Film Forum

3:20 & 9:10 ONLY

WINNER – GOLDEN BEAR
(Top Prize)
Berlin Film Festival 2021

A cri de coeur that unfolds like a mashup of Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Waters. BAD LUCK BANGING is “a riotously bonkers film that throws decorum in the trash to reveal the hypocrisy of the powerful as the true vulgarity” – Sight & Sound. When a sex tape produced by a school teacher gets leaked to the internet, it engenders hysterical outrage from her colleagues. Director Radu Jude, shooting on the streets of Bucharest during the pandemic, eviscerates common assumptions regarding obscenity. His references include the myth of Medusa and Perseus, the predations of Romanian tyrant Ceaușescu, and the words of the nation’s beloved poet, Mihai Eminescu.

2021     106 MINS.     ROMANIA / LUXEMBOURG / CROATIA / CZECH REPUBLIC MAGNOLIA PICTURES     IN ROMANIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Warning: Contains several scenes with explicit sexual content. But it’s a comedy.

Reviews

“A bold, hilarious take on society’s awful state. The brilliance of (the film), Radu Jude’s astonishing Berlinale Golden Bear-winning satire, comes from a most unusual combination by jamming together two very different kinds of movies that shouldn’t work in harmony, but end up making perfect sense. The filmmaker’s bold approach suggests what might happen if someone spliced a late-period Jean-Luc Godard essay film into the middle of THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, with such mesmerizing results that you just have to roll with it. One of European cinema’s most unclassifiable auteurs has delivered the bitter pill we deserve. It’s a daring and hilarious cinematic gamble that gives a justifiable middle finger to the sheer inanity of the Western world - and it’s also an unpredictable blast, an angry editorial cartoon that invites us into its outrage… In Jude’s eyes, the world is a dead serious place, but it’s also a sick joke.”
– Eric Kohn, IndieWire

“An irreverent contemporary satire. A provocative and unapologetically profane Buñuelian prank. An absurdist time capsule. Jude presents three possible outcomes to this grotesque mock trial, each one more preposterous than the last, before freeze-framing on the film’s most blasphemous image yet (a high bar, considering all that’s come before).”
– Peter Debruge, Variety

“A scathing social satire about sex, lies and videotape. A scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming. Formally daring as cinema… (the film) will divide viewers and critics with its tonally jarring mix of fact and fiction, explicit imagery, salty language, bawdy comedy and social commentary. Rude remains a boldly original voice in modern European cinema, with serious things to say and increasingly adventurous ways of saying them. The film’s second act (is) a quick-fire montage of horror and hypocrisy.  (Rude) mischievously offers three alternative endings, including an orgiastic revenge fantasy worthy of John Waters. It’s not subtle, but it is deliciously demented. A bumpy ride, audacious and witty.”
– Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter