Driving endlessly through hazy, sun-deprived Bucharest to scout potential interview subjects for a corporate video, an overworked and underpaid production assistant named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) battles traffic, construction, and the weight of her own eyelids. The irony that she’s risking life and limb to help produce a PSA for job-site safety is not lost on our heroine, and neither is the fact that her overlords are only truly interested in exercising caution when it comes to covering their asses (they’re offering victims not-so-subtle hush money in exchange for participation in the videos). Angela’s white-hot loathing of her time-sucking, gas-guzzling gig is palpable, but it’s also sublimated beneath steady, pounding waves of boredom. Blond-tressed and statuesque in a sparkly, sequined T-shirt, she’s an unlikely and indelible embodiment of alienated labor.
To blow off steam (or maybe just to stay awake), Angela punctuates her errands by recording outrageously profane videos in character as “Bobita,” a racist, sexist, xenophobic alter ego addressing “a nation of sluts and pimps.” “You won’t catch me dead here,” crows Bobita, who’s been modeled, visually and rhetorically, after Andrew Tate, the notorious kickboxer turned social media star who was recently under house arrest in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape. Angela’s scenes are shot in black and white on grainy 16 mm celluloid, but when she transforms into Bobita, the format switches to cellphone video, with Tate’s visage digitally superimposed over her own. The result is a wonderfully layered sight gag that renders Bobita as a blurry, androgynous refugee from the uncanny valley, at once hyper-macho and strangely coquettish. Tate, who got rich off his grift as the king of toxic masculinity, would not be amused.
He might be the only one: Bobita is the comic creation of the year, a spleen-venting Greek chorus in a modern odyssey through a crumbling European metropolis. As its title suggests, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has distinctly apocalyptic vibes; where some movies evoke dystopia by way of special effects, writer-director Radu Jude simply keeps his lens trained on everyday life, refracted through multimedia prisms that distort it like a fun-house mirror. In this degraded present tense, everybody—even a posturing shock artist like Bobita—can be infamous for 15 seconds. To paraphrase the author of “The Hollow Men,” this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a TikTok.
When Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World premiered last fall at various international film festivals—including Locarno, Toronto, and New York—it made an explosive impact. Imagine a dirty bomb blowing a hole in all that surrounding art-house austerity. Such shrapnel-like sharpness is Jude’s stock-in-trade: In a pop-cultural moment that’s increasingly come to be defined by political provocation, the Bucharest-born director’s staunchly incorrect sensibility places him in the vanguard of contemporary edgelord auteurs. After cutting his teeth as an assistant director on his countryman Cristi Puiu’s harrowing, pitch-black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)—a film widely credited with kick-starting the influential movement known as the New Romanian Cinema—Jude made his feature-director debut with The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), a gentle but pointed comedy whose preteen protagonist is tapped to star in a car commercial, only to receive a harsh lesson in the realities of the hard sell. The theme of behind-the-scenes satire continued in 2018’s superb I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, in which a young female theater director attempts to dramatize a dark chapter in Romanian history only to suffer threats of government censorship. Her struggles with the project—and the attendant questions about the ethical representation of violence and genocide—provide the spine for a movie that both celebrates and subverts the impulse to re-create the past.
In 2021, Jude scored international headlines—and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival—for his kamikaze comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a delirious, satirical tour de force in which a female history teacher becomes a local pariah after a homemade sex tape gets uploaded to an X-rated website. Carefully divided into three parts that increasingly veer away from straightforward narrative—including extended, stylized digressions into Godardian essay-film territory and documentary interludes depicting work and play in the shadow of a pandemic—Bad Luck is swift, confrontational, and self-consciously obnoxious; a shot of a priest wearing a face mask emblazoned with the words “I Can’t Breathe” dares to be deconstructed. Such semiotic high jinks are catnip to critics looking to anoint vanguard auteurs, but unlike, say, Yorgos Lanthimos—whose Poor Things ultimately flatters its audience under the guise of subversion—one gets the feeling Jude couldn’t care less about award races or even good reviews. In the film’s funniest sequence, Angela ends up crashing the set of a science-fiction thriller being directed by none other than Uwe Boll, who crows about literally getting into the ring with the critics who panned his movies and beating the shit out of them. “They came, and I smashed them,” says the bullet-headed director of Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne. “That’s the history of cinema,” Angela replies.
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Suffice it to say that Jude knows plenty about the history of cinema, and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has been carefully annotated for cinephiles via a series of thoughtful but scattershot homages ranging from art house to trash-humping. Jude’s style is to keep bouncing images, ideas, and epigrams off of each other until they either spark meaning or become redundant—a throw-everything-at-the-wall style that might be called shitpost modernism. The dialogue is peppered with allusions to current affairs, including the war in Ukraine, yet the script’s two biggest reference points bridge the gap between past and present, as well as between the Old and New Worlds. Firstly, Angela’s adventures behind the wheel directly invoke Romanian director Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Goes On, about a female taxi driver winding her way through Bucharest. The film, while by no means famous, is a key audiovisual artifact of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime, and, in an inspired act of solidarity, Jude edits footage from Bratu’s movie into his own, drawing pointed parallels between images of a country buckling beneath dictatorship and one supposedly liberated by democracy. Forty years ago, Bratu’s film flummoxed the country’s censors by embedding its critique into a deceptively banal slice-of-life style, with the titular cabbie as a passive tour guide puttering, quietly, through scenes of widespread poverty. On the other side of the millennium, Jude leans into the idea of Angela 2.0 as a rhetorical shit-stirrer, duly inventorying injustices at every intersection, as well as a directorial surrogate. “I satirize through caricature,” she announces at one point, effectively instructing the film’s audience on how to watch it.
Jude’s other guiding light is one that will be more familiar to Western viewers: the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan’s landmark video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—in which he silently flips through a series of cue cards containing his cryptic, poetic lyrics—becomes an important motif in the film’s second half, including in an extraordinary, 30-minute, single-take sequence that is probably the best scene of the year so far. This extraordinarily choreographed and acted static shot not only serves as the climax to Angela’s labors, but also ropes in Bratu’s version of the character—now a senior citizen and played by the original actress, Dorina Lazar—for a kind of metatextual coup de grâce. After two hours of relentless digression and momentum, Jude’s camera comes to rest on the “winner” of Angela’s search—a wheelchair user recently out of a coma—and depicts, in excruciating detail, his participation in a spectacularly disingenuous PSA designed to absolve its producers of all responsibility for his condition. For what feels like a small eternity, the man’s testimony about the nature of his accident is cheerfully critiqued, revised, and eventually silenced altogether; under cover of corporate politeness, a broken man is reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy and then a literal placeholder—an absurdist doppelgänger for Dylan, except his cards are blank, waiting for somebody to fix them in post. “Don’t worry, we’ll write what we said we would,” says one of the filmmakers, lying through his teeth. Not that anybody on set believes him anyway. As the man himself said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; with fresh air in short supply, Jude’s brilliantly corrosive movie invites us to breathe in a toxic lungful.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.