Not many directors in the 21st Century can truly be said to be inimitable but, for better and worse, Romanian enfant terrible Radu Jude certainly deserves such a title. Wickedly intellectual yet profoundly crass, an obviously masterful image maker who nonetheless is fascinated by ugliness, and a provocateur above all else, his films always elicit a strong reaction for good or ill. I hated his last one, Bad Luck Banging, when I first saw it, but it has stuck with me in the two years that passed since then in a way few other 2021 films have and while his latest, the anti-work parable Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, is certainly much more palatable, Jude has lost none of his anarchic, finger-on-the-pulse rage.
Broken down into, essentially, four sections, the main driving force here is overworked and underpaid production assistant Angela Raducanu (Ilinca Manolache), who we see across the course of one exhausting Sunday on which she’s forced to work an 18-hour day for the shitty Bucharest production company that employs her on an Uber-esque gig contract. Auditioning various handicapped people for the lead role in a workplace safety infomercial commissioned by an Austrian company, represented by coldly neutral executive Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss), it’s exhausting and frustrating work, shot in a grainy black-and-white that adds a timeless kick to an otherwise remarkably modern story.
Jude is one of the few filmmakers in active conversation with the ways in which the moving image has evolved in recent years. The only time we see Angela’s world in colour is when she performs to her phone camera for her Instagram profile, where she uses a filter to transform herself into Andrew Tate and spew the sort of misogynistic bile that she otherwise has to face from the men of Bucharest. It’s grim and funny, allowing Jude to take shots at every aspect of modern life he can think of, from male entitlement to shoddy urban planning to Western cultural hegemony (pointedly, the film is set across the weekend after Queen Elizabeth II died, which dominates the thoughts of the older characters).
It all adds up to something that is undoubtedly an acquired taste and, even then, can be baffling, especially when the other three key sections of the film come into play. First up is a series of clips from a 1981, Ceausescu-era drama called Angela Moves On, in which the taxi-driving heroine of that tale’s life seems to dovetail with our modern Angela’s. Then, there’s an extended, silent break looking at all the commemorative crosses across an infamously lethal stretch of Romanian highway and, finally, to close the whole film out, a 40-minute unbroken shot of the infomercial actually being filmed as the handicapped lead gets into a verbal fight with the director. Oh, and Jude also finds time in the 2 hours 45 he allows himself to include an extended cameo for infamous German hack director Uwe Boll.
The results are often patience-testing and if you asked me what everything meant, I really couldn’t tell you – Jude’s work is, for all that it’s often scabrous and hyper-energised, intellectualised to a point I find alienating – but it’s still hard to tear your eyes away from. Not for everyone and, at points, not really for me, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is nonetheless a thrillingly singular piece of work that taps into our modern ills in a way that all too few modern auteurs seem to really want to.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 