Radu Jude, Romanian cinema’s foremost exponent of punky, subversive audience-baiting provocation, returns with the gloriously titled Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. And as may be expected from the director whose last movie was the eye-bogglingly explicit 2021 Berlin Golden Bear-winning satire Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, this picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it.
Like Bad Luck Banging, the film is divided into chapters: the first follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache, excellent), an overworked production assistant interviewing potential subjects for a workplace safety film for Doris, an Austrian client (Nina Hoss). Captured in unsentimental black and white, much of this unfolds as a profile shot of Angela as she burns around the streets of Bucharest in her minivan, blasting music to stay awake. She has a satirical TikTok alter ego, the crass, ultra-macho obscenity-spewing Bobiță – “I criticise by way of extreme caricature,” she explains, “like Charlie Hebdo.” The second chapter, filmed in a single, static take, shows the subject of the safety video as his spirit is broken and his story is gradually moulded to fit the corporate message.
Within these chapters are further mini-digressions; a throwaway comment about a perilous stretch of highway is followed by a montage of roadside memorials to lives lost. And Angela’s story is punctuated by clips from another film, Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On (1981), a portrait of a female taxi driver in Bucharest. Themes of worker exploitation are woven throughout, but the takeaway here is the unpredictable anarchy of execution and a bracing explosion of ideas and anger.
