Babardeala Cu Bucluc Sau Porno Balamuc (2021)

Well, let the bad luck bang.

Like the movie itself, I don’t actually know where to start, but I think starting with porn and ending with Wittgenstein really deserves some consideration.

Let’s first focus on the technical narrative of the film, while it exhibits neo-realistic features with the long shots, real space and the use of natural light, on the other hand it alienates the audience with the people on the street looking at the camera etc. (Brechtian vervremdungseffekt). Although it seems like it focuses on the narrative or the character in its first and third episodes, the main focus of the film is that it often goes out of its way to universalize the subject, disturbing aesthetics and focusing on thematic, didactic and sometimes rhetorical elements. We should not be deceived that it carries the three-act structure that looks like a classical narrative element, as these three episodes are not the result of the introduction and development, on the other hand, we cannot say that it has an episodic narrative. One can easily say that all this deconstruction and other technical aspects include today’s new wave features. The narration of the film, on the other hand, has purely post-modern, even contemporary narrative in terms of showing the absolute impossibility to reach the real meaning itself.

In the first episode we are following our white bunny Emi, more like grayed out with her boring outfit on the streets of Bucharest, though not like an Antonioni woman of course. The fact that everything is advertised and we tend to materialize all, the moral dilemma that started even in billboards / advertisements (will be mentioned later), nevertheless the city and its inhabitants are far from civilization; their intolerance fades, and the economic situation worsens, closed shops and movie theaters – nothing else but a mirror of the state the country is in. When we add the political messages the movie includes, could the dilapidated buildings be the result of real socialism? The deafening city cacophony; horns, bulldozers, sirens – it seems that the bells are ringing for the city as well as for Emi, who is on the verge of a scandal.

The second episode though distorts the already clunky thematic axis completely and abandons its character and narrative. Considering once more that this is a contemporary narrative, I believe that it is included in the rhetoric section mentioned above (also it reminds of Dogville); anecdotes, signs and wonders – video art meets cinema, just like the precursors of sharp satire and meta-cinema, is certainly not concerned with being directly understood or directly related to the film, with its narrative particles that contain didactic elements. But when we look at the big picture / the movie in general, it is possible for us to catch semantic elements of course. For example, Medusa, who mirrors the ugliness of society and its corruption (supported as well by the El Greco reference) in the first episode as well in the second, she’s turning us – the viewer into stone together with Romania’s already indifferent / petrified society, or doing the same with The Anatomy of Rembrandt, diving in the very heart of the Romanian society.

In the third episode, Emi’s sexual performance is interrupted for the second time in her personal – private life, where she is ‘supposed to be’ 100% free of her own will and consent (the first was interrupted by the nanny at the door during sex) and this time the ‘voyeurs’ are the prototype representatives of the society – most of them ignorant – immoral-moral parents from the church, army, bourgeois, intellectual (the only makes-sense character), conspiracy theorist, male entourage, foreign/rich immigrant, media, educator…. The fact that they are all over exaggerated and even cartoon figures from clothes to masks is one of the weak stomachs of the movie, though it gives the message maybe too clearly. Although it is necessary to be so extreme sometimes in order to reflect the tragicomic nature of the to-be-laughed-at society at its best, the didactic messages and the repetitive emphasis of immorality seems to hinder the quality of the film. Otherwise, as it already incidate the message very well; it’s not a couple’s private sex life that should really be scandalous; if we start with the second episode; the brutality, injustices, ignorances committed by corrupt communism, capitalism, the church and the army… This is a mirror of society that degenerates between two most-googled objects – oral sex and empathy, or  two versions of the same newspaper, long live Stalin and long live Hitler, let the audience decide which one has less or more supporters. The other part that seems pretty weak is the 3. ending. It’s something I love that it has 3 possible endings, but as mentioned, it already shouts the message so obviously that the third one, going to the Marvel universe, is no longer needed . Plus one more thing beautiful is the voyeurism which Hitchcock gave us trouble with – the fact that voyeurs here are used as meta again and are all destroyed.

We often see contemporary brave, critical, extremely frank and even arrogant works in today’s cinema world, that’s a fact. However, with Loony Porn’s structure and content, it’s so exciting to see something both punk and even avant-garde art piece still be done today, seriously!

Nil Birinci