Director: Radu Jude
Writer: Radu Jude
Stars: Nina Hoss, Dorina Lazar, Uwe Boll
Synopsis: An overworked and underpaid production assistant has to shoot a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement that forces him to re-invent his story to suit the company’s narrative.
After delivering what I consider his worst work to date with the Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn, Radu Jude corrects his wrongs with an ambitious, complex, and experimental (even somewhat moving in its latter half) picture in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, which might be one of his best works to date. It is playful and testing in its satirical nature while implementing some metatextual passages that comment on capitalism, the 2020s influencer era, and Romania’s history (both past and present) without feeling self-righteous or overly pretentious.
Plenty of filmmakers have been inspired by the legendary and inspirational French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (who sadly passed away last year; his last piece of work making the festival rounds throughout 2023). Many have openly spoken about his influence in their respective works; like Tarantino, Jarmusch, Soderbergh, and even Hartley, just to name a few. However, none have acquired the persona or similar stylistic visual representation of two of Europe’s most fascinating filmmakers: Leos Carax and Radu Jude. While the former has been covering the grounds for a few decades now, the latter is now rising into popularity because of his 2021 feature, Back Luck Banging or Looney Porn – an absurdist take on our frustrations during the pandemic era, privacy, sex, labeling, and social media.
That film wasn’t my cup of tea. Its satire didn’t flow as easily as Jude wanted, ending in a confounding and mixed experience. However, his latest work might be at the top of his filmography. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, a title that has plenty of meanings (all of them relating to life in the 21st century), is a film that explores the screen-infected minds of modern society – while questioning the reasons why such a phenomenon has transpired – as well as Romania’s history (both present and past). And it is all viewed through the eyes of two women named Angela. The first one we see is from a 1980s Romanian film, Angela Moves On, played by Dorina Lazar. Jude often intercuts his movie with that one to create a parallel portrait of how the world has remained the same and changed in different aspects.
Angela, played by Lazar, is a taxi driver who spends her day driving around Bucharest during the Ceausescu reign. Via an intertitle, Radu Jude mentions that his film and Angela Moves On are “in conversation” with one another – finding their connections through the city’s poverty and the misogyny that both leads face during their journeys. In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Angela (played by Ilinca Manolache with an oozing personality) is cut from the same cloth yet is far more rebellious on her terms. She’s a sleep-deprived and overworked production assistant. Some Austrian entrepreneurs have hired the company she works for to do a safety video for their Romanian team. What we mostly see throughout the course of Jude’s film is Angela’s lengthy and draining workdays, which range from fourteen to eighteen hours. In essence, she’s trapped without time to do anything for herself.
Her job requires a lot of multitasking, as she drives around Bucharest, like Lucian Bratu’s, doing errands for her company’s heads. The main thing she has to do is look for people who have been disabled at their workplace. She records those willing people saying that it was their fault instead of their bosses and they didn’t take the necessary safety precautions. In exchange, they receive five hundred euros. It’s completely unjust and part of the satire that Jude wants to play with in his latest work. How does paralysis or dismemberment equivalent to that little money? Why would you take responsibility for something your bosses could have avoided in the first place? Jude plays with this notion of unfair and harsh working conditions with these scenes, Angela’s unpaid overtime, witty and hilarious lines by her bosses like “Respect the rules, because if you don’t, you’re f*cked”, as well as the constant ringing of the protagonist’s phone – often suggesting that there’s another favor being asked.
Angela is a project-based worker, so she needs these calls to come in. But at what cost? Each time she’s in her car, a feeling of angst is felt. She roams around for her company’s sake and not her activities. Her time is limited, but when her company needs her, Angela needs to go out of her way to solve their problems. One of the few things we see her do to take the edge off is making videos with her foul-mouthed persona named Bobita – aggressively saying plenty of obscenities about women and their privates (think of it like an Andrew Tate-like persona). These scenes are an odd combination where Jude puts plenty of themes in a blender to see what emerges. What does it all amount to? This amalgamation of scattered ideas paves the way for a purposefully fragmented vision that blends time and setting all together. And that comes with the inclusion of the aforementioned Lucian Bratu film.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is set between two different timelines, films, and societies (the modern and the haunted past). Through this double-sided lens, we see the director’s farcical vision and despair-addled reflection of today’s political and societal norms. He takes absurdism and creates controversial cinema with it – an element many filmmakers shy away from due to their incapability to make it work effectively. Jude laughs and worries about our pointless ways of living; desperate to make sense of it all, he curates unique pieces of work that transcend its irony and knack for exaggeration. Through the eyes of Angela, both Jude and Bratu’s, we see how the world changes in its aesthetics, yet morality and desperation stay the same. And it feels that nobody has an answer to why this tends to happen as the years go by, not even Angela in that cinematic realm or Jude in the real world.
That’s why there are jokes about everything – religion, the royal family, politicians, TikTok, and even the intellectuality of Europeans. All of this on paper sounds like a mess (or, as we Puerto Ricans say, “un mogoyo de tres pares). But, in the hands of a filmmaker who doesn’t fear letting his thoughts go loose and express all of his worries, it ends up as a fruitful and thought-provoking project with plenty of anomalous layers.
