With 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian auteur Radu Jude made the only great film about Covid. That film told the story of a teacher whose sex tape with her husband got leaked on the Internet, leading up to a raucous school board meeting in which her future was debated, with conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism popping up constantly. While Hollywood spent multiple years repeatedly whiffing with movies about the pandemic, this movie from Romania spoke to both pandemic insanity and the types of unhinged public meetings that took place back then.
Jude has returned, turning his attention to capitalism and exploitation. But just as he did in the impressionistic second act of Bad Luck Banging, the new film is very concerned with echoes of Romanian history. The film is called Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and like the director’s other work, it’s trying to do many different things at once. As it does so, it frequently switches between black and white, color, and varying visual styles. Jude’s film has reached theaters now after a festival run last fall. It was Romania’s entry for the Best International Film Oscar last year, but distributor Mubi says it should be considered a 2024 release.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is primarily the tale of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an assistant for a production company hired by an evil corporation to make videos featuring injured workers. The idea is ostensibly to provide cautionary tales to encourage safety, but there’s an underhanded motive of trying to refute their workman’s comp claims. The German actress Nina Hoss plays the soulless boss of the operation.
The company’s questionable morals also come into play with their treatment of Angela, who’s overworked and often sneaking naps. She spends lots of time in the car, and the film establishes that drivers in Romania are insane and the roads aren’t safe. We see fleeting glimpses of her personal life, including a brief affair. Still, Angela’s primary creative outlet is a TikTok account in which, employing a crude filter, she imitates a bro misogynist who cheers on Russia against Ukraine and idolizes the influencer/accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate (who makes his home in Romania and faces legal trouble there).
We also see multiple scenes lifted from a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Goes On, about a different woman with the same name who drives a taxi through Ceausescu-era Budapest. We’re introduced to the older Angela today, played by the same actress, and the point is that Romania has lots of the same problems in the current hyper-capitalist era as it did back during the communist days.
(Another Jude film, 2018’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, also told the story of a woman in the film industry dealing with the country’s past while running afoul of powerful bosses.)
The film makes room to consider the plight of the much-maligned German filmmaker Uwe Boll, who makes a cameo and interacts with the Tate-inspired TikTok persona. The end features a long, unbroken take of the filming of the infomercial, as the film’s themes all come together. It’s not nearly as cathartic as the ending of Bad Luck Banging, but it’s a fine summation. Nearly three hours long and doing all those things at once, a film like Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World will test some people's patience, but I was delighted by it.