Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: The Sociosexual Kobayashi Maru

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is maybe the art-housiest of every art-house movie I’ve seen in at least the past ten years. Its Romanian setting is just familiar enough but also just different enough from what we’re used to seeing in movies set in the Anglosphere to make this American viewer feel slightly off-balance the whole time, but its story ultimately transcends its nationality. If its ultimate points are unsubtle, at least seeing and hearing them made in an at-once familiar yet obviously different cultural context offers an illuminating perspective shift–and leaves a piercing question.

We begin with a prologue. I’m going to drop a spoiler about this prologue in the event that you go to see the movie. It looks a lot like pornography. What we’re seeing is a sex tape made by a married couple who have found some time for play. It’s very explicit. ¹ There is a point later on in the movie when you the viewer will be tasked with remembering that prologue, and asking yourself whether it made you uncomfortable, and if so, why. After all, it’s one thing to say that you’ve no problem with whatever consenting adults do behind closed doors. It’s a little different to actually confront what that looks like.

In the movie’s first act we learn that the woman from the sex tape, Emi, is a teacher at a prestigious middle school in Bucharest. What her mostly off-screen husband Eugen does isn’t quite clear, but the quality of her suit and what seems to be a live-in nanny helping them with childcare suggests they are economically well-off. Emi also wears a pale blue NV95 face mask, as the movie is set in the time of COVID. She’s not perfect in her mask-wearing habits (sometimes she lets it sag, exposing her nose and mouth) but seems to do better than most of the other people she encounters in her stroll around Bucharest’s marketplaces.

As Emi wanders about, she speaks with Eugen and the nanny on her cell phone and pays a home visit to the headmistress of the school. Thus, we learn that Eugen unwisely uploaded the sex video from the prologue to a porn site, and it has gone viral. Emi is recognized and the parents of her middle school students are demanding that she explain herself. We’re left to wonder if Emi is doing all of this walking around Bucharest not to run errands, but rather simply to work out nervous energy; she has nothing else to do before the confrontation.

Often at the end of a particular scene, the camera lingers on facades of various buildings, and during the scenes, the microphones pick up heavy loud noises of traffic and people having disagreements (sometimes Emi is one of the disputants; most of the stray remarks, near-soliloquies, or arguments display a blend of ignorance and hostility). One suspects the movie is building up to a sermon about the ugliness of a modern consumeristic society, but I think that’s not quite right. More on this in a bit. But it’s quite likely that the Bucharest Chamber of Commerce will not be happy with the first act of this movie at all.²

The movie’s second act is very arty. It’s billed as a primer on various concepts and words in Romanian culture. For what feels like forty minutes, we get short vignettes illustrating concepts like “the church” and “money” and “pornography.” Eventually, it should dawn on the viewer that what’s being illustrated are things that are thought to be somehow obscene. You might disagree that this or that thing is obscene, but you are shown a reason why someone, a someone who might be called “patriarchal Romanian society” does. What went through my head when I was puzzling through this lexicon was a sense of anxiety, a fear that there was no way she could prevail. After all, the fact that she not only had sex but enjoyed it would simply be too much for certain kinds of people to tolerate.

After the lexicon is completed, we move on to the movie’s third act, when Emi sits in a socially distanced hearing at school. She is forced to sit while the video is played for the assembled parents. The parents then interrogate her, first about the video and later about her activities as a teacher. Emi claims she has no idea how the video was posted to the internet and refuses to apologize for making it. It’s poignant here to have filmed the movie while COVID is still in circulation, because it offers a convenient way to demonstrate that as the tensions of the exchange rise, the masks of the participants come off. Some expose themselves as willfully ignorant, or as bigots, or just plain mean. They are not unanimous in condemning Emi; some more westernized thinkers, who map as “liberal” to the American viewer, seem to defend Emi, but they ultimately prove as self-absorbed as the others, and perhaps even more useless.

Ultimately the plot comes down to a vote whether Emi will keep her job or not. The more liberal parents and the more conservative parents spend a lot of time talking past one another with verbose, but angry, non-comprehension, and then after failing to persuade anyone, they each go ahead and vote exactly as they wanted to do all along. But what’s the result? The filmmakers offer you, the viewer, a choice! I’ll not spoil any of the three different endings. But lest the idea of a three-ending movie seems like just too much to swallow, let’s give some thought to the bigger point the filmmakers are making, and perhaps the idea of offering three different endings won’t seem so indecisive.

It’d be easy to say that all of the lingering shots of the edifices of generally tacky-looking Eastern European shops from the first act of the film develop anti-consumerist tropes now familiar to those in more Western areas of avant-garde cinema from the 1950s and 1960s. You’ve surely seen many movies developing ideas like things that seem permanent and important aren’t. Perhaps these are notions that need to be developed in Romanian cinema and just haven’t been yet. But it’s hard to believe that, more than thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as accomplished a filmmaker as director Radu Jude thought those notions were somehow new territory.

So, I wonder this isn’t really feminism: when we see tacky currency exchange shops, men profanely refusing to move their illegally parked cars, and are deafened by passing trains, maybe the message is society has become this. It calls itself morally good, but the truth is it’s malicious and self-destructive. It ultimately benefits almost no one. It calls itself the bearer of a beautiful tradition, but its real works are ugly and cheap. And most importantly, women like Emi, who are smart and educated, who do not bow to the demands of the old world’s patriarchy, and most of all women who do are unashamed of their own sexualities, don’t really fit in to that society. And society hasn’t yet fully adopted the newer ideals, of which Emi becomes an aspirational avatar.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn persists on its theme of social discord, of old and new visions of the world co-existing deeply unharmoniously, for its duration. The filmmakers were probably thinking mostly about their own culture, about Romania. But particularly in the third act, it became very hard for me not to think that it was close to overt commentary about contemporary American political and cultural discourse. And a viewer from the UK would probably feel that the movie spoke to their experiences of cultural conflict. I suspect so would viewers from, Japan, or India, or Brazil, or any other nation. It’s universally true that society is changing, rapidly and dramatically, all over the world.³ Modern technology catalyzes this, the important changes are happening in peoples’ minds. In some peoples’ minds. Some embrace democracy; others question whether it’s really the best choice. So too with capitalism. So too with feminism.

In the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, we learn that the protagonist Captain Kirk had previously cheated on something called the Kobayashi Maru test as a cadet. The test tasks the cadet with simulated command of a starship in a difficult situation. Every decision the “commander” makes backfires or fails and inevitably ends with the destruction of the starship. The test doesn’t look for whether the cadet can find a way out of the predicament: they can’t; it’s been created to be a no-win scenario. The Kobayashi Maru test is one of the test subject’s resiliency, ingenuity, and most of all, their character. Kirk hacked the computer that runs the test so that there was a solution, justifying himself later by saying he doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a no-win scenario.

Returning to the subject of this review, when Emi does things that modern people do–like taking pleasure in sex, displaying her intelligence and capabilities, while also being a woman, and not even pretending to apologize for any of it–she gets thrown into conflict with the deep and powerful values of people who haven’t really moved past the older ways. People with serious flaws, although not all of them seem to have evil hearts so much as no experience of modernizing their own thoughts. When those worlds collide, is there any way Emi can prevail? Or has she fallen into a cultural Kobayashi Maru?

1. There’s an interesting meta-question here about whether filming what’s portrayed as a marital sex tape between actors who can’t possibly be merely simulating the sex acts shown meets your definition of “pornography.” Seems to me making that distinction requires divining the intent of the filmmaker somehow, but that is something of a rabbit hole.
2. Or maybe it’s just padding the time of the movie out, which has been known to happen with low-budget films, but I don’t think so here.
3. The industrialized world, at least.