Radu Jude’sDo Not Expect Too Much from the End of the Worldcertainly makes an impression. While the title suggests that the film’s vision of the future is bleak, it’s unclear if Jude can imagine anything worse than it depicts in our present. The film is set in Bucharest, Romania, a city it show as an endless snarling traffic jam, in the process of having its entrails devoured by a system of global capitalism managed by vapid sociopaths. And yet, in its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), it gives us a human perfectly evolved for her time. A millennial production assistant gigging on an industrial workplace safety video, the film follows her on a grueling workday of caffeine-fueled driving. Angela has a keen, ironic, perception of her world’s moral rot, and yet she’s able to instantly set that awareness aside whenever her work demands it, without a hint of internal contradiction. Angelais not a hero, but her seeming invulnerability makes her an aspirational figure. You end up wanting to be more like her.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
An overworked and underpaid production assistant has to shoot a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement that forces him to re-invent his story to suit the company’s narrative.
What Is ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’ About?
The film wakes up with Angela, groaning, at 5:50 am. On her end table is a wine glass and novels byMarcel ProustandHenry Fielding, so we know, from the beginning, thatwe are dealing with a multifaceted person, a hard worker, a heavy reader, and a weeknight drinker. With the sun just coming up, she’s loading into her car, the vehicle in which we will accompany her for approximately 36 hours of particularly meaningless errands.
At her first stop, she conducts a recorded interview with a man who has recently had his fingers cut off in a workplace accident. While it’s at first hard to get a grasp on what Angela’s assignment is, as she drives around to meet with various workers in the same situation, it becomes clear. A multinational conglomerate is making a “workplace safety” video, and is auditioning each of the workers who have been in serious accidents in one of their facilities to be its star. However, the message ofthis public service announcementwill be “don’t be like me; always obey safety regulations,” with the injured worker taking the blame for their own accident. The potential cast members Angela meets chafe against that message. Their accidents are not their own fault, but the result of long hours and poor equipment. Yet, whoever is chosen will receive €500 (500 euros), a significant amount, which papers over some of these contradictions, at least temporarily.
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Over the course of the film, Angela plows through many interviews. One worker is selected, a man named Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan) who was in a coma for a year after being struck in the head in his workplace parking lot, and now uses a wheelchair. The multinational corporation’s Austrian marketing representative, Doris Goethe, played byNina Hoss(Tár,A Most Wanted Man), flies into Romania for a day, and the video is shot.The end product of their work is a hilariously evil piece of filmmaking. But everyone participates willingly in its creation, from Goethe, to the film’s pretentious above-the-line crew, to Ovidiu himself. They each have a sense of being paid just the right amount to proceed.
Radu Jude has a Few Arthouse Tricks Up His Sleeve
Jude’s films are known for their unique, stylistic flourishes. InDo Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,there are a pair of impactfully provocative choices.Most delightfully, we are frequently treated to videos from Angela’s TikTok feed. She’s a successful account, with a single gimmick, similar to that ofBrian Jordan Alvarez. Using a TikTok filter that gives her a bald head, goatee, and massive unibrow, she does front-facing comedy in character as “Bobiță” a hyper-misogynist influencer in the style of Andrew Tate. Angela makes Bobiță videos throughout the day, whenever the inspiration strikes her, as it often does. The Bobiță character was actually developed by Manolache herself and then worked into the film, so the comedy has a polished quality. While the film is largely shot in black and white in a harshly low dynamic range, the Bobiță videos are splashes of color.
Color celluloid also makes an appearance, in the form of cutaways to scenes from a completely different film.Angela Goes Onis the name of a 1981 Romanian workplace drama about a Bucharest cab driver(Dorina Lazar). She’s named Angela as well, and her job, like our Angela’s, keeps her behind the wheel of a car all day. Jude not only cuts to footage from this other movie repeatedly, he slows down the footage to a hypnotic crawl. He chooses to focus on moments when the taxicab is being filmed in exterior, from the sidewalk, and the background are clearly not paid actors, but simple passersby.The effect is to break through the artifice of cinemato the reality of 1981 Romania, when the country was still communist. In particular, Jude focuses on a pair of background passersby who, unclear what is going on, stare directly into the camera.The puncturing of that film’s reality makes it a particular shock when the lead fromAngela Goes Onshows up in our movie, playing an 80-year-old version of the same character(she’s Ovidiu’s mom).
Angela Remains a Provocatively Ambiguous Protagonist
The parallels Jude is drawing, between workers now and workers in 1981, and the persistence of oppression, are clear, but he leaves many of the conclusions open-ended. Take Angela, our protagonist. What are we supposed to make of her? On the one hand,she is very aware that her enemies are the heartless masters of the global economy, whomshe often fantasizes about executingfor their crimes against humanity. On the other, she works herself to the bone for these same masters. Not only that, but she compartmentalizes ruthlessly. When she’s on the clock, she refuses to identify with the injured workers whose stories she records. When one of the workers regrets that there wasn’t a stronger union to protect him, she turns it around on him: “you failed to unionize.” It’s the same mentality infecting the film she’s being directed to make, blaming the workers for their own accidents. When the vampiric marketing executive Doris Goethe shows up, and Angela gets some car time with her (Goethe blames Romania for allowing its natural resources to be exploited by her company) she even lies about the working conditions she’s experiencing on their current film,falsely reassuring her boss that this project is one of the few on which she’s being treated fairly.
The film obviously admires Angela, and when she hides the truth from her boss, we appreciate her canny brown-nosing. Angela is an anarchic spirit, in a sense, and her vulgarity is affectionately tolerated by her bosses. But she knows where the lines are, and knows instinctively how much (or how little) “individuality” her willingness to work 18-hour days buys her. Clearly, she’s doing what she needs to do to survive, and her resiliency is enviable.But is she allowing her rebellion to be entirely co-opted and neutralized?Or is she somehow keeping the flame of rebellion alive in a deadening world – and perhaps even injecting it into the system that has allowed her past its gates? The film does not resolve this.
What Is the Timing on the Titular ‘End of the World’?
It’s tempting to interpret the titleDo Not Expect Too Much from the End of the Worldas referring to right now. After all, we tend to refer to the present as a period of “late capitalism,” as if the wheels are about to fly off. And this movie fits in very comfortably with the typical late capitalist critique:the contradictions of society are screaming loud, but we all pretend not to hear them.
Jude’s films are always interested in history, and how the past relates to the present.Ultimately, it feels that Jude is more interested in inquiry to ever make a definitive statement like “this is the end.“The title itself is a quote fromStanisław Jerzy Lec,a Polish poet who survived the Holocaust. The quote has no greater context. Lec was an “aphorist,” meaning he enjoyed coming up with pithy little sayings; this is one of them. But it’s not the only strand connecting the film to the Holocaust. Goethe’s boss, though a cartoonish character evocative of the titularToni Erdmann, is named Hans Frank, after Hitler’s lawyer, hung at Nuremberg. This film alludes strongly toToni Erdmann, andJude even considered castingthat film’s lead,Sandra Hüller,in the very similar role played by Nina Hoss). Jude appears to be saying that the past is still with us, reconfigured. It’s a point he seems to reaffirm by naming his working-class hero Angela, after the hero of Romania’s past. There are always Hans Franks, but also always Angelas, driving around, holding on to some degree of dignity.
But if the past and the present are as one, it suggests a kind of stasis.If that’s the case, there’s no particular reasonto expect the apocalypse any time soon.Of course, Jude suggests a tinge of horror to the thought that we’re still far from the end. As Lec also aphorized, “I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.”
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the Worldis currently available to stream on Mubi in the U.S.
