A Romanian satire exposes media chaos and tyranny.
In Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s latest satire, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, post-Ceaușescu Romania looks very much like life in the United States under Biden. If that seems like an unfair statement, consider that Jude observes the moral leveling that occurred after Covid and the absurdities that now define the modern world.
It’s shocking to realize that no other moviemaker is attempting Jude’s critique. Fact is, the film’s sharp social observations derive from the way the media have mangled our political perception. Legacy media have failed us, and Jude pinpoints that catastrophe through his hustling protagonist Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache), a tough, tattooed, blonde production assistant who drives a stick shift through hostile traffic. She’s assigned to video-interview film victims of industrial accidents for a TV program that promotes corporate safety. Her multicolored, sequined party dress is inappropriate, but no more than the glamour-puss hostesses of TV news and public-affairs shows. Jude pushes the comparison, with gum-smacking Angela blowing bubbles as she curses at male-chauvinist drivers; it gives the character the raucous authenticity of a survivor.
Radu’s road-movie premise recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic Weekend (1968), once considered Godard’s greatest film, before dystopian movies became comic-book escapism. Radu maintains Godard’s social critique through the use of competing narratives: black-and-white scenes of Angela’s sojourn are collaged with color fantasy scenes of her unibrowed alter-ego Bobita, and these are intercut with clips from an obscure 1981 Romanian film about a lady cab driver, Angela Goes On, by Lucian Bratu. Additional, slo-mo doc footage of depressed, quotidian Romania extends the movie to nearly three hours, which itself becomes a commentary on media excess and the crisis of impatient social-media narratives.
Yes, Jude is brilliant. I knew that from his 2016 historical epic Aferim! But he’s also conscientious without being didactic. (That’s why John Waters is a fan.) He’s driven to make naïve viewers aware of media processes that they take for granted, and his exposé sometimes gets so close to the true insanity of Millennial media that it looks like a découpage of propaganda and emotional chaos. Yet Do Not Expect is saved by Jude’s wit and his vast cultural sophistication: He goes from a very Godardian interview with Goethe’s “grand- grand-granddaughter” (played by Nina Hoss) to études on Charlie Hebdo, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” music video, a riff on Waiting for Godot, and a perspective on a Ceaușescu superstructure built through eminent domain (“second-largest building to the Pentagon . . . Ceaușescu was an imbecile,” Angela informs Miss Goethe).
Jude’s conclusion shows a real-time argument between the family Angela chooses for her public-service-announcement project and her production-company bosses who take the side of the corporation that accuses and argues just like government authoritarians. But at his most poetic, Jude pauses for a shot of a clock without arms, then a brief dissertation on Angela’s fear of a dangerous 250-kilometer highway where more than 600 Christian crosses mark traffic fatalities — the ultimate, respectful tribute to Weekend and its recently deceased master.
Jude’s talent is not so disciplined as Godard’s genius, but he keeps the faith, even when a character muses that “a photo lasts longer than film.” Jude’s cynical social perceptions and teasing sympathy toward strivers like Angela and her common-man subjects surpass the efforts of all his clueless filmmaking contemporaries, such as Wes Anderson, who packs whimsy into his Roald Dahl anthology only to create solipsistic distraction. By contrast, Do Not Expect has enough audacity and insights for a dozen movies stuffed into one. The film’s plenitude shows how people subsist alongside the irresistible rise of media fascism. Jude faces the problem of art in the age of gaslighting.
