Romanian film “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”, which won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival early in last year, is quite bold and naughty to the core. Right from its deliberately salacious opening scene, the movie will catch you off guard, and that is just the beginning of how it frequently challenges us from the beginning to the end as handling many different subjects besides the main issue of its very unfortunate heroine.

The movie consists of three parts, and the first part gradually establishes the ongoing plight of a young schoolteacher named Emi (Katia Pascariu). As shown during the opening scene, she and her husband shot a sex video just for their private fun, but, alas, their sex video file was somehow leaked on the Internet not long after that, and now she will have to confront the parents of her students during the upcoming evening meeting.

While it does not delve much into how her sex video happened to be exposed on the Internet, the movie does not hide at all the content of that sex video from us. As far as I can see from the film, it looks like the two performers on the screen really went through a series of explicit sexual acts, and I can only admire how willing director/writer Radu Jude and his two performers were to go all the way for pushing boundaries. Yes, the result is basically your average porn clip, and I still wonder whether this is really necessary due to its inherent voyeuristic quality, but it surely shocks and embarrasses us as much as intended while somehow generating some gaudy sense of humor.

Once it grabs our attention via the opening part, the movie becomes far less sensational as leisurely rolling from one tangential moment to another along with its troubled heroine. When she drops by a flower shop, she is approached by some male stranger who seems to be interested in getting closer to her, but we wonder whether he knows her via that leaked sex tape. When she later drops by the residence of her direct boss who is sympathetic to her, the movie pays some attention to what is going on among the family members of her direct boss, and we get a little amusing moment as our heroine listens to one of these family members for a while.

In case of several outdoor scenes, they almost feel like the clips from a documentary film as cinematographer Marius Panduru’s camera calmly looks around streets and people. I have no idea on how much of these moments were actually planned in advance, but their considerable verisimilitude is impressive on the whole, and we come to get several small slices of life from the Romanian society going through the current COVID-19 pandemic era. Many people on streets do wear a mask, but I could not help but notice that some of them do not wear their masks that properly, and that made me wince more than once during my viewing.

The second part of the film is a forthright video essay which presents various subjects ranging from history to sex. I must confess that I do not entirely understand the whole picture of this part, but I was often amused by how the movie cheerfully presents these subjects one by one in alphabetical order like a little encyclopedia. The movie is surely determined to encompass all these things presented during its second part, and you may come to admire its ambitious attempt more.

As entering its third part, the movie eventually goes back to its heroine’s ongoing circumstance, and that is where many of subjects presented in its second part come to resonate via the accumulating absurdity around her. After flatly presenting herself in front of the parents of her students, she tries to make some points on her privacy and rights, but many of them are already determined to judge and then persecute her, and some of them are quite rude while never hiding their prejudice and bigotry at all. I guess these very unpleasant characters represent a number of negative aspects of the Romanian society, and they will probably make you think twice about visiting Romania.

As our heroine and those parents pull and push each other during next 30 minutes, the movie skillfully dials up the level of its comic tension, and then it catches us off guard again. I will not go into details here for not spoiling any of your entertainment, but I can tell you instead that I chuckled a lot as watching the very last shot of the film, which is another social satiric jab to be appreciated.

By the way, I must tell you that the movie has two different versions. Compared to the original version, the “censored” version prepared by the director himself covers up all those sexually explicit elements in the film, and that is the one which is being currently shown in South Korean theaters. I watched both of these two versions, and I assure to you that you will be less shocked and embarrassed in case of the “censored” version, but I also must point out that the overall dramatic impact of the film is naturally decreased in comparison – especially in case of what is so uproarously shown at the very end of its third act.

In conclusion, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”, which was incidentally selected as the Romanian entry for Best International Feature Film Oscar in last year, is definitely not for everyone, but I recommend you to watch it if you are looking for something daring and different. I am not sure whether it succeeds as well as its director wishes, but it is quite unforgettable to say the least, and I guess that is a sort of achievement.