Beware! The Dublin Film Critics Circle recently awarded Radu Jude’s bold and provocative film top honours at the Dublin International Film Festival last weekend. This adds to the accumulating list of international awards and adoring followers.
No other film this year will capture the repetition, servility, crudeness, and stress of contemporary life as effectively as this picture of a single day in the life of Angela, an overworked production assistant, masterfully portrayed by Ilinca Manolache. Angela’s day is a whirlwind of driving, rushing, and shouting around Bucharest, seeking to recruit actors for a film about a workplace accident.
She is tasked by a multinational corporation, fronted by the unapproachable Nina Hoss, with the job of casting a victim of an accident caused by their working conditions to prove that the fault lies entirely with that individual. In her free time, squeezed between meetings, much needed sleep, and coarse sexual encounters, Angela posts audacious videos on TikTok and Instagram as her vulgar, misogynistic alter ego, Bobita. One of the milder posts quotes: “A c**t is like four nations: wet like Britain, divided like Korea, bloody like the Wild West and happy to be f**ked like Romania.”
The director fearlessly draws from another Romanian film, Angela Moves On from 1981, which portrays a female taxi driver, also named Angela, played by Dorina Lazar. Jude compares modern day queues with the ones in Nicolae Ceausescu’s era. The past seems gentler, as showcased in a scene set in a 1980s cafe where women share companionable glances as they dine on fish dishes. This sharply contrasts with our present day heroine harriedly consuming a kebab at a stand while the proprietor chases and swears at a beggar. A feeling of yearning for the past is absent from the director’s portrayal, replaced by an unending and dystopian downfall.
Despite the confronting audacity and harsh visuals of the film, the lengthy Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World possesses comforting rhythm and extracts much absurd humour eliciting laughter. Brace for the sixth phase of despair: amusement.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World will be on a limited release from Friday, March 8th.