Photo: MUBI

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World/Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Radu Jude

Few directors working today can claim to have had as protean an oeuvre in as a short time as Radu Jude. He first began somewhere in the realm of contemplative cinema, with his international breakthrough Afterim! (2015) and considerably lesser-seen Scarred Hearts (2016) essaying self-consciously “antiquated” visual schemes—black-and-white widescreen in the former, color Academy ratio in the latter, both on 35mm—to capture historical periods constantly under the shadow of colonial and fascist forces. Since his decisive turn (in the narrative realm) to satire, inaugurated with “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018) and solidified with his Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), the same intellectual rigor which undergirded those earlier efforts has been turned towards outright comedy. The opening moments of Barbarians, where the lead actress (purportedly out of character) tells a boxing joke that invokes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, set the fast-and-loose, unpredictable tone and spiral of citations and references.

Jude’s latest and best film to date, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, at least somewhat continues in the same vein as those previous two narrative features. Like those, it is centered upon a woman dealing with issues related to work—a director attempting to mount a reenactment of a massacre in Barbarians, a schoolteacher caught in a porn scandal in Bad Luck Banging—and features a decisive switch from celluloid to digital cinematography more than halfway through the film. Here, the woman is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant driving around Bucharest to film injured workers auditioning to be in a factory safety video; like Bad Luck, where the third part of the film used digital cameras to delineate the rancorous parent-teacher meeting, the second and final part of Do Not Expect uses a digital single 35-minute long take to capture the filming of the video.

But where Barbarians maintained a consistent pattern of philosophical and historical debate, and Bad Luck Banging confined its own shape-shifting play between fiction and archival signification to three separate parts, Do Not Expect refuses such boundaries to bracing, illuminating effect. Such interplay begins immediately with the first part, running over two hours in this 163-minute film, situated as a conversation of two Angelas: our heroine and the protagonist of the 1981 film Angela Moves On by Lucian Bratu. Extensive clips are used from that preexisting film, presented in both Academy ratio and 1.85:1, with the pale colors making for a stark contrast with Jude’s hazy black-and-white 16mm. These are in turn interrupted by Angela’s way of blowing off steam: an online persona named Bobiță, with Angela using an absurd Andrew Tate-esque face filter to make various crude and misogynistic jokes; these sequences are presented as bright digital iPhone footage.

What the proto-feminist film and the foul-mouthed TikTok personality have in common is a certain “found” nature: Manolache had apparently been posting as Bobiță, and when Jude learned about it he wanted to incorporate it. In interviews, he has talked about both his mixed-to-low opinion of the film—whose footage is frequently slowed down and zoomed-in to reveal images/signifiers of life under Ceaușescu missed by the censors—and his fascination with TikTok, comparing it to early silent cinema in its promise and capacity for invention, but what’s fascinating is how Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World avoids such associations. For one, the film embraces a certain slowness that matches the grind of Angela’s quotidian work experience: much of the film just observes both Angelas driving, and despite the frequent unpleasant interactions with other cars and blasting of music to stay awake, there is a certain pensive, even hypnotic quality that emerges.

This isn’t to say that Do Not Expect isn’t incredibly funny, both with its vulgarity and barrage of references—a single scene manages to reference Antonioni, Warhol, Freaks, and Godard’s suicide—but Jude’s aim has never been more balanced or effective. In large part, this is derived from the unsubtle but detailed shared exploitation between Angela and the workers she is interviewing, and in turn her own complicity in carrying out the bidding of her production company. That company has itself been hired by the Austrian company operating the factories in Romania where the accidents occurred, from which a great many more economic connections and injustices across nations can be inferred. Even a visit to the set of Uwe Boll’s latest film and an ongoing issue with a graveyard set to be moved conjure up a sense of life under oppressive capitalism as a series of inexplicable, numbing events, a rhythm that Jude creates while still making each of these individual moments across disparate media surprising.

By the end of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, both Angelas are sidelined, and Ovidiu, the wheelchair-bound worker selected for the video whose mother appears to be 1981 Angela herself (played by the same actress Dorina Lazăr), takes center stage. He leads the second and final part, which is classified as “raw material,” a phrase which applies equally to the actual camera footage and the dehumanizing outsourced labor which led to his injury in the first place. Combining the Lumières and Bob Dylan, along with the hilariously inane repetition of the phrase “gold diffusion filter,” this last part is both denouement and vital encapsulation, a hyper-compressed, real-time recapitulation of the previously seen lived experience across a single day within the span of half an hour, where ultimately even fabricated language proves inadequate to capture the intentions of an unfeeling corporation. But Jude’s vision, crucially, is not one of unmitigated bleakness. Whether it be the frequent use of poetry, including interspersed through his handwritten credits, or a haunting silent sequence towards the end of the first part that silently films crosses along a road infamous for car accidents, Do Not Expect constantly demands and foregrounds the moments of contemplation. And in those many, many scenes of Angela focused on the road, trying to stay awake as she moves from place to place, he has found the perfect vehicle.