Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – first-look review

Car cul­ture is neolib­er­al cul­ture: The promise of per­son­al lib­er­ty, of mobil­i­ty and agency in nav­i­gat­ing the world, means trad­ing away the com­mons for com­pe­ti­tion, every man for him­self on sprawl­ing roads choked with oth­er rad­i­cal­ly empow­ered, rad­i­cal­ly atom­ised free-mar­ket actors. 

Direc­tor Radu Jude recre­at­ed the bru­tal­i­ty of Romania’s feu­dal past in Afer­im!, remem­bered the shame­ful eth­nic ani­mus of the World War Two years and not­ing its era­sure by lat­ter-day eth­nona­tion­al­ism in I Do Not Care If We Go Down in His­to­ry as Bar­bar­ians, and logged the mad­ness of lock­down-era viral cul­ture and para­noia in Bad Luck Bang­ing. With his new film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, he has made one of the great anti – car cul­ture films, which means that the vicious, hilar­i­ous satirist of con­tem­po­rary Roma­nia has now turned his atten­tion ful­ly onto the nation’s rela­tion­ship to the Euro­pean Union.

An open­ing title card describes Do Not Expect… as a film ​“in con­ver­sa­tion” with Angela Moves On, a Roman­ian film from 1981 about a female taxi­cab dri­ver, which the crit­ic Flavia Dima has praised for its fem­i­nist depic­tion of a self-suf­fi­cient work­ing woman. In plen­ti­ful excerpts from the old­er film, we see Angela (played by the icon­ic Roman­ian actress Dori­na Lazar) behind the wheel, mak­ing her way through the world, often trav­el­ing the same streets as anoth­er, mod­ern-day Angela, played with a sim­i­lar but more vocal no-non­sense affect by Ilin­ca Manolache. 

Manolache and Jude’s Angela is a pro­duc­tion assis­tant, and the major­i­ty of the film fol­lows her over the course of a sin­gle, 16-or-18-hour work­day, criss­cross­ing the city in her own car, on con­stant errands that give a cramped, neck-craned-out-the-win­dow neo­re­al­ist view of con­tem­po­rary Bucharest, its bill­boards and glob­al cor­po­rate HQ office-tow­ers, con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion sites and weedy poor neighbourhoods.

Angela’s set of wheels sig­ni­fy any­thing but inde­pen­dence: she’s cut off, honked at, cat­called, and con­stant­ly slam­ming brakes, swear­ing, and flip­ping off oth­er dri­vers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ring­tone, sig­nal­ing the arrival of yet anoth­er task, is Beethoven’s 9^th, the offi­cial anthem of the EU), appeal­ing to her team spir­it — and, implic­it­ly, her eco­nom­ic pre­car­i­ty as a project-based work­er — as they send her over to the air­port to pick up a for­eign guest, or to pick up lens­es from a back­lot where Uwe Boll is shoot­ing a cheap nonunion mon­ster movie. (Yes, you read that right. The film’s picaresque struc­ture yields many such one-off setpieces.) 

Angela’s main project is to vis­it the homes of injured work­ers. Her pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny has tak­en a con­tact to pro­duce a work­place safe­ty video for an Aus­tri­an fur­ni­ture man­u­fac­tur­er; she must record brief inter­views with labor­ers who have var­i­ous­ly suf­fered paral­y­sis or dis­mem­ber­ment while work­ing unpaid over­time in shod­dy con­di­tions, and her boss­es will select one to appear in the film and implore their ex-col­leagues to please take respon­si­bil­i­ty for their own safety. 

The mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive com­mis­sion­ing the video is played by Nina Hoss, in anoth­er iter­a­tion of San­dra Hüller’s role in Maren Ade’s 2016 film Toni Erd­mann: an über-cold exec­u­tive endur­ing stilt­ed glob­al Eng­lish with her obse­quious Roman­ian sub­con­trac­tors, in this case in an extend­ed meet­ing in which her dis­em­bod­ied head floats like Zardoz against a Zoom back­drop on a con­fer­ence-room monitor.

In a brazen irony typ­i­cal of Jude, Angela chugs astro­nom­i­cal amounts of caf­feinat­ed bev­er­ages in order to stay awake and alert as her day on this job stretch­es into night. To stay sane, she records Tik­Toks, while dri­ving or wait­ing for appoint­ments: she has an influ­encer per­sona, a manos­phere guru named Bobi­ta achieved via an Andrew Tate fil­ter, with grease­paint eye­brows, shiny bald head, and chin soft as a poached egg; the fil­ter flick­ers on and off dur­ing her grotesque rants on misog­y­ny and mate­ri­al­ism. (A vagi­na, Bobi­ta tells his fol­low­ers, is like Roma­nia: eager to be fucked.)

When pressed, Angela explains that her micro-viral per­sona is a satire. (In fact, Bobi­ta is Manolache’s own cre­ation.) But the satire has an edge that she walks right up to with her cara­pace of pro­fes­sion­al blunt­ness and Bobita’s release-valve scat­ol­ogy. Even still, she cul­ti­vates her own high­brow lit­er­ary inter­ests (when not drop­ping obscene dou­ble-enten­dres about Muriel Spark when in char­ac­ter), and sub­tly engages with the work­ing-class fam­i­lies whose homes she vis­its, with del­i­cate agree­abil­i­ty redi­rect­ing their polit­i­cal griev­ances towards larg­er sys­temic issues and away from, say, gypsies.

As in Bar­bar­ians and Bang­ing, Jude takes an exag­ger­at­ed-or-is-it look at the casu­al prej­u­dices in con­tem­po­rary Roman­ian soci­ety, in far­ci­cal extend­ed scenes in which char­ac­ters blurt out Covid con­spir­a­cies or racial slurs at inop­por­tune moments. His capa­cious sense of humour also encom­pass­es shag­gy-dog sto­ries and half-remem­bered anec­dotes, know­ing meta-com­men­tary about film­mak­ing, and riffs on cur­rent events unfold­ing over the late sum­mer and ear­ly autumn of 2022, such as the death of Eliz­a­beth II (Bobi­ta, with one eye always on the world beyond Romania’s bor­ders, claims to have dou­ble-teamed a few skanks with Charles III.)

At 163 min­utes that fly by, the film is an end­less scroll of ironypilled polit­i­cal incor­rect­ness, dis­junc­tive absur­dism, inside jokes, riffs ripped from the head­lines, and left­ist anger try­ing not extin­guish itself in despair. All of this marks Jude as one of our most Extreme­ly Online film­mak­ers — with the hap­py caveat that his free­wheel­ing for­mal­ism means that when one final­ly look up from Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, one feels ener­gised rather than enervated.