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School scene in "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn": Look, that's how we fuck.
Look, this is how we eat.
Photo: Ghetie Silviu / New Visions
Pornhub means well to us.
Right at the beginning of the pandemic, the platform offered its so-called premium access free of charge for explicit erotic content in order to prevent possible collective tension from the prescribed home office.
According to the provider, the number of hits in Corona spring 2020 in Germany rose by 26 percent.
Apparently, Pornhub has been the gateway to the world for many people over the past few months.
Customers of the site looked at what the others were up to in lockdown.
Or showed the others how they did it.
Technically, many of the amateur recordings even before Corona were at the level of the video switches that let us look in the living room and kitchen during the pandemic: Look, that's how we fuck.
Look, this is how we eat.
Sweaty greetings from the bedroom
The problem is: Even if the aesthetic sophistication of both image productions is equally low - the possible entanglements are of course much higher with home porn than with home office after work beer.
The teacher Emi Cilibiu (Katia Pascariu), the main character of the society satire "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" filmed during the Corona summer 2020, has to find out.
Right at the beginning we watch her making a sex film with her husband at home.
Bodies clap against each other in a moderately supple manner, little hymns are stammered on the other's orifices.
Home-porn-aesthetics, a little sweaty greeting from the bedroom to the rest of the world.
But this greeting also reached the parents' council and college of the grammar school where the teacher works.
It is not so clear how the private video came into the world and to Pornhub.
But there is great indignation among those who saw it.
Which may also be due to the fact that dirty images spread the fastest among those who are most upset about them.
That's what you call bigotry.
The teacher now has to get the film that has been circulating from the network and at the same time reassure the parents.
The long
walk of shame
Grandiose, how the Romanian director Radu Jude stages the disproportionate nature of porn jokes and damage limitation: He adds a half-hour passage to the only five minutes long explicit fiddling in which the teacher with a hygienic mask walks through Bucharest and tries on the mobile phone the thing with sex film to clarify.
The little awkward intoxication at the beginning is followed by the long, long
walk of shame
.
From the perception of the post-pandemic state, in which we are at least currently feeling, this is also so overwhelming because director Jude traces the contradicting feelings of the lockdown time: the inner distress, the longed-for happiness of free movement.
We follow the teacher through the streets, shops and amusement arcades, the camera often gleefully revolving around supposed trivialities.
From gray prefabricated buildings to glittering skyscrapers
Where the film initially imitated pornography, it now suddenly opens up and strolls with its audience seemingly aimlessly through a city that veils the prefabricated building style from the old socialist days with a lot of flashing prosperity.
What is obscene? That is the basic question that runs through "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn". While the teacher has to fend off moral reproaches on the cell phone, the camera captures the social contradictions of post-socialist Romania as if by the way. Parked in the middle of the sidewalk was an SUV with huge tires that was twice the height of its smaller owner. The driver of another, wrongly parked car is mobbed with the words "Get out of here before I spit in your informant's face". In a pharmacy, customers talk about the fact that solvent sick people can buy kidneys from children.
The second part of the film does not seem to have any connection with the first. Using a stream of images, it brings together the present and history of Romania - from the Second World War, when Romania made a pact with Nazi Germany and apparently provided willing helpers in the persecution of the Jews, to the now stale optimism about the future. A voice lectures: "When the time of coal-fired power stations is over, we will admire their chimneys just as we do today the pillars of the old temples." We also see a sequence in which the camera zooms from gray prefabricated buildings to flashing skyscrapers, from sooty factories to rotating wind turbines. Everything is rampant - the residues of socialism as well as the dreams of the future of capitalism.
Finally there is a final, cabaret-like passage in which the teacher has to justify herself to parents and teachers for her sex video. For reasons of hygiene, the meeting takes place in the school yard. The usual distance rules apply. But what etiquette should apply? One discusses fellatio and anal intercourse, but quickly ends up with fundamental social issues. The teacher also teaches the children about the Romanian involvement in the extermination of the Jews, not all parents approve of it. "This porn teacher teaches our children about the Holocaust," one complained during the escalating debate. "The teachers are paid by Soros and Bill Gates," someone else curses under the hygiene mask.
"Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" is not a complete experience.
Amateur porn and big city symphony, film essay and Haudruff satire, all of this is disparate in this film, which was awarded the Berlinale Golden Bear in February.
So he makes the social upheavals between pandemic and right-wing populism, the conditions of which he was wrested, part of his narrative.
How free and frivolous a film can feel that has been made under strict hygiene rules.