Ilinca Manolache in Radu Judeâs Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)
Since winning the Golden Bear in Berlin for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn in 2021, Romanian director Radu Jude has made a handful of shorts, and now, another feature with a chewy title, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. The aphoristic line, which rings so true that Umberto Eco slipped it into his 1989 novel Foucaultâs Pendulum, is lifted from a poem included in the 1957 collection Unkempt Thoughts by the Polish poet StanisĹaw Jerzy Lec.
Premiering in competition in Locarno and set to screen as part of the New York Film Festivalâs Main Slate, Judeâs new film is âa dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work,â writes Jessica Kiang for Variety. âFunny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when itâs workâas in, the pitiless daily grindâthat will be the death of us all.â
As Angela, an overtaxed production assistant, Ilinca Manolache, who first worked with Jude on I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), delivers what the International Cinephile Societyâs Matthew Joseph Jenner calls âone of the most outrageously funny and heartfelt performances of the past decade.â Deprived of sleep and downing energy drinks to keep from nodding off at the wheel, Angela zips through the clogged streets of Bucharest while Jude and editor Catalin Cristutiu splice into this grainy black-and-white footage clips from Lucian Bratuâs 1981 color feature, Angela Goes On, starring Dorina Lazar as a cab driver in the Romanian capital.
At the Film Stage, Leonardo Goi notes that âthe two Angelas are both victims of bilious misogynyâmen harass and humiliate them throughout, suggesting a fairly straightforward âas it was then, so it is stillâ readingâbut Judeâs after another, more provocative point. Time and again he slows down Bratuâs feature to draw attention to some everyday details of life under CeauČescuâs tyranny that no other Romanian production of the time ever dared make public, fearing the regime and the censorsâ retaliation: bread lines and other glimpses of the rampant poverty the country was mired in. Angela Goes On doesnât just match Do Not Expectâs dioramic structure; it also echoes its rebellious spirit.â
The Angela of 2023 has been tasked with auditioning prospective subjects of a safety video commissioned by an Austrian firm whose head of marketing is coolly played by Nina Hoss. The employee eventually selected will be required to blame himself for his life-threatening injury rather than the companyâin exchange for a modest fee. Angela grabs any chance she gets to blow off steam by shooting TikTok videos of herself as BĂłbita, a bald and goateed misogynist who claims alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate as a close friend.
At Films in Frame, Bucharest-based critic Flavia Dima suggests that Do Not Expect is âperhaps Radu Judeâs bleakest, most critical filmâand thatâs saying something for the director [who] almost single-handedly revived public awareness of Romaniaâs history of enslaving the Roma peopleââwith Aferim! (2015)ââand its bloody involvement in the Holocaustâ with I Do Not Care. The Guardianâs Peter Bradshaw describes Do Not Expect as âa continuous white noise of complaint about modern Romania: the degradation of its public space, the misery of its continuing infatuation with strong leaders, its racism, and its incompetent embrace of capitalism and the free market.â
Writing for the Film Verdict, Jay Weissberg points out that since his first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), Jude has âsought to combat willful ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty through films that masterfully balance gut-punches with side-splitting laughter: no other writer-director has such a creative ear for obscenity-laced dialogue.â Do Not Expect âcan be considered a summation (but not a final chapter) of the themes heâs visited multiple times, in which his fury boils over to scald everything it touches . . . If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.â
Varietyâs Christopher Vourlias reports that Judeâs next film, codirected with the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, is already in postproduction. Eight Postcards from Utopia will be a found-footage documentary pieced together from ads that ran in Romania during the years immediately following the end of the CeauČescu regime. âThese kinds of images offer the most fictionalized version of life, or society,â Jude tells Vourlias. âYou can see in them all these tendencies regarding a market economy, capitalism, desires, the fetishism of the merchandiseâsometimes in really ludicrous ways, sometimes absurd, sometimes dirty.â
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