film to dub, we could do it in half a day!”
How did making the film this way change the tone of the movie?
Well, first it changed practical things. For safety reasons, I refused to do any physical rehearsals with the actors. I recorded everything on Zoom. We couldn’t spend a lot of time on rehearsals or preparation. Everything was done very fast in order to limit the possible risk. This created a different type of role for me in terms of staging, which had to be done fast.
There was a lesson I think I took from the Nouvelle Vague, from the French New Wave, because, in the 1960s, they were working fast. If you read all the biographies of [Éric] Rohmer or [Jean-Luc] Godard, they didn’t shoot for half a year or three months: they did a film in 15 or 20 days. I really liked that idea. I wanted to emulate it.
Of course, when you put on a mask things change. We did the rehearsals with masks on—even on Zoom, with people at home. And everything became much more surreal because there you had people with their mouths blocked but still shouting at each other, insulting each other. Of course, I liked that enormously. We searched for different types of masks, both to provide the anthropological side of what we were going through but also to enhance the bad taste style of the movie.
Is there anything you’ve learned from the experience that you’ll be using for your future films?
It depends. I think some projects can be done like that, some others less so. But I don’t have a method, so to speak. I think this was the method I used for this film. It was the only idea I had.
But right now, I’m trying to make a film composed of different stories about history. Different short pieces which I’ll put together with some archival footage. A mixed kind of photo-montage film. I think it’s unfair a writer can have a book of short stories or a book of essays, or a film critic can have a book of different film reviews or a painter can have an exhibition with different paintings, but as a filmmaker, if I propose a project with five or six different short films on the same theme, people say: “no, no, this is a collection of short films. We don’t accept that.”
In some ways, you did that with this movie. The first part is like a cinéma vérité documentary. The middle is a film essay, and the final section has the structure of a play or a TV sitcom.
Yes. But the one I’m trying to do now is more heterogeneous than this film. With Bad Luck Banging, while there are different styles, I think all the sections are connected and it’s one film.
Actually, the first title of the film was The Sleepwalkers, a much more respectable title. My idea was that the movie could be a kind of dialogue with The Sleepwalkers, the novel of [Austrian writer Hermann] Broch. It’s a novel written after the First World War composed of many styles and many stories but you still have the feeling there’s a unity. I think with this film, I hope at least, there’s the same unity. I’ve heard some people say the middle part could be a film on its own. Maybe, but I don’t think it would be an interesting film. It wouldn’t have any direction. The first part is like a documentary but, as well, it wouldn’t really have meaning without the other two parts. The third part on its own would just be in bad taste, like a sitcom.
When did you decide to switch the title from The Sleepwalkers to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn?
Quite early on, because I knew that my own link to Hermann Broch’s novel wouldn’t really fly. And I wanted a kind of cheap title. Actually, I think the English version doesn’t really do justice to the Romanian title [Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc] which has a vulgar word in it. A word just on the edge of vulgarity. Not like fuck or something, but just below that. Here when they announced the film went to the Berlinale, they didn’t say the title on television, they said: “Radu Jude’s new film”.
The word bucluc, which in English we have as “bad luck” is actually an old Ottoman word, a Turkish word which in Romanian we use a lot for cheap boulevard theater. You say: “a holiday with bucluc,” “a family with bucluc,” and it has this cheap theater feel. I wanted to emulate that. “Loony Porn” is similar. The Romanian, porno balamuc, is more like “madcap porn,” which sounds like a typical tabloid headline. The Romanian title sounds vulgar, cheap, and tabloid. That’s what I was aiming for.
The film also combines that crude tabloid vulgarity with very serious subjects.
That’s a long tradition. You have that tradition in Shakespeare in his comedies, in Cervantes. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a mixture of that. Ulysses was actually a big influence on me for this film because I read it just when I was structuring the script.
I think that seriousness cannot be separated from the funny and the ridiculous. Hannah Arendt, when she wrote her report about the [Adolf] Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 or 1962, she mentions that she had to laugh so hard all the time because everything Eichmann was saying was so ridiculous. In Hannah Arendt you have both: she could see the tragic, horrifying realities of the Holocaust. And at the same time, she’s laughing at the human stupidity expressed through Adolf Eichmann, I think is the same thing. Sometimes things are so mixed together that it’s hard to see both sides. Hard but not impossible.
One thing reviewers, especially American reviewers, have commented on is the hard-core sex in the film. You open the movie with the “sex tape” that the teacher Emi made with her husband. Why did you want to show that, full-frontal, as it were, and not just refer to it elliptically?
First of all, because this is the center of the film. If the other scenes or parts of the film have meaning, they have meaning in connection to that opening scene. The viewing of the film is connected with the viewing of that scene. I think that essentially this is a montage film, meaning by montage, it’s about the juxtaposition of different things. Not only in editing, in terms of having a good narration, of putting images together for a story. But montage understood as a clash of sets of images in order to create a bigger picture, maybe a new idea.
For this, it was essential that this porno, this amateur video, be seen. I put it at the beginning also because we know there’s a link between cinema and voyeurism. Like Laura Mulvey’s writes in her important essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” I wanted to put viewers in the position of the parents we see in the third part of the film. Symbolically, so to speak, the viewers become the parents: they have to judge for themselves, figure out their opinion of this film. I think that’s interesting. And it’s a bit of a joke. At the end, you realize you’ve been put in the same embarrassed, horrible position as the parents.
It’s a fairly tame porn video, given what you can see on the Internet. But it still feels shocking somehow.
Yes, so many people have said: “it’s such a shocking beginning.” I think it’s a banal beginning. But maybe it’s the context: we aren’t used to seeing this in films like this, but we are when you open any porn site on the Internet. It’s like people here in Romania complain about hearing vulgar words in Romanian films, even though they use the same words themselves every day. They’re just not used to hearing it on screen. Or we watch a Scorsese or Tarantino film and it’s all these “fuck, fuck you, motherfucker” which sounds quite neutral to us. But the Romanian version of those are shocking.
Obscenity seems to be a theme at the core of the movie. What do you consider obscene?
It depends. If you use the word specifically to refer to sexuality, whatever one or two or a few consenting adults do with each other, I don’t find any of that obscene. I don’t have a concept of obscene for that.
But otherwise, I mean, everything else is obscene for me. If I turn on the television and see a political talking, or having a “debate.” The world is full of obscenity. But symbolically, not from the point of view of sexuality. Of course, I’m not talking about pedophilia or something like this, which is beyond obscenity, it’s criminal.
But I also see obscenity in cinema. Let me give you an example: last year I was with this project in Berlin at the co-production market, looking for financing. We met with a lot of producers. At one point, my producer, Ada Solomon, told one of them, to convince them were are good, serious filmmakers, that I had two films running Forum [Uppercase Print and The Exit of Trains]. The guy said: “don’t tell about Forum films. Those don’t sell.” This coming from somebody who pretends he’s interested in the art of cinema. That’s for me is an obscenity.
The film’s subtitle is: “a sketch of a popular movie.” By that do you mean this is the closest you’re going to get to making a popular, or mainstream, movie?
Oh, I’m not sure of that. I thought, because of the tabloid topic and because of some of the scenes, especially the last part, were using “popular” elements. But a few years ago I made a film, Aferim! (2015) which is a 19th-century kind of Western, that was also popular, almost a genre film. It did quite well locally and won the Silver Bear for best director in Berlin.
I think, at least here in Romania, we have a problem with the audience. It’s not because people are stupid or unable to appreciate good cinema, it’s because of our lack of investment in education. General education gets worse and worse every year. The bigger cities are a little bit better but the rest of the country is a disaster. There’s no artistic education, almost nothing, and no cinema or visual education whatsoever. So it’s normal that we don’t have an audience with knowledge or understanding or interest in cinema. It’s becoming less and less and I don’t know how this is going to be solved.
You’ve just won one of the first big film festivals to be held virtually. What was it like to win Berlin while sitting on your couch, without attending any events, or red carpets?
Well, since I am a shy person, for me, it was easier. Of course, it’s great to be able to connect with the audience, it’s great to be able to meet colleagues. It’s great even to have interviews where you can look someone in the eye and chat afterward. And of course, I miss the big screen. But I’m not an idealist. I think the Berlinale did a great job adapting.
I haven’t seen any of the other films but many people say the selection this year was quite good. Maybe it helped that they didn’t have to compromise for commercial taste, for the red carpet. I don’t know. Things are never ideal. When we made this film, we thought about waiting for a year for “ideal conditions,” which as it turns out would have been for nothing, since the situation still hasn’t changed. It is the same with film festivals. I accept whatever the situation is and I appreciate them doing something, even if it is less than perfect.
After winning, you called out what you said was the false glamor of film festivals, the “bullshit of red carpets.” Berlin is planning an in-person festival in June where they will show all this year’s winners, including your film. If it happens, will you go? And will you walk the red carpet?
Of course I will. Out of my respect for them. If they want me to, I will. It’s not like I “see red” when I see a red carpet. It’s just that the spectacles around these festivals have become like a virus. Where the red carpet is more important than the movie. I think it should be the other way around. We should be celebrating cinema, which is great art, in my opinion, and a great way of thinking, and less the glamorous side of cinema. But that’s just my opinion.
