Cinema Travelogue

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a brazenly iconoclastic political manifesto made by someone who really hates Romanian traffic. It’s a significant improvement from Radu Jude’s previous Golden Bear winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn for being a lot less self-indulgent and having a more fluid narrative arc. The film follows a day in the life of an overworked PA who travels across the overcrowded streets of Bucharest to perform various tasks for her advertising company. Angela’s task consists of interviewing four candidates for a worker safety ad her company is assigned to shoot. Ironically, all four candidates were physically and financially fucked by this company they are auditioning for, yet they signed up for the job because of the financial benefits – a trenchant observation of the symbiosis between large corporate companies and their exploited workers. She was also tasked to pick up film cameras from a studio lot where she met the one and only Uwe Boll on a set of a green-screen-dominated alien movie. The film takes place in the present tense. As one of the most singular and contemporaneous auteurs we have today, it’s funny how his films are so topical it’s already somewhat dated when they actually came out. Dozens of jokes told about the deceased Queen Elizabeth made 2022 feel like a million years ago. Like his previous feature, the film is characterized by ridiculous and real billboard ads in the streets, in-your-face pedestrian-level social observations; silent montages of still images remotely connected to character conversations; and satirical name-drops of figures such as Jean Luc Godard, Mao, and John Lennon amongst so many others. It’s the confluence of these disparate elements where the film resides, where Radu Jude freely plays with his toy box like the rules of cinematic convention have just been rewritten. It’s a signifier of how our current social media culture can bring the likes of Andrew Tate and Goethe on an equal platform.

Mirroring and interrupting the film’s action are interstitial clips of the 1981 film Angela Moves On, which portrays the life of a divorced taxi driver during the reign of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. In addition to the main characters being namesakes, both films can be called vehicular movies, and the stylistic contrast between the two highlights a lot of the film’s implicit messages. The 1981 film is very melodramatic, saturated with sentimental music, and Angela’s life as a working-class woman is embellished with colour, romance, and time for movies after work. While Angela’s life in present terms is inundated with heavy black-and-white photography, dumbfounded workplace politics, traffic arguments, bombastic music to keep her from dying on the wheels, and constant anarchic blabbering as her Andrew Tate filtered alternative ego on Tiktok (she gets a lot of views as well). This contrast is not to condemn the present and reminisce on the good old times but a clever dissection of how films capture our realities. The footage of Angela Moves On is often edited to x0.25 speed for the viewer to notice what we’re watching is just a film – a filtered world. Perhaps Jude’s intention here is to present a Romania as unfiltered as possible – chaos stranger than fiction, a macabrely truthful tapestry that uses the old cityscape as a frame of reference for how far humanity has reached – it’s the end of the world after all.

The conversation from the film feels incredibly fluent. The meeting point between  Angela Moves On and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is the casting of the lead actress from the former, Dorina Lazar, in a surprisingly sweet reprise of the same role. The now 83-year-old is the mother of one of the workers who is permanently paralyzed in his lower half due to an accident caused by the company’s poor working conditions. The film makes wry political twists on her story after the film as the two Angelas share a modest and hilarious conversation before the arrival of her son. It finds candid comfort in Lazar’s senile grace and evokes the haiku Jude referenced at the end of the film, “In this world, we walk on the rooftop of hell gazing at flowers.” Maybe there is still beauty within each of us even if our world is corrupt behind recognition. The same feeling of surprise stems from the inclusion of Angela’s tiktok persona Bobita. The two versions played by the foulmouthed and humanistic Illinca Manoloche mirror one another. You can refer to Bobita as the crystallization of Angela’s exhaustion and anguish, but you can also use Angela’s experience to explain how a figure like Bobita can emerge on the internet.

For all its wild formal experimentations, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World has its heart in the right place. For every devious Andrew Tate filter appearance, there is a lingering close-up of an exploited worker that shows vulnerability behind the camera. In the film’s final unbroken shot that spans 45 minutes, a minute moment almost moved me to tears. After a long-winded argument between the chosen family for the ad and the production company, the music of Vali Sterian starts playing, and the wife leans on the shoulder of her permanently wheel-chaired husband. In the rain, she gently strokes his arm; they share a smile together, along with the old Angela and their daughter – a pleasantly gentle moment amongst all the nonsense the family has been presented with. For all of the film’s sadistic elements, it’s human.