Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World - English subtitled
Brilliant satire in which master provocateur Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn) denounces Romania’s unhealthy work culture and the excesses of neoliberalism. A postcard from Absurdistan.
Some sixteen hours a day, production assistant Angela sits, overtired and swearing, behind the wheel of the van she uses to tackle the traffic jam called Bucharest. She drives from place to place to ‘audition’ victims of workplace accidents. The chosen one gets to feature in a company film about safety measures in return for payment. Director Radu Jude lets us ride along with Angela and then masterfully brings his urban road movie to a halt for a single shot of over half an hour, in which the satire rises to absurdist heights.
Angela’s torture is filmed in coarse-grained black-and-white, which is regularly interrupted by scenes from a 1981 Romanian colour film about a female taxi driver in the same Bucharest, whose fortunes are strikingly similar to those of the production assistant. And then there are the TikTok videos in which Angela, with the help of a face filter, assumes the role of the foul-mouthed, sexist Bobita.
In DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, Radu Jude unleashes a barrage of blackly comic social criticism on the viewer. About his homeland’s burdened history and its less than ideal present, about poverty, exploitation, sexism and the excesses of neoliberalism. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno film festival.