Fasten your seat belts: Radu Jude is taking you on a deliciously outlandish journey that makes Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn feel almost restrained. Letting loose with an even more caustic assault on contemporary Romanian society’s smashed social fabric, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World will leave audiences reeling from its non-stop blitzkrieg on the senses even as they roll in the aisles from the delirious vulgarity of the humor. When the first words of a film are “fucking shit,” you know things aren’t going to suddenly get gentle after that.
From his first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World, Jude announced his intention to flay alive the inhumanity of his fellow nationals in their daily interactions, and ever since he’s sought to combat willful ignorance, prejudice and cruelty through films that masterfully balance gut-punches with side-splitting laughter: no other writer-director has such a creative ear for obscenity-laced dialogue. Do Not Expect Too Much can be considered a summation (but not a final chapter) of the themes he’s visited multiple times, in which his fury boils over to scald everything it touches. There may be those who feel he’s covered some of this material in the past, but that’s a reductivist reading of a filmmaker constantly exploring new ways of expression. If the end of the world really is approaching, Jude may be our most trenchant Cassandra.
Propelling us into this world is Angela, played with breathtaking audacity by Ilinca Manolache with the same manner of risky boldness as Katia Pascariu in Bad Luck Banging. Those first scatological words referenced above are heard as the alarm goes off and Angela races to start her day, pushing the clock on the nightstand alongside copies of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones and Proust – itself ironic since Angela hardly seems the type to be reading such high-falutin’ literature, or having “Ode to Joy” as her ringtone. It’s already been announced that this part of the film is called “Angela: a conversation with a 1981 film,” and the reason for this becomes clear early on: most of Jude’s film is in b&w, which he weaves together with color scenes from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela merge mai departe (Angela Goes On), about a taxi driver in late Ceausescu-era Bucharest. Similar to Bratu’s Angela, played by the great Dorina Lazar, who also makes an appearance in Jude’s film, the Angela we see waking up will reveal more sides than initially expected, and the conversation created by editing in the 1981 footage creates a fascinating parallel forcing us to question how society has changed between then and now.
Angela is an Uber driver also working for Forbidden Planet, a video company hired by an Austrian multinational company to make safety promos using workers whose on-the-job accidents could, at a big stretch, be blamed on their own negligence for ignoring safety rules which were never marked anyway. Through the day, Angela drives around the city auditioning these disabled workers, all of whom are painfully compliant in the hopes they’ll be chosen for the promo and earn some money. Among the families she visits is the fictional Angela from 1981, played once again by Lazar, as well as her ethnically Hungarian husband Gyuri (also played by the original cast member, László Miske), who praises Viktor Orbán to the skies.
Once the candidates have been filmed, Angela goes back to the office for a Zoom meeting with Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss, in a fabulous piece of unexpected casting), an Austrian executive from the multinational company who drives home the main message for the video: respect the rules or you’re screwed. Later in the evening Angela picks Goethe up at the airport, their divergent personalities played up to the hilt, with the Romanian’s foul-mouthed, blowsy brashness contrasted with the Austrian’s near-expressionless cool. Chapter Two begins just past the two-hour mark, with the filming of the public service announcement, but of course “public service” was never anyone’s intention.
Within all the ferocity here, nothing is quite as stupefying as the scenes of Angela playing an Andrew Tate-inspired pig named Bobita in a Tik Tok series she’s devised using a filter that makes her bald and gives her facial hair. Here’s where Jude really goes to town with the foul language, concocting misogynistic obscenities of unimaginable vulgarity that probably aren’t all that much of an exaggeration from Tate’s own postings. Shot in color to contrast with the majority b&w, these short videos are dropped in like flavor bombs, the opposite of the 1981 color scenes which the director occasionally slows down, freezes, or drops out the sound. By paralleling actions between the two films, he demands that the audience question how we as a society got from one to the other, but he’s far too clever to give any easy or pat answer. There are clues however for keen-eyed viewers, such as the image of the darling of Romania’s religious ultra-conservatives, Father Arsenie Boca, dangling from her rearview mirror (he’s the focus of Alexandru Solomon’s 2023 documentary Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife).
Nearly every frame of Marius Panduru’s images feels full-on, every line outrageous and hilarious, and yet thanks to Catalin Cristutiu’s devilishly good editing, the film is a roller-coaster that never wears out its welcome. Despite the multiple formats and styles, there’s a rhythm here, an understanding of when to push and also how to hold back, such as a sudden respectful pause when the screen is given over to a montage of tomb crosses marking people presumably killed in work-related accidents. Despite the hilarity and notwithstanding how Do Not Expect Too Much makes us keel over with laughter, Jude reminds us again and again that this is serious: Andrew Tate and his ilk attract millions of followers celebrating violence against women, soulless companies exploit tragedies. Accepting the status quo simply isn’t an option — it needs to be blown up.
Director: Radu Jude
Screenplay: Radu Jude
Cast: Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pirsan, Nina Hoss, Dorina Lazar, László Miske, Serban Pavlu, Katia Pascariu, Nicodim Ungureanu, Claudia Ieremia, Zita Moldovan, Ioana Iacob, Alex Dascalu, Sofia Nicolaescu, Rodica Negrea, Adina Cristescu, Adrian Nicolae, Andi Vasluianu, Uwe Bolle, Rudolf Valentino
Producers: Ada Solomon, Adrian Sitaru
Co-producers: Adrien Chef, Paul Thiltges, Serge Lalou, Claire Dornoy, Ankica Juri? Tili?
Executive producers: Dan Wechsler, Jamal Zeinal-Zade, Andreas Roald
Cinematography: Marius Panduru
Production designer: Andreea Popa, Cristian Niculescu
Costume designer: Simona Alecu
Editing: Catalin Cristutiu
Music: Jura Ferina, Pavao Miholjevi?
Sound: Hrvoje Radni?, Marius Leftãrache
Production companies: 4Proof Film (Romania), Paul Thiltges Distributions (Luxembourg), Les Films d’ici (France), Kinorama (Kinorama), MicroFILM (Romania), in association with Board Cadre Films, Sovereign Films
World sales: Heretic Outreach
Venue: Locarno (International competition)
In Romanian, English
163 minutes
