Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

Impressive, darkly satirical piece from the streets of Bucharest - Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World review by PD

This highly original, darkly satirical piece from Radu Jude uses the traffic-jammed streets of Bucharest as a nightmare vision of modern life. Our guide through this hellscape is Angela (Ilinca Manolache - fabulous), an overworked and distinctly under-slept production assistant. Angela is conducting at-home auditions with several working-class employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job, one of whom will then be selected to appear in a safety advisory video and share their story as a cautionary tale-meets-ass-covering gambit. The film’s plot, inasmuch as it has one, ultimately hinges on a man left partially paralysed in a car-related accident, and it’s clear that Jude has cars on his mind - his camera observes them as economic necessities, environmental hazards, physical dangers, and unsightly detritus cluttering modern cities, embodiments of our dependence on the very things that are killing us.

Jude interposes Angela’s urban travelogue with scenes from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film 'Angela Moves On', which, being made during the last decade of Ceau?escu’s rule, presents a sanitised version of a taxi driver’s life. Here, Dorina Lazar, who played Angela in 'Angela Moves On', shows up to reprise her role, whilst in the present day she’s a relative of the wheelchair-bound worker, Ovidius, who’s ultimately selected for the safety video. Also, using a video filter that makes her look like Andrew Tate’s face painted on a balloon head, Angelica records short TikTok videos in character as Bobita, a foul-mouthed misogynist and Putin fanboy who rails against the 'sluts and whores' of Bucharest, a practice she describes as a 'critique through exaggeration', comparing herself to the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Treated as a peon at work, she finds perverse pleasure in lashing out through her outrageous social media avatar, and even manages to score a cameo from notorious director and boxer Uwe Boll. This theme, of the pliability and manipulative power of images, comes to its climax in the final shot: a 40-minute continuous take comprising the raw footage of the company’s safety video, during which, as marketing reps step into the shot to coach him into tweaking his account, we see the construction of a false narrative.

If the film sounds like it’s all over the place, it’s because, in marked contrast to Jude’s earlier works, which typically focused on the minutiae of specific historical events or fictional incidents, this one feels like it’s about just about everything. He still taps into a wide variety of literary sources, from Don DeLillo to Slavoj Žižek (all cited in the end credits), but more than that, this is a film that listens avidly to what a cross section of ordinary citizens, played by both actors and non-actors, have to say about such things as the war in Ukraine, Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jewish and Romani people, poverty, exploitation, and many more. In Manolache’s extraordinary performance, she’s a highly relatable avatar for a generation swindled out of the very idea of leisure time or job satisfaction by the con that is the gig economy, but, despite everything, she's also wholly herself, an independent spirit with a brilliant magpie mind.

Many will inevitably moan about the film's sheer length (just short of three hours), but this not only reflects the sheer amount of time spent on the road but also allows for many effective tangents, the most remarkable of which occurs when Angela picks up the Austrian head of marketing from the airport and describes a stretch of particularly dangerous road with hundreds of crosses honouring traffic casualties, at which point the film cuts away to a several-minute silent montage of the roadside crosses. No, we shouldn’t expect too much from the end of the world: it comes not with a bang nor even a whimper, but with the realisation that it’s been ending all along. Very impressive work indeed.