During a film that reckons with (and is a reckoning for) meme culture, there is an intrusive meme that springs to mind. Imagine a picture of a long-in-the-tooth Jean Luc-Godard with a mournful ‘Died 2022’ hovering over him. Now, next to it, imagine the poster of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, with a celebratory ‘Born 2023’ above it. A ‘Welcome Back Mr New Wave’ bridges the two below, and a sweeping statement about the reincarnative complexity of one of modern cinema’s most bold and singular step forward (or sideways, it’s difficult to say a mere year after its festival premiere) has been made. That is, of course, completely reductive and also a good example of how impossible this low-key epic is to define. So let’s start again with the most rudimentary of constructs: its ‘plot’.
Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache) is tired. “Dead tired”, in fact, as she reiterates at every possible occasion. Her 5am alarm is greeted with visceral disdain as it heralds her day ahead, due to include a series of thankless encounters with victims of workplace accidents to find the perfect mascot for a safety-at-work video, produced by a conglomerate of unfeeling, algorithmic overlords who care more about optics that truth. To keep herself amused and awake at the wheel of her car, she whips out her phone and dons a horrifying TikTok filter that turns her into Bobita, a goateed, bushy-browed parody of a vehemently toxic hyper masculine influencer who speaks in eye-wateringly blue tirades, often so disgusting they boomerang back towards Chaucerian genius. Meanwhile, her story runs parallel to footage of another Romanian odyssey, Lucian Bratu’s 1982 taxi driver drama Angela Moves On, and Jude splices this local classic into 2022’s Angela’s mundane, blackly funny journey in increasingly bathetic ways. As the hours of her day trudge slowly by, the world gets more depressingly modern by the second, and everything were to end at that very moment, no one would be surprised, or even all that bothered.
Shades of Under the Skin’s transit van odyssey can be found in Angela’s soul-hollowing daily grind, facing misogynistic encounters with fellow drivers and suspicious street dwellers lurking around her means of transport. There’s also something of Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, a relentless ticking clock narrative that holds a tremendous amount of bad feeling as it approaches an uncertain destination. Yet it can’t be overstated how wholly new what Jude is doing feels with this. Granted, his satirical chops have been proven before; it’s tough to work out what wasn’t skewered by previous Berlinale prize-winning feature Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but here, he hits a fine balance between sharp polemical filmmaking and a surprisingly involving gig economy grind storyline.
By the time its punishing real-time climax caps off Jude’s thesis with a pathetic whimper, one will either be exhausted or electrified by his vision, painstakingly drawn-out and naturalistically assembled to provoke.
While stretches could be mundane beyond belief, they’re anchored and enhanced by Manolache’s miracle of a performance, chewing bubble gum and spitting spiky insults at every turn. Sporting a blindingly sparkly dress, her Angela looks like she’s in a perpetual walk of shame, hungover from a decade’s worth of nights on the tiles. She’s the epitome of the IDGAF mentality, flaunting a disgraceful work ethic that sees her stop off for unflattering car sex with her older boyfriend and let off steam by donning the Bobita mask and spouting some of the most horrifically witless nonsense your ears will ever suffer. There’s a question of just who she’s doing it for; a fellow PA at the film studios says they’re laughing at her content, yet there’s no sense of ambition or satirical intent in the creation of this obscene character, and one late-in-the-day sequence sees her snap into her alter ego with disturbing speed and unbelievable unawareness (a hilarious cameo from filmmaker/pugilist Uwe Boll sees him compare the Angela and Bobita dichotomy to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde one point). As a depiction of screaming into the abyss of online echo chambers, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is as accurate as it gets, and we can no doubt see shreds of ourselves in Angela’s determination to cultivate a pointless plot of digital land in the ever-expanding frontier where life is cheap and clicks are currency.
Jude doesn’t just stop there with Angela’s miserable existence with his hyper-modern hellscape. He weaves in uncanny sights around her; the sight of Nina Hoss’ striking face staring out of a Zoom background cityscape is like if George Orwell and Fritz Lang lived to see the age of conference calls, and a hysterically wry send-up of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues with green screen cue cards is a brilliantly damning indictment of how easy information can be manipulated with any bog-standard editing software. Moments like these rub up fantastically with aspects of Romanian culture he is clearly fuming about, and when he takes you on a structuralist digression into mourning those taken by meaningless traffic accidents, it hits like a ton of bricks. His tonal control and incision has grown massively since Golden Bear win in 2021, and there’s a universality to his messaging that not only captures the unbearable weight of being alive in this annoyingly noisy world, not only destroys the corruption of corporate art and the flattening of its subjects, but makes all of that engaging and funny as it is acerbic and depressing.
By the time its punishing real-time climax caps off Jude’s thesis with a pathetic whimper, one will either be exhausted or electrified by his vision, painstakingly drawn-out and naturalistically assembled to provoke. In the end, he’s planted a seed of cinematic revolution here, and whether he’ll follow in the footsteps of Godard or Varda or start his own personal new wave remains to be seen. His body of work so far has been encapsulated in this nearly three-hour collage of digital decrepitude and algorithmic ennui that prepares us for just how lame our impending apocalypse may be; we shouldn’t expect too much from the end of the world, even though it expects way too much from us.
Do not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is out now on Digital Platforms via Sovereign Films
