Radu Jude’s social porn-criticism

A review of the film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Alexandru Ionașcu

There was a time in the early 1970s when the emergence of the first aestheticized pornographic productions such as Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones seemed to signal that pornographic acts, let’s call them unsimulated sex, would naturally become part of mainstream cinema. Considering that the beginning of this decade marked the advancement of the rights and sensibilities of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as the legalization of abortion in the Western world, one might have thought that it would lead to a situation where a feature-length art film would include scenes of the protagonists having sex, such as the iconic 1976 In the Realm of the Senses (which scandalized at that year’s Cannes Film Festival). However, pornography has evolved as a type of entertainment separate from cinema, and cinema will keep its distance from this new genre of entertainment emerging from the sexual revolution. As you can guess, Romanian cinema cannot boast of many films containing scenes of unsimulated sex. Such a performance would have been unthinkable even during the transition period, i.e. the 1990s and the first half of the following decade, when society was gripped by a kind of chaotic and fragmented sexual revolution, and artists sought to distance themselves from the hypocrisy of the past regime’s censorship. At best, we can find obscure and completely forgotten productions like 2001’s Star Owners, but transition audiences could see some erotic scenes, but that’s about it, nothing explicit.

Radu Jude’s film is an exposure of the hypocrisies of Romanian society, as one might intuit from the title: sex is with ,,trouble” and any attempt at personal or commercial pornography will lead to a host of problems and confusion.

And in the Romanian urban environment there are many things that can intervene while a couple is having sex, such as extended family relatives wanting stuff taken from pharmacies, this is because housing is built for profit and we have the most crowded housing in the EU, sometimes with 2-3 generations in a two bedroom apartment. After the explicit sequences that last only three minutes, a credits roll telling us the title of the film and showing us a quote that seems rather random from the epos of the Mahābhārata, something about how the world is sinking into the deep ocean of time, i.e. everything is forgotten but first grows old and dies, meaning not just people but all their daily endeavours. In the first part of the film, ”one-way street”, we follow the protagonist Emilia Cilibiu, a teacher at a college in Bucharest, but also the protagonist of a pornographic video with her partner, a video that ends up on the net, going through various streets in Bucharest to get to the meeting with her parents – where she will decide whether she will be a teacher or not. Walking around Bucharest in the second year of the pandemic can be an experience not far removed from the image of a bizarre dystopia, a city with streets being renovated, buildings being renovated, everything being renovated, and everyone moving around as their own car, which means that unless you drive an island car, you’ll have a very difficult time navigating such a sprawling, labyrinthine city. Jude’s lens also captures how the mix of aggressive commercialism of bookmaker ads and MMA fights, confused nationalism with Dacian fantasies, or books of memoirs by former secretaries sold alongside bestselling volumes by right-wing intellectuals seems to forge an aggressive masculinity, with drivers, especially of 4X4 minivans, always prone to verbal aggression, while many don’t want to comply with anti-pandemic measures. 

A significant portion of the first half of the film catches Emilia Cilibiu waiting at traffic lights and crossing pedestrian crossings, and the viewer gets a sense of gridlock in a city where everything seems to flow according to its own logic, where people never have time and you wonder how anyone can get from point A to point B when the narrow sidewalks are occupied by cars? Then, the daily violence produced by inequality, deprivation push people to react aggressively in shopping malls, while owning a car to get anywhere in Bucharest means social status. Somehow, the film reveals a kind of pornography of post-transition urban life: arcades and currency exchanges occupying the same space with political posters as if it were always an election campaign, pedestrian crossings blocked by bollards, discussions in pharmacies about increasing budgets for intelligence structures at the expense of education and health, discussions in pharmacies about traditional cancer cures or historical buildings left in disrepair. Whoever sees a film directed by Radu Jude for the first time cannot escape the impression that the director is portraying a kind of kaleidoscope of the Romanian urban left and its view of society. The impression is especially visible in the last part of the film, when Emilia Cilibiu has to bear the judgment of parents outraged that their children have seen her in more than erotic poses. In these last forty minutes of the film, we see characters whose lines allude to the texts of right-wing intellectuals, such as the one played by Andi Vasluianu, who does not want the “health dictatorship” (the favourite phrase of anti-vaccine conspiracists in Romania) guilty of injecting fear into “the recent man”. ” A professor who claims to be familiar with the debates of the local left cites Sebastian Țoc’s study on how pedagogy reproduces power relations and cites statistics on the risk of poverty and social exclusion in Romania.  There are also allusions to the imaginary local alt-right, the virtual far-right, with conspiracies such as the ‘pizmodification of men’ or the obsession that a liberal feminist like Mihaela Miroiu is in fact a radical leftist. Played by Katia Pascariu, a member of the political theatre collective who can now be seen in the show ,,ACROBATIONS – 7 days in the life of a country teacher”, teacher Emilia Cilibiu bravely faces a strange and hypocritical judgement, in antithesis with the up-to-date information of the progressive teacher. The teachers of a fictitious school in Bucharest “with tradition” reproduce a hollow and pseudo-scientific discourse (present in the rest of Romanian society), with stupid notions like “the life and mental and physical health of our children”, but also many Caragian allusions: a teacher is named Ghiță Nițescu, the vice-principal is called Niță Ghițescu, a teacher is called Chicoș. In the same twisted logic, the headmistress repeats the authoritarianism about how the teacher “must have irreproachable moral conduct”, i.e. the mantra of all conservatives who deny people the right to live their personal lives as they wish.

However, the themes of part three are also largely reflected in the montage sequences of part two, entitled ”small dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders”, where we don’t retain many details, except for the message Radu Jude insists on, that Romanians have a series of prejudices and operate in a contradictory regime of social camouflage and exposure in private life, or that the entire Romanian society is hierarchically structured and it is believed that not only women must obey men, but also children have to reproduce the wishes of their parents, nature has to make way for concrete constructions of dubious social utility, pedestrians somehow occupy an inferior place in this generalized hierarchy compared to drivers, and even animals have been left by God, as one character expresses it, to be consumed by humans, knowing that “all animals, all things have a purpose from God”. ” In this social stratification, which is so difficult to permeate with democratic values such as equality of opportunity and tolerance, employees are exploited by employers and culture is subject either to capitalist profit and consumerism or to nationalist frustrations that conceal inequality. 

 Some scenes don’t seem to make any particular sense in the film’s discourse, such as the sequence where a guy talks on the phone about how communist security hunted down those who distributed manifestos in the late 1980s, or the students discussing in a restaurant the Japanese students forced to become kamikaze pilots called tokkotai, especially if they were from humanities faculties, because “students from realistic, technical faculties got away with it, students from humanities faculties were considered much less important and didn’t get away with it” – a reference to the marginalisation of the humanities in neoliberalism? In any case, that student who includes Aurel Vlaicu in the category of suicide pilots has an incredible sense of humour. From all the observation thrown at the local left, we don’t know how Radu Jude stands on virtual pornography, a subject that provokes fierce debate and controversy in feminist circles. Judged from the perspective of social criticism, Radu Jude’s film achieves its goal.

If you want to see the first Romanian film with scenes of unsimulated sex, children forced to internalize the male violence of war and episodes of historical sadism under the flag of the European Union, but also fantasies of feminist revenge in which phalocrats are orally raped with a dildo, progressive teachers reciting a porno poem by Eminescu, or the only example where the word “mansplaining” is used in a conservative context (and here Romanian cinema has certainly broken some records), Radu Jude’s film is what you’re looking for. Did I mention that he was awarded the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival? For those who don’t know, the Golden Bear is the German version of the Oscar.

Photo: A screenshot from the official trailer of Radu Jude’s movie

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