Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn review – absurdist provocation in Covid-torn Romania

The mock trial of a teacher puts history on the stand in Radu Jude's peculiar revenge porn story - but what is it telling us?

Radu Jude's new film, with its rambling and self-consciously inelegant title, is an absurdist provocation, or an obsessive-compulsive disruption, like the photograph of the dadaist Benjamin Peret insulting a priest in the street.

It's about the anger and frustration of Romania, and maybe of all of us, at the Covid outbreak, and our creeping suspicion that standard-issue human unhappiness will survive even when, or if, the disease is eradicated. Most of all, this is about porn, and even when it is not about porn, it is somehow still about porn and the porn aesthetic of social media. There is a bleak humour here, but also a kind of redundancy: the film constitutes a huge comedy pratfall that isn't perhaps every bit as funny and meaningful as it was supposed to be.