For a long time, I thought Adam McKay was going to be the only big movie satirist of our times. The Big Short was such a scathing indictment of the financial industry, that I really hoped we would get more and more pitch black social critiques from the talented comedic director. Well, a few so-so McKay movies and a pandemic opened the opportunity for someone to step into the top movie satirist. That someone is Romanian director Radu Jude, who burst onto my radar with the dark, delirious, wonderfully named Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. His follow up is in the same vein, reminding everyone Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, because let’s face it we’re all screwed already. Jude brings on the darkness, with lots of laughter in tow.
Jude’s main character is Angela (Ilinca Manolache). Angela is a typical blue collar modern Romanian woman: she’s overworked, underpaid, and endlessly in pursuit of a better life but gaining no traction, resorting to, um, a fascinating persona for more clicks on TikTok. Her latest job in the movie industry is interviewing workers for a company run by a German boss (Nina Hoss) that’s trying to appear more worker friendly. Jude intercuts present day Angela with another Angela: Dorina Lanzar from the 1981 Romanian Film Angela Moves On to paint a comparison with the Angelas of 1981 and the ones of today.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World doesn’t need to be 3 hours long. I’m guess Jude never hired an editor for this one. The director is intent on very long takes on purpose, trying to highlight the hour to hour boredom and exasperation poor modern Angela goes through in her hustles. He could get his point across with one or two of these long takes, and then just constantly showing traffic, or wait times, things like that. But no: we get somewhere between 5 and 15 LONG driving sequences that really hammer his point home. There’s 30-45 minutes right there that could be gone. I’m also not sure about the 1981 video footage either. Every now and again Jude finds some really potent parallel commentary with his present day tale, but sometimes the grainy old footage really derails from the really juicy stuff in his present day tale.
And no one captures the cynical zeitgeist better than Jude today. His bread & butter is having characters say one thing, while he shows us the exact opposite thing happening in reality. One character in his movie has to give a speech about how wonderful this German company is, but you can clearly see they are wheelchair bound, in a really sketchy apartment, in a really sketchy part of Bucharest. Jude plays those scenes completely straight, which makes the cruel bleak humor that much more funny. About every 45 minutes he finds perfect acid tongued magic with one of the scenarios he portrays. Here’s a tease for one: Angela has to meet with an executive of a cemetery company. There’s also the funniest Zoom call of all time, and Jude’s last 40 minutes of the movie: a deranged one take shot that captures the essence of everything he’s trying to do with this film.
There’s no apocalypse in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. But that’s Radu Jude’s point. When the end happens, we’re too wrapped up in an unfair system to really care. Or even worse, this is the endtimes, we’re in one of Dante’s circles of hell right now. That could make most people depressed. But if you’re like Radu Jude or myself, it’s better to just laugh it off and move on.