’Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’: Public space, private life

Radu Jude's new film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Golden Bear winner at the recently concluded 71st Berlinale industry event, begins with a quote from Mahabharata's "Shanti Parva". Jude divides the film into three disjointed parts and in the first, he is asking the question, do you even need inadvertently uploaded amateur porn to make the life of a woman living hell? The second part —"Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders"—is a long series of images with one or two lines of narration and this is the portion that would normally throw us off in any other film but not here, for with an endless conveyor belt of pictures and words, Jude sets the tone for the history of civilization and how we've arrived at the place we are today. Jude takes us through a mural of quickly transmuting historic vignettes on topics ranging from truth, bookshelf, competition, kitchen, Christmas, luxury, social distancing, Romanian thinker Mihai Eminescu, family, fiction, folklore, Jesus, love, sex, rape, fellatio, pornography, sidewalk, realism, war, blonde jokes, male and female genitalia, gaze, power, racism et al.