Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

«One time we were shooting a porn film for some Danes and in the middle of the scene the guy couldn’t get it up anymore. So he got up from that hot ass under him, all naked and sexy as hell, and to get it back he went on PornHub on his phone. It struck me as apocalyptic». When he referred for the first time to his Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude said that it’s (also) about the complicated matter of image-making in our times. Back then, sometimes in December, I didn't take his word for it, as it seemed abstract; and because almost all of his films since The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) have been revolving around the topic, so nothing seemed special.

My bad; this new film is Jude's freest of all, a rare glimpse at something that has never happened before in cinema (and an even rarer understanding of everything that has happened) – not even Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2020) saw it coming. Although, in principle, it concludes perfectly a stylistic trilogy consisting of these two and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018). If the first two were one-woman-against-all narratives, with fierce protagonists struggling to do themselves justice (putting on a theatre show about the Romanian anti-Jewish massacre in Odessa, and respectively keeping her job as a teacher after an amateur porno of hers got on the Internet), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is much more unconventional as narrative and philosophy – precisely because it reaches a certain resigned despair where there’s no justice left.

Its protagonist, played by Ilinca Manolache – has anyone seen a better actress in recent cinema? – is a young factotum freelancer who has no mission with a capital M other than finishing just another endless day's work, and then another. The boiling agony of the film has to do precisely with the fact that the two days are not so-called exceptional events, but rather seem doomed to infinity. Even The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), Jude's debut from his Romanian New Wave period and the film with which Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World communicates best – about a young provincial girl who won a car and now has to film a silly commercial in Bucharest, while her parents try to convince her to sell the prize – however sardonic his humour, at least foresaw an end, that everything would be over once home.

[The film] has all its characters in the know, both spectators and protagonists of a slow burn disaster.

Angela, Manolache’s lead, works for a production company as a casting agent and driver (she also drives for Uber, in the spirit of Romania’s former liberal Minister of Labour in Romania, currently of Culture, saying that those who don't have enough money should get a second job). Her first job for today is to cast several victims of workplace accidents that all happened in a factory owned by an Austrian corporation: the chosen one would receive 500 euros to star in an educational main role to promote better usage of protection equipment among employees. The main condition of the client, beyond many corporate protocols, is that the victim should more or less play a role out of herself, telling the approved version of the story, in which the employee bears all the blame for the accident and now regrets it. The shooting is supposed to take place right on the following day. More narrative details wouldn’t do justice to the film: it sounds vindictive, righteous and sure of itself, while Jude is neither a demagogue nor a moralist – he cares little about giving life lessons but he is concerned, and his concerns are spectacular: very simple and ordinary spectacles, somehow similar to Chaplin’s dance of the bread rolls. A perfect setup for an apocalypse: Angela, alone on the street at 5 a.m., dressed in a flashy sequined evening-party dress and ready to start her 20-hour workday. She is punky, vulgar and slightly uneasy with herself, what (other) Romanians would call a stereotypical Bucharestian, one of the many self-conscious performers of toughness that this city has, willing to do just about anything to become more and more of an idea. A common thing about disaster films is that most of their characters are taken by surprise. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, an aphorism of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec's, has all its characters in the know, both spectators and protagonists of a slow burn disaster – otherwise they wouldn’t joke so freely about it and wouldn’t expect the apocalypse to be disappointing.

It is not the man who is vulgar, but the society in which he lives.

Vulgarity and its many double standards have become a main topic for Jude's cinema: in fact, since the 2000s, the New Romanian Wave has been condemned as vulgar in its dialogues, and the response used to say that hard life makes people like this, and young filmmakers are interested in how people talk in real life (Cristi Puiu was said to record street conversations and then use them in scripts), and Jude's films – especially this one and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – suggest something similar: it is not the man who is vulgar, but the society in which he lives; only Jude does not feel the need to excuse the vulgarity of the "common man", but integrates it into the idiosyncrasies of each character, along with erudition, conspiracy, charm, individualism, and circumstantial mischief, with the former being an inescapable condition of life under capitalism (Uppercase Print, about the case of Mugur Călinescu, a teenager whose anti-communist graffiti provoked secret police's paranoia and repression in the eighties, was very much about the same condition under communism).

Being presented somewhat in opposition to the generic corporate politeness has created a dominant discourse and fantasy , a new discreet extremism in itself, where vulgarity takes on a spirit of popular bravado. Jude is an unusual humanist, an anti-melodramatic one, and his characters’ worst and best are the very same. In a constant to-and-fro, Angela holds a fictitious video diary on TikTok in which she performs the other extremity: a macho trickster in the manner of a Balkan Andrew Tate (just a few days ago the Tate brothers celebrated their release from pretrial detention: «Respect for the judges, respect for Romania, respect for Romanian justice!»): criticism by exaggeration, as in Charlie Hebdo, she says. These moments are funnier than anything I’ve seen on the big screen recently, a reminder that nowadays’ comedy seems at this point better, smarter and faster on social media. Jude didn't create them but discovered similar ones that Manolache had been already doing on TikTok as a feminist collaborative project.

…a reminder that nowadays’ comedy seems at this point better, smarter and faster on social media.

In this first part of the road through Bucharest, a Romanian film from the eighties is intercut with Angela’s route: Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On (1981, written together with film critic Eva Sîrbu), a rare local landmark of feminism in communist cinema. The result becomes a small montage of Bucharest then and now – for example, the Uranus area, which appears in some of Bratu's sequences cited by Jude, was demolished in the 80s to make way for the People's Palace and the new surrounding blocks. On the surface, it seems a simple pairing: Angela, a taxi driver from 1981, Bucharest, and Angela, a driver from 2022, Bucharest. The two meet at one point with Dorina Lazăr, the original Angela, playing the mother of the chosen injured.

However Jude is once again at play: he recuts Angela Moves On and continues her (unhappy) story to the present day, in the spirit of the remix culture to which he seems so attached, but – more importantly – when editing the two trips through Bucharest he is almost scholarly interested in the documentary aspect of the first film, especially of the people who at that moment seem to have appeared without their will in the frame. By playing them in slow-motion, Jude speculates as to the public character of the private image and vice versa, which he will continue throughout the film – what is an epitaph, this last desire to communicate? Godard, who jumps into the void, owes no explanation to those who stand and watch? How is it that porn cinema, so invested in the illusion of intimacy, is made with so many people on set? What does it mean to sell your image to a corporation? Do advertisements dictate a society's subconscious or vice versa? And so on.

There's something else as well: if Lucian Bratu chose to fill his landscapes with impromptu portraits, human backgrounds, images of people unaware or surprised to become images, Jude's backgrounds are empty (the milky 16mm helps): moving cars, stationary cars, commercials and glass walls – the open space has closed in on itself and the transformation into images has become a condition, as it happens under the million eyes of surveillance cameras, but also a passion done wilfully by ourselves. It’s a paradoxical power, both popular and oligarchical, public and private. By their very production, the portrait and self-portrait have become impersonal watermarked landscapes (watching a screener on my watermarked Activate Windows desktop was a joy) and the terms and conditions are, more than ever: between the lines of which wonderful terrible things happen, such as Jude’s film.