Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Wow. I just finished watching this film and could not get enough. It is a slow burn to start off but as I watched I found myself getting pulled in. This is the story of an overworked woman, who travels from place to place capturing videos of the survivors of nearby, workplace accidents. The most compelling story awards the family a cash prize and commercial spot about workplace safety. In the end, the participants and the rigors of the process are skewered answering questions about capitalism, voyuerism, status, and the results of hardwork. The main character is an endurance champion. The writer and director brought to my mind Proust, capturing the day to day human condition in such a realistic way. I did not want this movie to end. Hopefully there's a 5 hour directors cut out there.

Some may find it discouraging to look upon the world with a robustly cynical outlook, yet, given prevailing conditions in the world today, it may sometimes be unavoidable, an attribute reflected in many contexts, including art and cinema. And that's just what Romanian writer-director Radu Jude has done in his latest feature outing, a biting, darkly satirical comedy-drama that lays bare many of the everyday frustrations that his countrymen experience in areas like politics, corruption and economic opportunities. The film tells this story through the experiences of Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, underpaid, sleep-deprived movie production assistant as she struggles to make it through her daily work routine, an unappreciated effort not unlike that thrust upon many contemporary Romanians. To compensate for the tedium of her career and to let off some considerable pent-up steam, Angela makes short videos of her own featuring a foul-mouthed, sexually provocative male alter-ego, Bobitja, who swears like a sailor and describes explicit erotic encounters that would make a porn star blush. She also wrestles with the many self-serving demands of her arrogant Austrian corporate sponsors and a bloated Romanian bureaucracy that proves ineffectual in resolving property ownership issues related to her family's cemetery plots. Moreover, the picture draws uncanny parallels in the living and working conditions experienced by the nation's present-day residents with those who lived under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1980s, presented here through intercut thematically linked film clips from the 1982 Romanian melodrama "Angela merge mai departe" ("Angela Moves Forward"), the story of a taxi driver whose circumstances mirror those of the beleaguered PA. It all makes for quite an intriguing and engaging mix of story elements, one the holds viewer attention well for about two-thirds of the release, especially in its deliciously bawdy, ribald humor. However, with a 2:43:00 runtime, it becomes somewhat trying as a comedy (and as a movie overall), serving up an excess of almost everything. Unlike comparably long offerings such as "Triangle of Sadness" (2022), which manage to successfully sustain their humor for such a lengthy duration, this effort starts getting repetitive, running out of gas to keep propelling it forward, especially in the somewhat exasperating final half-hour. Like Jude's previous release, "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" ("Barbardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc") (2021), this outing definitely could have benefitted from some judicious editing, particularly in its endless footage of the protagonist driving through heavy Bucharest traffic. To the filmmaker's credit, "End of the World" deserves kudos for its irreverence and its ambitious inventiveness and willingness to try the untried, but this is yet another example of a project where the creator fails to kill his darlings, an undertaking that could have been accomplished successfully in lobbing off about 20 minutes of extraneous material, especially in the closing moments. This one is worth a look if you're willing to be patient with it, as that's essential to make your way through all the way to the end. But, if you don't go in with that attitude, you might be expecting too much from the end of the film.

Angela, the overworked and underpaid production assistant, drives through chaotic Bucharest, trying to film castings for a commercial. Completely stressed out and exhausted, she desperately seeks a few minutes of peace, but her boss keeps calling, telling her to drink a strong coffee or a Red Bull and to keep working. The ringtone on Angela's phone when work calls is "Ode to Joy" - the EU anthem.

A film that couldn't be more cynical. It's an authentic critique of society and capitalism, wrapped in bold, crude situational humor. The West-especially Austria, the country that in recent years blocked Romania from joining the Schengen Area-is constantly ridiculed.

It's not common to see a Romanian film that is so critical of the present, as most tend to condemn the past under Ceausescu and embrace capitalism without much questioning. Radu Jude shows that those days are likely over, as things haven't improved much for Romanians. Quite the opposite. Nature is being destroyed for private companies, cities are drowning in traffic, intellectuals are leaving the country, and poverty is everywhere.

This dark comedy is, for me, a highlight of the year. It makes you think, but most of all, it makes you laugh out loud.

...and learn to stop worrying and love the bomb? Probably not, director-writer Radu Jude doesn't imply the unavoidable condition of our fate with his newest foray into social satire. It is rather an appraisal of this odd stage in history, where we've stepped a toe into the future of work and self-expression, but our day to day has cynical commercialism flowing through its veins. Given these underpinnings, why should we expect much? Jude finds a good balance in his latest work, which is seemingly crass, yet full of class (ahah, sorry), in a narrative and visual layering that flows freely and conjures a kind of complexity that's often hard to catch on film.

You should intuit this movie is something else as soon as you see its poster. Funnily enough, it's one of those things that make next no sense out of context and as soon as you get the context, it seems the most obvious choice. Add to that the almost three hour runtime, the international cast, which includes Nina Hoss and Uwe Boll (really spanning the breadth of German cinema there), and you get a sense of how Jude's new film has a specific kind of guts to it.

So what's the story? Our protagonist Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a production assistant at a Bucharest-based film company that's about to shoot a public relation's bit for an Austrian business operating in Romania. Angela's job is your too typical sixteen hour shifter, that involves everything from shooting audition material, to delivering technical gear, to doing airport pick-ups. When she is depleted, the best she gets from her employers is a "have another Red Bull" suggestion. It's a taxing, soul-sucking, "useless job" as Jude called it, the kind of job whose real usefulness in the grand scheme of things is marginal. As an escape from this hellish drudge, Angela has created a social media character named "Bobitza", as whom, while hidden behind a face filter, she waxes lyrically as a cuss-dripping, misogynist alpha male. And to halfway contrast, halfway enhance this image of present day Angela, Jude juxtaposes scenes from Angela Goes On (1981), a communist proletarian movie about an eponymous taxi driver and her search for a partner.

So there you go, layers. For those who have seen Babardeala cu bucluc (2021), we do not find ourselves on completely foreign territory here. The End of the World is also set in and around Bucharest and it captures the same aggressiveness that's emblematic to living and, especially, driving around the Romanian capital. My main issue with it was that it took satire to the point of caricature, in a demonstrative way that detached it from reality - even from its reality. The experience in Jude's latest is more consistent, finding harmony in dissonance, even if it doesn't always make for a perfect fit.

Aside from Angela's work-related travails, she has to deal with the impending exhumation of her grandparents, as the cemetery they were buried in had illegally annexed land to its property. Now, real-estate developers had reclaimed it and, naturally, luxury condos need some air to breathe. In what is perhaps the most straight-out comedic scene in the film, Angela meets with a representative of the developer who assures her that they are the good guys, covering not only relocation costs, but also theological approval. As she exits the building, we understand in part who Bobitza is - a representation of the number one capitalist model in Romania of the 90s, Bobby Ewing of Dallas.

This perverse, exploitative capitalism is at the core of the movie, as Angela's "auditions" feature people who have suffered work-related accidents at the Austrian company - and the company mind-bendingly want to put-together a clip with one of these people promoting use of helmets and compliance to health and safety procedures. All the while, ignoring their own culpability. As Jude succinctly put it when asked about the vulgarity of Angela's alter-ego, it's all just part of the contrast between explicit and implicit vulgarity, the latter being the use of discretionary power at will behind the fake veneer of corporate civility. Which act is more vulgar, he asks of us.

While there isn't so much going on in terms of story, almost every scene is rich in context and implications. A main cause for that is that Angela defies categorization, she is a person trying to make it, cultured, yet crude, moralistic, yet immoral, she's imperfect - played perfectly by Ilinca Manolache. It really is the kind of movie you can take apart for a while, making ever changing conjectures and discovering commentary on things from historical disconnects to critical posturing. Wouldn't we all like to go for a round of boxing with our enemies, Uwe Boll style?

But what makes Jude's latest especially stand out is its defiance for traditional structure and style. The juxtaposition of two age-divergent movies, the grainy black and white present-day and the beautifully restored and coloured communist propaganda piece, the mixing of narratives between the two, the fixed, engrossing shots contrasted with the vibrant distortion of the social media clips, a fluent rhythm broken up with a multi-minute composition of memorial crosses from the side of the road, and a final forty minute shot with as much off-camera action as on-camera. It's something else, really, an originality of vision that's simply an experience to watch, regardless of how much you like it.

At the heart of the movie is also that tension between what's proper and what isn't. Or, rather, between the appearance of both. What is the difference between classical music and "manele" (a type of Romanian popular music)? Between the grand vision of life and society that is written of in mission statements and the grindy, noisy, repetitive reality of their manifestation? In a perfect world, Do Not Expect Too Much of The End of the World should do to the final movement of Beethoven's 9th what Aftersun (2022) did to Under Pressure. It should forever break it, cursing the viewer with the plight of irreversible trauma.

Like any good movie, this one will not leave you indifferent. It finds excitement in unlikely places and delivers with a kind of spastic energy that's best incapsulated by its meta-world. There is a truth to it that cannot be denied, even in its moments that feel more like performance art than "factual" observation. Sure, it's not for everyone, not only because it can be uncomfortable in terms of content, but because it embraces a kind of otherness that requires some adjustment. That's one of the things we ask of movies, isn't it?

After deducting one star for over-the-top vulgarity, much of that from protagonist Angela's TikTok alter ego Bobita; and one more star for being way too long; this left eight stars to work with, and the film earned them all. My first impression of Angela was dim, but she was just a tough, bright cookie doing her own thing - mostly driving, apparently -- in rough circumstances. Terrific acting.

Can't say how well the "movie within a movie" device worked. I understand it was to provide both contrast and context, but after awhile it became intrusive and repetitive, like prolonged scenes of Angela's gum-chewing during relentless drives, and a wholly gratuitous sequence of highway fatality crosses. The scene at the end filming Ovidiu and his family is especially sharp, with quite a few lessons hidden in there.

Not exactly sure why, but the film overall reminded me of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria ... not for any obvious reasons, but a similar tone.

The ending was abrupt but appropriate and satisfying. Closing credits are wacky, not something I often see. Major credit too goes to whomever did the English subtitles: they were spot-on, very nuanced.

Not too sure about how it makes Bucharest look, though.