Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Radu Jude is not a new filmmaker by any means, having received awards at major international film festivals ever since his debut in 2009. But it seems as if he's more and more often penetrating the awareness of American movie watchers. Partially, it's the flowery, descriptive, and to the point construction of the titles for a few of his recent works, which paint an unforgettably vivid mental image: I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and now Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. They serve not only as excellent marketing, inviting you to investigate their proposition further, but they also deliver on the stated premise, taking the title as a thesis around which his pitch black, laugh out loud satire is constructed.

This effort has a fresh style which it deploys as a bitter attack on late stage capitalism. As a Romanian film, the experience is naturally rooted in its home country, following Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache) as she drives around Bucharest to fulfill the demands of her job as a production assistant for a work safety video. She's overworked and underpaid (when she's paid at all), and spends an incredible amount of time sitting in traffic as she criss-crosses the city, struggling to stay awake in light of her frequent late nights busting her ass to survive. The degree to which the modern world sucks is further highlighted by Jude's decision to juxtapose her day with scenes from 1982's Angela merge mai departe (a.k.a. Angela Goes On). On the surface alone, the two films make a strong point. The earlier film is about a taxi driver, showcasing how clean and orderly and open the roads were at the time. Meanwhile, our Angela can barely move a few meters without needing to stop, often finding herself in rundown and dangerous sections of the city. She mentions driving for Uber, a company notorious for abusing its drivers while providing none of the benefits taxi drivers enjoy. Both visit the same exact locations, throwing their dialogue across the decades into sharp relief, even before that concept is literalized about 45 minutes in.

But its application to the broader world is undeniable. Not only due to the global reach of Uber's campaign to destroy the taxi industry, but also the way Angela blows off steam. Any fragment of downtime she can steal is a chance to use TikTok's janky "bald and goateed dude" filter to create short videos as "Bobita", a crude, thoughtless, misogynistic womanizer who posts up any old place and claims to be jet-setting around the world. It's simultaneously a creative endeavor, a primal scream, and an attempt to gain recognition, the latter of which she at least has amongst her friends and co-workers, although may expand after getting Uwe Boll (playing himself) to join her for one in which they tell their haters to "Fuck off". Stuck in a menial job which pretends to have a positive impact on the lives of people permanently disabled by a workplace accident, left with no time in which to pursue her dreams, she may as well try to find her place online by posting into the void and hoping the world takes notice.

Make no mistake, though, she hasn't given up on life. She embodies the idea that in a world that's falling apart, what matters most is how we treat each other. Sure, she's constantly frustrated and angry, yelling back at other drivers who cut her off or scream misogynistic threats through her window, complaining that her employer's parent company is a faceless multinational from Austria, and desperately seeking a chance to sleep. But when confronted with an old woman begging, she immediately and wordlessly digs out some cash to hand over, proceeding to chastise the shop owner for angrily chasing her away. With each family she meets for the safety video, she takes the time to get to know them and makes clear she's rooting for them, despite her lack of power. She picks up her mother to pay their respects to her grandmother at the cemetery. Despite all her stress and the flurry of activity that defines her days, she still finds humanity within herself and fellow people discarded or ignored by society.

Which is the other major statement on which Jude is focused: how the government and the free market are failing its citizens most in need. Everyone Angela visits mentions how badly they need the money promised to the family selected for the final video. One woman tells her the power's just been cut; another family is unable to afford to heat their home. Angela herself is fighting with a company that purchased the land on which her grandmother is buried, and is planning to exhume and rebury her. All of this culminates with the final part of the movie, in which we see the process of filming the work safety video in a thirty-five minute section composed of two long, unbroken takes. The whole time, the camera is locked on the former employee and his family, listening to the chaos and direction being thrown at them from the crew along with their side conversations, all of which belie their true goal of creating a video blaming their workers for any injuries sustained on the job, despite how demonstrably unsafe and uncared for the site is.

The unmistakable conclusion is an unsavory one: in some ways, things are worse now than under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The key word there is "some", a detail ignored by some people from older generations Angela converses with throughout her day. These interactions slowly reveal Angela's general politics, and she'd rather rather struggle in a free democracy than thrive under a strongman. However, the presence of multinational corporations raise the specter of having traded a local authoritarian for a modernized, foreign-based version. At least under Ceaușescu, there was a central figure to blame, a villain to rage against who was clearly the source. The parameters of society may have been suffocating, but they were relatively clear. When faceless companies fill that role, your life is dictated by the needs for generating a profit, which is then played off as neutral despite the way it saps one's dignity. Is that any better?

The majority of the film is shot on 16 mm black & white film, gorgeous and thoughtfully composed and richly textured. Yet a world drained of color is more cold, more distant, more alienating. Especially when contrasted with the footage from Angela merge mai departe, full of warm colors and open spaces. Which brings with it a paradox: Ceaușescu enacted widespread censorship, rendering the images produced from within it untrustworthy when compared with contemporary media. The idea is driven home by the other times we see color images: Angela's "Bobita" TikToks, and in the final section when we witness through a camera the selected family being filmed. Both present distorted views of the world, implying the only reality is that which we can ourselves experience, contrary to the assumptions made by a highly networked global society.

The stylistic elements of Jude's work are unmistakable. Around two-thirds of the way through, there's a five minute sequence in which he wordlessly shows probably one-hundred shots of roadside memorial crosses lasting three seconds each, at which point I become confident this was the director of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. I appreciate when a director has an approach of their own, distinguishing their output from the cornucopia of media produced each year. It's a calling card, and a sign you're in the presence of someone thinking hard about their art, even if it doesn't always work for you.

And this won't work for everyone. There are long shots of Angela driving alone, the only dialog being short bursts of her fury at other drivers. While frequently funny, the comedy is often quite dark or in poor taste. Our protagonist is incredibly bitter and unafraid to show it, although it rarely gets her anywhere. The movie manages to be fairly daring for how much it ultimately takes on recognizable forms, which results in taking some effort to get into the right headspace. Your reward is a very enjoyable film which doubles as a rich and deeply layered text with much to say about the human condition and modernity and globalism and its country of origin.