BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN: Collapse Era Lingua Franca

New York, go check this out at Film Forum starting November 19! 

This review is spoiler-free, which is a pretty straightforward prospect as you get the premise in the trailer and I certainly wouldn’t come between you and the shock of the two moments in the film subject to being classically “spoiled” (the opening and closing couple of minutes). However, we’ll spin through quite a bit of the structure and integral camera work and a few other conceptually-spoiler-y things, so if that ain’t your bag just pop back by after you’ve seen it. We’ll be around 😎

PART I: The Strangely Fixed Gaze

So. Where do you first dip a toe or swing a hook into such a mysterious object? Spinning a wheel, I’ve landed on context and will go from there. Considering a film that is obsessed with the gaze, viewership both consensual and decidedly not, and what happens once a piece of video is forcibly removed from its original intent, I can’t help but wonder… what were the meetings like at Magnolia films as they were trying to decide how to market this capital F Film? It’s been a while since I’ve encountered an end product that is quite this antithetical to its own marketing campaign. This is no zany whiplash-driven tour de force of gonzo filmmaking, but rather nearly slow cinema for much of its run time.

Split into three main sections with a brief fourth, the film’s first 35 minutes follows our bad luck heroine as she traverses the city by foot and vehicle, making various stops for errands or encouragement or phone calls. Emi is constantly on the move, buzzing with an anxiety that is transmitted mostly through her eyes and the overstimulation of the crowded colorful environment, this being squarely a masked-up pandemic film. (It seems like it would feel jarring, or at least too on-the-nose, but it’s seamless!) She’s walking the long plank to her reckoning: a meeting of parents that have overridden the social distancing protocols so they can decide her fate after a private sex tape starring her and her partner shows up online and rudely squirts out all over her students’ phones.

However. The protagonist of this first section is not Emi, it is… us? The camera, and the implied viewer behind it, is center stage here in a dialed-to-11 Altman sort of way. The takes are long and meandering, following Emi as she crosses a busy street or attempts to buy a single Xanax. She nearly always walks out of the frame about halfway through a shot, leaving the eye of the camera to rove aimlessly over the scenery that remains. 

Except it is not aimless — it is exactly the way you or I would gaze around unfamiliar or hostile surrounds if we were only peripherally interested in this haggard, anxious, wildly unfairly put-upon woman before us. There are few to no tracking shots: the camera is planted in place and roams its black eye around from a single point of articulation. The breakdown of familiar filmic visual patterns is disconcerting and potent, if perhaps not fully legible beyond hammeringly calling to mind the act of watching.

The counterpart technique is employed with sound as well; multiple times we are privy to entire conversations of background characters that Emi is clearly not tuned into even as she is center framed. We listen to a detailed conversation among several students discussing kamikaze pilots at a table near her in a sprawling food court while she nervously drinks a coffee and flips through a book, preoccupied and drifting through her own anxiety-fueled time and space.

PART II: We Have Not Memorized Enough To Reckon

I recognize what I’m about to do is very stereotypically American, in other words, making it all about this Glorious (read: Bloody) Soil, but hey, form and content, and who am I to hide my unfortunate red white and blue candle under a bushel?

As many films from… let’s see… more serious countries tend to do, watching this movie made me once again question the ability of an American-made narrative flick to be truly revolutionary. We explored this idea a while back with a series we called PROTEST! RIOT! REVOLUTION!, and I think it really plays out in that case: there are some docs that don’t pull punches, but an American fictional film has got to, in the end, bow to the golden gods or it ain’t getting made. At least one that the stars and stripes will throw as much weight behind as Romania did for BLBOLP.

 In the coming years, how will we (we being whoever bubbles up as the artists and chroniclers of our time) reckon with our latest bout of rather more apparent, if still quite silly and tragically American, fascism? It is such a bone-deep, gravitas-laden thing elsewhere while here, although the damage to certain groups of folks was no less grave, the symbology of the thing was all brash and crass and shock and oceans of directionless outrage* and meaningless grand gestures. There’s a fine line between propaganda that’s effective and propaganda that is laughable, as with all media that is designed to incite a particular outcome (incidentally, along with pornography and religious texts). So too with the combatants’ response.

The middle section of this film — “A Short Dictionary of Signs and Wonders” — is a compendium of atrocities, delights, and errata. To stick with our theme, here, though, we’ll return to American media’s depictions of atrocities. Take the recent Watchmen and Lovecraft Country series, for instance, in one of the first widespread popular media depictions of the Tulsa race massacre. You get the sense of the creators behind these works wishing to take it further, while the Invisible Hand of the studio decrees: “No, that’s far enough.” There is always a silver lining, or a redirection, or an easy way out. Are we more reticent, as American people and writers and artists and filmmakers, to engage in honest depictions of our greatest sins because a true reckoning would bring about a jubilee, a violent redistribution of wealth? A cataclysmic giving-back of the land? And for those who are not afraid, for those who do seek to narrate the past in a way that does not provide easy answers or absolution, the means of production are locked up tight with all the chains the grinding engine and its stewards can forge.

The history of labor, too — the American cinematic machine has never allowed for call-to-arms depictions of class struggle. And it’s certainly not due to the workers, the IATSE strike still being quite prominent and top-of-mind these days. The best we get, lately, is maybe SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, which has to throw on a horse mask to sneak past the powers that be, else it’s all vaseline-lensed and romanticized and subtly cast as hopeless or bound-to-be-diverted, a fight that only an individual can win and only once he’s exited the working class. In BAD LUCK’s Dictionary, we’ve got unvarnished stories about a worker who extracts two teeth due to unmanageable dental costs, then dies from blood poisoning. In this movie, that’s where it ends; if this was an American movie, it would’ve ended with his family starting a foundation to provide dental care to “those who would otherwise” and winning some grandstanded hollow victory.

PART III: What’s Romanian For Conspiracy Theory

I confess I have never seen a Romanian film before this one (a cursory Google search appears to confirm this), so maybe I’m just late to the party. But. This movie has a strange power through its commitment to a fairly rigid structure and its willingness to let things truly blow up within those boundaries. The bizarro-realist style doesn’t waver in Part III: the outdoor space where the Emi’s sentencing takes place is aurally barraged by crickets, sirens, sounds from the street beyond the building, a Rosetta Stone of cell phone chirps, heckling, and one fine soul who laughs out the Woody Woodpecker laugh again and again. One scene in particular at the “trial,” in which the gathered congregants watch the whole three-minute private sex tape, features a nearly minute-long completely static shot… I swear I have never experienced a more progressively hilarious and mortified solo reaction to any other 60 seconds of static cinema.

This final section, observing the parents’ impromptu morality play, brings us back into more culturally familiar territory with a litany of conspiracy theories and don’t-tread-on-me sentiments that have become our collapse era lingua franca:

“Now teachers are paid by Soros and Bill Gates!”

“Your mask, please.” “The muzzle of slaves!”

A theatrical group reading of horrifying scorched earth comments sections!

What do ya know! All roads really do lead home.

 PART IV: It’s Over!

 There’s loads more here; it turns out the oversoul that captivated me this watch through was the form more than the content, so that’s how these particular words on the web trend. But hey, as this movie so forcefully reminds: the viewer is an unavoidable part of the equation, meaning is fluid, and any recorded moment — no matter how intimate — is inevitably plastered on a slide and examined beneath the vicious kaleidoscope of other people.

TL;DR — 7/10 would recommend! 

*A submission on @jtfirstman’s IG secret series installment in November of 2021 comes to mind: “Fuck Trump” — as though this was something to be whispered? As though we didn’t know? As though it had power or does not simply warrant a sad, slow laugh and headshake (as was delivered)? Whew.