In Romania, Angela travels the country to interview people injured at work. One of which will be selected for an institutional video on safety at work. For Angela, it’s just a contract: the rest of the time, she earns her living as a driver with the Uber app. In Don’t expect too much from the end of the world (Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii), Radu Jude, the author of The Iconoclast Bad fuck or crazy porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc), transforms what appears to be a modest tale of ordinary madness into a teeming satire with universal ramifications.
Unveiled at the Locarno festival, where the film won the Special Jury Prize, Don’t expect too much from the end of the world is divided into two chapters. The first, the strongest, focuses on the very “automotive” daily life of Angela (Ilinca Manolache, who bursts through the screen). Always on the move, she almost lives in her car.
His meetings, which should be depressing since they are with people who have experienced terrible ordeals, often provoke laughter – certainly yellow, certainly grating. During the first of these meetings, Angela shows up at the family of a man who thought the interview would be virtual, and who is absent that morning.
So here is Angela installed in the living room, flanked by the candidate’s relatives, with whom she chats via Zoom: modern surrealism in all its… realism. Shortly after, in a traffic jam, Angela complains about the pollution to which she contributes…
Each stop by Angela is for Radu Jude the opportunity to approach in an oblique, irreverent manner, different facets of what we could call a “global socio-economic and environmental disintegration”.
And there are these TikTok videos that Angela records all the time, and where she parodies masculinist influencers by using a very bad filter which changes her into a man… In this regard, let Radu Jude’s humor be unusual or insolent, its bite is always fierce.
Like Angela in her vehicle, the film moves at full speed, stops for the duration of an encounter, resumes its course, then interrupts during some aside or some digression…
All this, interspersed with fascinating metanarrative segments during which Radu Jude integrates extracts from a 1981 film into his plot (Angela merges but leaves), dedicated to a taxi driver named… Angela. These passages echo the action in progress, even making it progress, up to a magnificent tête-à-tête between the two Angelas (Dorina Lazar, 83, reprises her role from yesteryear).
Absolute self-deprecation
All of this is put together in a way that is sometimes fluid, sometimes stumbling, as a reflection of Angela’s frenetic existence. Then, without warning, the narrative flow calms down, suddenly becoming meditative, during an interlude showing a succession of roadside memorials. All these people who died tragically, hit or behind the wheel and who, like the exhausted heroine, had to get from point A to point B, in a basically quite futile back and forth…
Ride to work, work to live, live to ride, die…
However, at the moment when the absurdity of existence hits us head-on, Radu Jude resumes his course and presses the accelerator pedal again for a brief second chapter. At this stage, we are in absolute self-deprecation, with the filming of the famous institutional video as a metaphor for an (institutional?) cinema which likes to teach lessons and which, draped in its good conscience, feasts on human misery.
The result is a fragmented fresco, but strangely cohesive and above all brilliant. In front Don’t expect too much from the end of the worldwe will not fail to agree that the adage is true: it is not because we laugh that it is funny.