We could be watching a film by the late Abbbas Kiarostami: the wear of being stuck in a car babbling for hours. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives through a Bucharest little changed from its Communist era, a point made by the decision to shoot the present-day in black-and-white and to intercut scenes from the 1981 Angela Goes On directed by Lucian Bratu for the sake of (rather plodding) counterpoint. A production assistant condemned — given what we watch it’s the appropriate word — to interview accident victims who repeatedly fail to be photogenic enough for the sake of a cash prize, Angela entertains herself by using a couple filters and filming herself as “Bobiţă,” a potty-mouthed incel influencer who in the opening minutes namedrops Andrew Tate (yes, that Andrew Tate).
That’s a lot of ideas to consider, and writer-director Radu Jude wants the audience to know he intends to use every second of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World‘s 163-minute running time. The title suggests a mordant topicality, and in Angela’s chatter with clients and the conclusions drawn from juxtaposing the earlier film against the present one we get it; but after, say, the third time Jude shows her behind the wheel, interrogating a camera subject, or clowning as Bobiţă, I started to look at my watch. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is an entry in the European comedy of outrage genre responsible for festival and year-end award favorites like Toni Erdmann and Ruben Östlund’s last couple films; its laughs come from timing, delivery, a rich sense of the absurd, and testing our patience.
“We can’t show you having fun — it should be dramatic,” Angela advises one of her subjects before she films them. The workplace accidents — severed fingers and concussions among them — and the conditions under which the victims suffered them may have no discernible effect on her unless viewers want to psychologize about her addiction to denouncing Romania as “a nation of sluts and pimps” in the Bobiţă character (“I’m like Charlie Hebdo,” she offers by way of explanation late in the film). As played by Manolache, who’s onscreen in nearly every frame, the multilingual Angela is too smart for her job. In a film replete with allusions to Oliver Goldsmith, Aristotle, Thomas Bernhard the smallest gesture is the most revealing: she buys a used copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from a street vendor (maybe she could use a Maggie Smith filter while still smut-talking as Bobiţă?). Her furious gum-chewing habit and attraction to Rumanian rap are other ways to keep at bay the anxieties of Bucharest traffic, a squalid mix of aggressive drivers and pure jerks who flip her the bird or yell obscenities. This impresses a corporate lackey whom she picks up, played by the German actor Nina Hoss in an incisive cameo (the German director Uwe Boll appears as himself in another scene). “You have aggressive drivers!” she remarks in the amused tone of a countess visiting a peasant village (she claims to be a “grand-grand-grand-grand-granddaughter,” in another literary nod, of Goethe’s).
Altruism, if it wasn’t clear before this encounter, does not motivate her production company: firms hire Forbidden Planet to cover their asses. By insisting on parallels between Angela and the Angela played by actor Dorina Lazăr in the earlier film, Jude argues that the transition from the Ceauşescu dictatorship to today’s vulture capitalism of the 2020s amounts to replacing one kind systemic depredation with another. A curious inversion happens. The washed-out black-and-white photography of the now timeline suggests a Soviet-era documentary while the color in Angela Goes On, unflattering to the pot-holed streets and the battered expressions of residents, lends that era’s Bucharest a contemporaneity. “What you wish for when you’re young you’ll get it galore when you’re old,” Angela chirps in English, the recitation of a prayer she has never believed in.
I’m sympathetic to Justin Chang’s contention in his probing review that the question of what power films like Jude’s can still exhibit when anyone with a smartphone can manipulate image and sound. Again, like in Kiarostami’s work, Angela at times stands in for the director; she alters reality to suit the whims of her parasitic employees and to provide amusement for herself. Two examples of Jude’s formal play stand out. On that harrowing drive with the corporate shark Jude forces the audience to watch a four-minute (by my watch) montage of crosses of every shape, size, and construction representing automotive deaths in Romania. It’s as if he’s saying, “No YouTuber has the patience to edit this stuff, much less watch it.” The last sequence, thirty-five minutes in length, depicts how the weasel words of the corporation ethos infect the testimony of a man (Ovidiu Pîrșan) who suffered a dangerous head injury. Arranging wife and children around him and in front of a Soviet-era checkpoint, Angela wants to create sympathy for their plight but watches the group lose their conviction in retake after retake in which he also sands down the ghastliness of his accident. By the time she’s through the man who declared, “We are exploited. Slaves.” is reduced to a supplicant at the feet of overlords. Jude and cinematographer Marius Panduru barely move their camera; we squirm in real time.
I hope my descriptions entice readers into watching Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. But this is a grueling, repetitious film too. Jude could have made every one of his points within the constraints of a two-hour timeframe (Kiarostami did). He’s on to something, though: the way in which social media can create the impression that we cosplay our own lives, and how performing versions of ourselves abets the nameless capitalists whose ad revenue pays for those apps. Andrew Tate gets it.
GRADE: B+
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is screening on MUBI and select cities.
Humanizing The Vacuum 