Iconoclastic Romanian director Radu Jude continues his war against good taste with his latest satirical epic, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, which world premieres in Locarno this week. A sprawling feast of scabrous farce and film theory lesson, peppered with highbrow quotes and lowbrow pop culture references, Jude’s new feature is composed of two main sections. The longer opening chapter revolves around an overworked, foul-mouthed, brutally funny film production assistant (Ilinca Manolache) as she blasts around Bucharest in her car, the shorter coda an injured factory worker (Ovidiu Pîrsan) struggling to share the inconvenient truth about his industrial accident. Here the prize-winning provocateur chats to The Film Verdict about Jean-Luc Godard and Andrew Tate, TikTok and Barbie…
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World has two main loosely linked sections. How are they connected for you?
“Well for me, they connect and they don’t connect. It’s difficult for me to answer in a straightforward way because it has to do first of all with the fact that these two stories are real. They are based on stories I encountered many years ago when I was working as a production assistant and assistant director. They stayed in my head because they happened 10, 12, 15 years ago. I find both stories to be very symbolic, for the life in our new society, but also for the production of images. Then I decided to put them together in a single narrative, but little by little it felt like to fold them into a single narrative was to betray something from their essence, to make them more conventional, more traditional. As you know one film has to have one main story, but what if I have made a film with two stories? Of course they are connected, but they are different films in a way.”
These contemporary sections are also intercut with archive clips from a Communist-era Romanian film about a female taxi driver, Angela Moves On (1981). What was your intention with these scenes?
“At some point, doing my research I said, OK, I want to see road movies with women from Romania, and I discovered that there was only one! Ha! It’s not one of the greatest Romanian films from that time but it has a lot of interesting elements, If you watch it carefully you discover there are a lot of textures, a lot of hidden details even. When you slow it down you have in one second people waiting in line for food, which was impossible to show because of political censorship back then. So the film is full of hidden things like that. I don’t like the word but the film is somehow self-refective. It’s a lot about its own form and about the deconstruction of images. Of course it is about the new economy and exploitation between people and corporations and whatever, but a lot of it is about how images are constructed. All the decisions I took, including the one about having this old film inside the new film, was somehow to challenge people to think and analyse. What does an image constructed in a Communist dictatorship say now in a time of political freedom? What is the relation between image and reality?”
Your films are often dialogues between past and present, excavating hidden horrors and dark corners of history. Is this because you are worried people might forget these events?
“Yes, in a way. But I consider this film to be very contemporary, and related to contemporary issues. It is true I am interested in history but not in the kind of history magazines you can find in airports, where if you’re curious about Napoleon, or Nefertiti, or the Roman Empire, you can read some information. I am more interested in the traces of history that the past left to us. I’m interested in the clashes between elements of the present and the past, and in the continuities. In this case, I would say I am more interested in the history of cinema. If I can put it in a very broad way, the history of images.”
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World also features bursts of online platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. Could this DIY technology become a new form of cinema?
“It’s very true that I’m also interested in these kind of images. It’s just a pity that most of the people that use it are not more interested in cinema, because I think they could use it better. I think these new ways of recording images, with a phone, with a digital filter, posting them on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, it has some of the energy of the beginning of cinema in a way. Someone making a TikTok video, probably without knowing it, has some of the same energy or naivety or beauty of Lumière or Melies at the beginning of cinema.”
Some critics and academics have hailed you as an heir to Jean-Luc Godard, do you see the parallels?
“I’m not at the level of Godard, but Godard is a very important reference. Maybe because first of all he has a liking for quotations, which I have as well. I don’t know, maybe it’s a lame thing to do, a lot of film-makers think quotations are lame, but this is how my brain is functioning. And then maybe it’s my interest in montage as a kind of tool, not only for telling a narrative but also for breaking the narrative. Eisenstein is also very important for me, as a film-maker but also a theorist. The structure of the film is as important for me as the content or the style.”
Your new film’s heroine Angela posts foul-mouthed satirical videos online using a creepy digital avatar modelled on controversial social media personality Andrew Tate. Is this a commentary on Tate’s recent legal troubles in Romania, where he faces possible charges for rape and human trafficking?
“There is an Andrew Tate reference, but actually we shot the film in September last year and many people didn’t know about him back then. It exploded a few months after. But I knew him because of my older kid, who is 18 now, he has a kind of liking for this very toxic, horrible guy. So this is why I started to follow him. And I got a bit worried, to be honest, because these kind of people attract a lot of gullible naïve young people and create these fake values. Yes there are parts of the film where the actress Ilinca Manolache uses this avatar, which is actually her avatar in real life. So when I cast her I said I also wanted to cast her avatar. It’s her creation, and then we did the texts together, so to speak. It is kind of caricaturing and criticising, but in such a horrendous or exaggerated way it becomes quite on the edge, which I like.”
The cult German action director Uwe Boll, notorious for challenging his critics to fight in the boxing ring, has a cameo in your film. Why?
“When I wrote the first part of the film, the idea of this young woman driving around in the city to do her job, I knew I wanted her to encounter another film shooting, another creator of images. So I thought about Uwe Boll, despite the fact that he makes films very different from mine, I like him for at least one reason. At some point there was a petition of film critics against him, and when I read that I thought: I don’t think I would survive something like that! I have great empathy towards him because in the end he challenged his critics to a boxing match. But still he went on. So Uwe Boll is a model for me, I want to go on. Even if everybody tells me I should go home, or kill myself, or whatever, I will go on. Ha!”
You and Boll make very different films of course, but perhaps the common ground is that you both ignore conventional rules of “good taste”?
“That’s true. It is also true that bad taste still has a little bit of power to offend people. Some people are offended by what they consider vulgae, I discovered this with my last but one film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Many people in Romania were disgusted with such a bad taste film. And then I thought: look! There is something to explore here, this bad taste thing.”
Good taste has always been the enemy of great art surely?
“Yes it’s true, and the enemy of kitsch I think. The enemy of niceness, or cuteness. I saw Barbie yesterday, and there are scenes with a lot of imagination and competence in the film-making. But to be honest, I think 20 years ago Tim Burton could have made it with his eyes closed, without such a fuss. And then it is like a huge commercial. This is something so obvious and so cynical that it’s interesting to watch: such a long, nice, funny commercial in a way. But the thing I really disliked is this cuteness. It’s a very cute film. Maybe it’s good for young people, but not for me. I don’t want to make cute things.”
