Radu Jude is international cinema’s great anarchic satirist, crafting pointedly political films about his native Romania—and, by extension, our universal state of disarray—with a deliriously free-wheeling go-for-broke spirit. On the heels of 2021’s stellar Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, he returns to take a scalpel to our mad modern condition with Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, another formally daring odyssey through his homeland that, with thrilling dexterity and acerbic wit, finds a way to mock crass commercialism, cultural misogyny, corporate greed, worker exploitation, bigotry, social media hate, and the many systems and forces conspiring to crush us all.
As with his prior gem, Jude’s expansive, uninhibited latest (making its US premiere at the New York Film Festival, and running a whopping, if fleet, 164 minutes) defies easy synopsis. In present-day Bucharest, production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) works insane hours driving to and fro at the behest of her film-firm superiors. Her current task is interviewing a collection of men and women who were injured while employed by an Austrian multinational, and who are now candidates for a public-service video that the company is making about the need to abide by safety regulations. Angela perpetually navigates the bustling city in her car, and Jude shoots this action in black-and-white, his camera often static in the passenger seat gazing at her (and out the windshield) as she curses at and flips off the sexist men who honk and harass her.
Her arms covered in tattoos, her body decked out in a glittery dress, and her mouth frequently chewing gum, Angela is a tough and indefatigable laborer who knows she’s being used by her bosses but has no choice but to accept her lot in life. As an outlet, she routinely records TikTok and Instagram videos as her alter-ego Bobita, a profane Andrew Tate-loving male chauvinist reactionary that she brings to life via the platforms’ face filters. In these clips, she brags and slanders in the most profane fashion imaginable, be it proclaiming that she’s "picking up some hot stupid cunts who flocked around my Maserati like they hadn’t seen a car before,” praising Putin and vilifying Zelensky as a “two-dime Jew actor,” and riffing, "A cunt is like four countries: Wet like the UK, split in two like Korea, bloody like the Wild West and glad to be fucked like Romania!"
Angela’s online performance-art character is an ironic expression of national (and global) right-wing extremism, and the opposite of her actual self, who buys books (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) from destitute street sellers and has no compunction about telling her Austrian client Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss) that, when it comes to her usual gigs, “We are exploited. Slaves.” In her car, Angela is, physically speaking, both in constant motion and stuck in the same place, and that dichotomy subtly speaks to her overarching situation. “I don’t want a new cage. I’m staying a free woman,” she tells her beau over the phone, yet freedom is a relative term in a crumbling world where agency is a pricey commodity and nothing makes much sense—epitomized by Angela’s anecdote about a porn star needing, mid-sex scene, to watch Pornhub in order to get himself aroused (“It struck me as apocalyptic”).
Along her daily route, Angela spends time with her mother and argues with a developer about new construction that’s directly on top of her grandmother’s grave; has a messy car tryst with her lover; and visits with a variety of safety-video candidates. At a meeting to decide which one to choose, Doris and the commercial’s director agree that they don’t want the most mutilated nominee (“Too much Tod Browning’s Freaks”) and settle on Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan), a wheelchair-bound man who, through no fault of his own, was hurt in a workplace accident. The cutting joke of this narrative thread is that the company wants Ovidiu to talk about the need to wear a helmet on the job even though such protection wouldn’t have helped him. Moreover, the company’s main point is to shift blame from itself to the injured—a manipulation that becomes clear in the film’s bravura 35-minute finale about Ovidiu’s shoot, in which Jude’s camera never moves.
Interspliced throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World are scenes from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On, which allows Jude to create all manner of biting juxtapositions of that movie’s in-color protagonist (“My life’s been nothing but torment”) and monochromatic Angela—culminating with the latter meeting a woman who might be the fictional former. With a self-consciousness that speaks to his interest in what his images are saying, and how, Jude often slows down his Angela Moves On clips until they’re borderline frozen, their sound going molasses-grade sludgy in the process, to ominous and alarming effect. Then and now, with or without Nicolae Ceaușescu, Bucharest is a cacophonous nightmare of unkind men, put-upon women, and angry, menacing faces. The director’s critique spares nothing and no one, taking aim at the nation’s political corruption, sanitation problems, communist legacy, power-grid failures, rampant crime, labor injustices, and endless advertising, with billboards (“Production or Warehouse Units Available") looming large over even the dead and buried.
Like Angela and her X-rated social media tirades—which she defends by stating “I criticize by way of extreme caricature! I’m like Charlie Hebdo, sucker!”—Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World seethes with righteous anger but channels it through droll absurdity. A director pontificates about cinema’s foundational corporate roots (dating back to the Lumière brothers) and then vows to protect Ovidiu from being mistreated by the company (and his commercial). A silent montage highlights some of the hundreds of crosses decorating a single-lane road, marking the spots where motorists died due to terrible governmental planning, after which Hoss’ Doris unhelpfully suggests that maybe self-driving cars are the answer to the country’s roadway travails. And Angela makes a pit-stop at one of her company’s feature film locations and meets notorious B-movie auteur Uwe Boll, who talks about his real-life boxing match against critics and joins Bobita on-camera to curse off his haters.
Its narrative narrowly focused but its censure wide-ranging and severe, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World reveals a today that’s not so different from yesterday, given that both are drowning in filth, stupidity, avarice, and intolerance. Jude doesn’t just see the end; he recognizes that it’s already here.
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