Can something still be called a “new wave” if it’s been going on for twenty years? It became clear in the mid-2000s that cool stuff was going on in Romanian cinema and it got labeled a “New Wave” as such things are inclined to be, but the filmmakers who emerged at that time like Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu are still doing important work today and they’re still making movies that are roughly of a kind with what came before, but at a certain point does this just become a new normal? That’s a little hard to say, at some point it’s just semantics, but it does perhaps speak to a certain slowdown in interest around a once exciting movement during the 2010s, but things do seem to be heating up again at least a little during the 2020s. Last year we saw a major work from a revitalized Mungiu with his film R.M.N. for example, but the guy who’s really putting Romania back on the map has got to be Radu Jude, who’s a bit younger than those other guys and while he fits into the Romanian New Wave his style tends to be more confrontational and energetic than what you get from someone like Puiu. In fact I’d say he’s one of the best satirists working in cinema right now and has been on something of a run of making urgent movies that take a scabrous look at life right now and the various absurdities in modern society. His latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, continues that run and perhaps does what he does on the largest scale yet.
The film posits itself as being in dialogue with a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Merge Mai Departe, which as far as I can tell has never been shown outside of Romania and frankly doesn’t look very impressive from the various clips we see included throughout the film. That movie appears to be about a female taxi driver and her day to day experiences in Bucharest during the early 80s. This is contrasted with another woman named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) who also has a job that involves a lot of driving around but does so in a very contemporary setting. Angela works as a production assistant and is presently working with an advertising company on some sort of workplace training video themed around encouraging workers to always wear their safety gear. This video will involve interviews with people who’ve had workplace accidents whose stories are meant to serve as cautionary tales and Angela’s job is to drive around the city making audition videos of these people to help the filmmakers make a final decision of who to include. Angela is not happy about this job: she’s been working outrageous hours, has an unreasonable boss, and finds the project itself to be rather dubious. To cope she’s been making these vulgar TikToks in which she uses some sort of (not very convincing) deep fake filter and voice distorter to make her look like a man and in character does these deeply misogynistic rants as a parody of “manosphere” figures.
One of the first things that jump out at you about Jude’s films, or at least the satirical films he’s been making of late, is just how of the moment they are and also how applicable they feel to issues that are occurring throughout the western world despite seemingly being very laser focused on life in Romania. His 2018 film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (he’s not a fan of brevity when it comes to titles) focused on the various debates raging in that country about how to address their past as one of the axis powers and how that squares with the rise of right wing nationalism in Europe today. Seems like a pretty provincial concern, but the debates it raised struck me as basically identical to any number of similar debates raging closer to home about things like school library books. Meanwhile Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was one of the first movies to meaningfully engage with what life during Covid was like while also raising salient points about the way debates around social issues have become hypercharged in our increasingly online world.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World continues in that tradition in part because the woman at the center of the film is something of a symbol for burned out and fed up (though ultimately complacent) millennial workers. I’m pretty sure the “end of the world” referred to in the title is something like “the end of history” or “late capitalism” because it’s basically a takedown of the “rise and grind’ mindset and the borderline exploitative work culture in the world and especially in the lower rungs of the film industry. Angela (the younger) is said to be working dangerously long hours for this production company in service of a project without artistic merit which will just be used enable the even greater exploitation of other workers even lower down the chain than her and which itself exploits the misfortune of people who’ve experienced the worst of what employment has to offer via workplace accidents. The movie lays all these conditions out but Angela is not exactly an angry rebel about all of this, at least outside of some relatively empty rhetoric. Like most people in her position she kind of just goes along with conditions, cursing under her breath about it, and tries to find ways to make the most of things and find daily pleasures along the way. Her activities in some ways mirror and are contrasted with the woman from the old Romanian film, though the exact ends of this comparison aren’t always entirely clear. The elder Angela’s life in Ceaușescu’s Romania doesn’t seem great but also doesn’t seem to be worlds away either at least when it comes to day to day life, though the full context of that film isn’t entirely clear and I’m not sure how much of a accurate depiction of the era it’s supposed to be.
Aside from the clips from that older movie, the younger Angela’s Tiktoks, and an extended epilogue, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is shot in low contrast black and white for no readily apparent reason except to contrast it with the aforementioned clips. It’s certainly not a decision made to make it feel like a period piece because the film is otherwise almost outlandishly topical and willing to make extremely “of the moment” references that place the movie very much in the here and now. For example we get talk about the recent deaths of Queen Elizabeth and John Luc Godard and there are mocking references to the online influencer Andrew Tate (who was imprisoned in Romania recently) and other less specific signposts of daily life in these times. That gives the movie a lot of energy and topicality but there are places where the movie lets its stream of consciousness go astray. The movie runs a full 163 minutes, which is probably longer than necessary. Those clips from the older movie make for an interesting contrast but I don’t think we needed as many of them as we got and there are other flights of fancy like an extended montage of gravestones that go on forever and probably slow down the momentum more than anything. There’s also this extended epilogue at the end done in a single unbroken shot which makes a very salient point but which maybe didn’t need to be as long as it was. Still, for whatever misteps the film makes it’s still part of a larger project by Jude that I’m very much “here for.” We need more voices like this making movies that are engaged with the world today and I think this is going to prove to be quite the interesting time capsule in years to come.
**** out of Five
The Movie Vampire 