Part of Passports: An International Film Series
Borrowing an aphorism from the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec for its title, DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, Radu Jude’s latest film touches on labor, exploitation, death, and the new gig economy. Part comedy, part road movie, part montage, it centers around Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a bombastic production assistant working 16-hour days — while, on her own time, honing a quippy online brand featuring her alter ego, a self-pronounced friend of misogynistic media personality Andrew Tate, currently facing human trafficking and other charges in Romania.
Angela’s day-to-day rigmarole features an outrageous encounter with the great Uwe Boll, who in 2006, after unfavorable reviews, infamously challenged his critics including Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary to a boxing match. This is interwoven with clips — sometimes slowed so you can see what the government censors missed — of Lucian Bratu’s 1981 ANGELA MOVES ON, depicting the life of a female taxi driver (played by Dorina Lazăr, who also features in Jude’s film) driving around Ceaușescu’s Bucharest.
Hitting speed bumps that reveal the current state of modern Romanian roads, not to mention apathy to civics and sprawling corruption, Angela drives around the city casting a workplace safety video commissioned by a company for whom Doris (Nina Hoss), a descendant of Goethe, is the head of marketing. Jude — always on the vanguard — brings a larger focus to the question of image production, bringing another of Lec’s aphorisms to mind: those who are ahead of their time often have to wait for it in uncomfortable quarters. (Synopsis courtesy of 2023 Toronto Film Festival Guide)
“Few filmmakers are so reliably able to conjure snapshots of modern capitalism and its neuroses; fewer still can douse those documents with so much playfulness and wonder as Jude.” —Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage “While other directors make grand gestures about societal inequities, dating themselves with their stories and form, Jude is happy to launch a Molotov cocktail at everything that came before him… Contemporary malaise has rarely been captured on screen with such thrilling vividness as in DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.” —Ankit Jhunjhunwala, The Playlist “Radu Jude is international cinema’s great anarchic satirist… He returns to take a scalpel to our mad modern condition…with thrilling dexterity and acerbic wit, finds a way to mock crass commercialism, cultural misogyny, corporate greed, worker exploitation, bigotry, social media hate, and the many systems and forces conspiring to crush us all.” —Nick Schager, Daily Beast
