"Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn" written by Gregory Mann

(Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, BFI London Film Festival, Friday 08 October 2021 18:00 Curzon Soho Cinema, Screen 1)

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp

"Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn"

Emilia (Katia Pascariu), a school teacher, finds her career and reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is leaked on 'The Internet'. Forced to meet the parents demanding her dismissal, Emilia refuses to surrender to their pressure.

The first lockdown ended in Romania at the end of May. The second wave of 'Covid-19' comes at the beginning of July. The number of cases is rising. How to interact with people. When we were young, we really admired all the crazy shoots we read about; "Way Down East", "Aguirre", "Apocalypse Now". We still admire them, but we're too weak. We should not risk the life or health of anybody when it comes to shooting. No film in the world is worth someone contracting even a common cold. All characters wearing masks. Wearing a mask in severe heat for 12 hours a day can be horrible. So, it's quite disappointing to have a few people every day taking off the mask whenever they can. We see it as a lack of respect, a kind of 'Fuck You', We don’t care about anyone else, we want to feel good even if we can infect you. This sometimes make the atmosphere tense. The masks are part of our daily life and the film captures this moment, to find the anthropological aspect of the mask-wearing. If you go down on the street during this time, the signs that remained, posters for concerts, empty restaurants, and so on and so forth are already signs of a non-existent reality. Cinema has this possibility to capture things, to capture the signs of the time passing, to make a capsule of the moment in many ways.

It's about real-life stories from Romania and other countries, of teachers being expelled from schools where they're teaching because of what they're doing in their private lives; live-cam sex chat or posting amateur porn recordings on 'The Internet'. The discussions is so heabted, it makes us think that although the topic seems trivial and shallow, there must be a lot more behind it if reactions to it are so powerful. The film has three parts which engage each other in poetic ways, understanding poetic according to Malraux’s definition. Without doubt all true poetry is irrational in that it substitutes, for the established relation of things, a new system of relations. While the film title is mostly self-explanatory, it's subtitle, a sketch for a popular film, can benefit from an explanation. Malraux once noted that Delacroix, though affirming the superiority of the finished painting over the sketch, kept many of his sketches, whose quality as works of art he considered equal to that of his best paintings. The film looks like if it's form is left open, unfinished, like a sketch. The film could be easy like a summer breeze and because of it's tabloid-like topic. But it's not a real popular film. Only a sketch of a possible.

What's obscene and how do we define it? We're used to acts which are much more obscene, in a way, than small acts like the one that set off the uproar we see in the film. The film clashes these two types of obscenity, and to see that the one so-called obscenity in the porn video is nothing compared with what's around us, but that we don’t pay attention to. The film tells a contemporary story, a small one, a little story. If history and politics are part of the film, that's because the story itself has a deeper meaning if we see it in a historical, societal and political context. Obscenity is the theme of this film and the viewers are constantly invited to compare the so- called obscenity of a banal amateur porn video with the obscenity around us and the obscenity we can find in recent history, whose traces are all around. So, the viewers should make this montage operation.

Montage will be precisely one of the fundamental responses to this problem of constructing historicity. Because it's not oriented towards simplicity, Montage escapes theologies, and has the power to make visible the legacies, anachronisms, contradictory intersections of temporalities that affect each object, each event, each person, each movement. Thus, the historian renounces telling a story, but in doing so, succeeds in showing that history cannot be, without all of the complexities of time, all the archaeological strata, all of the perforated fragments of destiny. "Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn" delivers an incendiary mix of unconventional form, irreverent humor and scathing commentary on hypocrisy and prejudice in our societies.