Reporting from the Denver Film Festival.

It opens with sex: Explicit, hardcore sex in the bedroom. The woman before the camera is Emilia (Katia Pascariu), a teacher at a local private school. The man holding the camera is Eugene (Stefan Steel), Emilia’s husband. Looking to spice up a regular evening of rumpy-pumpy, they pull out a camera and have fun. Too bad the video was uploaded to the internet. Now everyone can see it, and that presents a problem for Emilia.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) goes all in. The opening sex scene is as disarming as the scenes to follow: Long, languid tracking shots of Emilia walking through Romanian streets and shops while masked citizens constantly stop to look into the camera. You think that writer/director Radu Jude is stealing shots until an elderly woman walks up to the camera and assaults it with foul language.

The world of Bad Luck Banging is a world of apathy and indifference. And it’s a comedy! Divided into three main sections, Jude uses everything he can think of to expose the rot at the heart of society, a rot that’s been festering for some time. The second section of the film—a dictionary of anecdotes, jokes, and signs—suggests that things may seem like they’re getting worse, but they’ve always been this way. In the third section, a tribunal where the parents of the students put Emilia on trial for her leaked sex tape suggests that bitchery, racism, and anti-Semitism form the heart of their argument, regardless if those three things have anything to do with the matter at hand.

Like his 2018 movie, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Radu has fun exposing the hypocrisy and the bigotry not so dormant in Romanian society. And with Bad Luck Banging, the COVID-19 pandemic, with actors masked and socially distant, adds to the visuals rather than distracts. 

The only drawback is that Radu doesn’t push the envelope enough, or at least in a direction other than absurdity. That might sound like an odd request from a movie that opens with amateur porn and ends with a pissed-off Wonder Woman attacking a group of men with a large dildo, but there you go.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is playing the Denver Film Festival on Saturday, Nov. 6 at 9:15 p.m. and on Tuesday, Nov. 9 at 7:15 p.m.