Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

The film opens with the violence of a shock. An intimate video, banal in its origin, exposed without consent and transformed into a public spectacle, drags the private life of a teacher into the centre of the square. The images circulate, multiply, spark conversations, and accumulate judgments. The obscenity is no longer on the screen. It settles in the chorus that gathers around it. The gaze no longer seeks intimacy.

The film is structured around three gestures. There is a realist drift, with the camera glued to the daily life of the city; this is followed by an essayistic collage, where definitions and images form a lexicon of the absurd; finally comes the farce of the trial, shattering the boundary between laughter and discomfort. Each part retains its autonomy, and the contrast gives them weight, as if to observe the present requires breaking the film itself into pieces, with no promise of unity. The possible unity is that of shock.

Halfway between essay and chronicle, Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn also opens itself up to the city. Bucharest appears as a feverish body, pierced by military billboards, incessant car horns, walls covered with advertisements and insults. The camera wanders through these streets with the patience of one collecting fragments of the real, as if obeying an old vocation of cinema: to linger on the physical surface of things, to insist on what presents itself unfiltered. This gesture recalls the flâneur that Benjamin reclaimed from Baudelaire, the gaze that gets lost and found within the crowd, lingering on scattered signs until a moral landscape is composed. What emerges is a broth of signs—consumption, faith, pornography, nationalism, resentment—where Emilia’s exposed intimacy dissolves. A gaze that gets lost in the crowd to find a moral landscape.

At the school—which bears the name of an anti-Semitic ideologue—the trial rises like a farcical agora. The laptop repeats the video, the chorus repeats the rancour. Each intervention adds an inventory of furies: insults against foreigners, suspicions of Jews, nostalgias for authoritarianism. There is no accident in this spectacle. The obsession with judging Emi is the present form of an ancient mechanism. At first glance, the scene reads as a warning against the return of fascism. On closer inspection, the evidence is otherwise: modern politics never frees itself from these returns. Beneath the rhetoric of progress, ironically mirrored in the moral trial, collective life always slides toward myths, tribalisms, and rituals of condemnation. The school assembly is merely the grotesque version of a deeper rule.

Radu Jude pushes the film to the edge of the unbearable and leaves it suspended between laughter and vertigo. The initial shock dissolves into a broader portrait. The exposed intimacy functions merely as the spark of an ancient mechanism. The chorus that rose in the assembly extends into other arenas, crosses streets, infiltrates networks, always settling on a new target. Words are exchanged, faces are exchanged, the rhythm endures. Like the wandering stroll of the flâneur, each face reflects back, each city noise echoes in an endless judgment.

Obscenity circulates because it is inseparable from communal life. The setting changes, the mask changes, but it persists.