Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World

Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World

In his new film, Radu Jude yet again transforms the vulgar into satire through irony and hyperbole, writes Prahlad Srihari.

Editor's note: As we count down to the new year, we've been discussing some of 2023's best films and shows. If you've stayed with us on this journey, now's the time to assess your end-of-year watchlist!

VULGARITY was the animating force of Radu Jude’s 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, flowing through the film’s form in its conflation of pornography and polemic. We follow a Bucharest schoolteacher whose private life becomes a public scandal. When an amateur porn video she shot with her husband is leaked online, she is forced to defend her job and integrity in front of a tribunal of outraged parents. Spare us the sanctimony, Jude declares. For what is more vulgar than the hypocrisies of an angry mob of prudes, chauvinists, racists and conspiracy kooks.

In his new film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude yet again transforms the vulgar into satire through irony and hyperbole. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a jaded, underpaid production assistant overwhelmed by the challenges of working in a gig economy. She spends most of the day in her car, driving from location to location, chewing gum and listening to loud music so she doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel. When fellow motorists swear at her, she responds in kind.

Whenever she feels the need to let off some steam, she records TikTok videos as her troll avatar Bobita, hiding behind the face filter of a bald, unibrowed, Putin-loving, Andrew Tate-like caricature who spits the most un-PC rants, each a mindless string of cuss words and buzzwords. “I criticise by way of extreme caricature,” she says, comparing herself to Charlie Hebdo. Jude uses vulgarity as a rhetorical weapon to defang his targets: the capitalist class exploiting the labour class and the neo-colonial powers extending economic authority over less-developed nations.

Bookmark This Title

BEST OF 2023

Radu Jude Reinvents Cinema & Himself

By Prahlad Srihari

There is a peculiar disruptive energy to Jude’s satire. It is spirited in its scepticism, restless in its audacity, and bristles with rage against the machine. In drawing parallels between the past and the present, referencing films and texts, Jude is creating his own personal mode of expression. It is a mode that jolts apolitical viewers out of their snug unconcern, while challenging those who are overly certain of what they already think. Do Not Expect, not unlike Bad Luck Banging, furnishes a portrait of our image-saturated, immoderately mediated, irony-poisoned lives. The intentions of the film however go beyond showing life as it is in our tech-addled modern world. Jude is as intrigued by how our everyday lives and struggles are interpreted, distorted and flattened by a media evolving at warp speed.

The first of two chapters shadows Angela as she drives around traffic-congested Bucharest in search of injured workers best suited to star in a safety video for a multinational conglomerate. Best suited meaning most inclined to acquiesce to the company agenda. For a €500 fee, all one needs to do is play the scapegoat and take the blame for the higher-ups. The second chapter is a static shot, lasting around 40 minutes, depicting the filming of said video. The (un)lucky star is wheelchair-bound Marian (Ovidiu Pîrșan). Surrounded by his family, he begins by telling the story of how his accident was caused by a combination of poor lighting and an inconspicuous boom barrier at the factory. Only, with each retake, he is sweet-talked and arm-twisted into editing out all the unfavourable bits of the story so the company isn’t held liable. Marian yields — an illustration of how capitalism makes workers a party to their own exploitation. When a top executive at the company directs Marian to use a series of placards, like Bob Dylan did in the music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, Jude mocks how the establishment has started to co-opt anti-establishment figures and ideas. We have reached the future that Debord had warned us about, where “dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material”.

Do Not Expect maps out a history of continuity and change, progress and regress. Angela’s journey is intercut with scenes from the 1981 Romanian film Angela Moves On (1981) about a female taxi driver navigating life during Ceaușescu’s regime. Jude keeps the two films in conversation, often zooming in on the harsh reality of a communist apparatus (like people lining up for bread) that was deliberately obscured or relegated to the background. The conversation also reveals the continuing economic struggles of workers despite Ceaușescu’s Communism being superseded by the orthodoxy of democratic capitalism. When marketing exec Doris (Nina Hoss), a supposed descendant of Goethe, first appears as a giant head on a Zoom call and later drops by all the way from corporate HQ in Austria, the Romanians’ eagerness to appease her points to exactly who holds all the bargaining power in capital-labour relations. The capitalist class holds onto that power by obscuring the exploitation mechanisms of the labour processes.

The endless collision of Romania’s past and present is epitomised in a four-minute silent interlude showing roadside memorials dedicated to victims of accidents on the country’s deadliest road. Jude’s freeform anarchy however doesn’t belie the sense of playfulness in his vision. In another segment, Angela meets critically derided German filmmaker Uwe Boll on a green screen set. Boll joins Bobita to vent his own frustrations in a tirade against the film critics. Anyone and everyone is a target. If all this sounds like too much for a single filmmaker to tackle in a single film, it would be for most everyone but Jude. As the film pinballs between Angela’s journey, Bobita’s recordings and all the other segments, it feels like Jude is reinventing cinema and himself, while situating his film in history at the same time.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World won the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival. The film had its India premiere at this year's MAMI Mumbai Film Festival as part of the World Cinema section.

Always get the latest reviews. Sign up for our newsletters.

Like what you read? Get more of what you like. Visit the OTTplay website, or download the app to stay up-to-date with news, recommendations and special offers on streaming content.

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

This weekly newsletter compiles a list of the latest (and most important) reviews from OTTplay so you can figure what to watch or ditch over the weekend ahead.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think it worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an
hour on this.