A film of two halves, two time periods and, in fact, two films, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World also tells two stories. In one the everyday travails of a production assistant driving around Bucharest auditioning injured people to appear in a public information film about workplace safety. In the other, snatches of a 1981 movie, Angela Moves On, the adventures of a female taxi driver in the same city 40 years earlier.
In the here and now we have Angela Raducanu (Ilinca Manolache), an earthy, forthright woman with a love of a dirty joke. When not charging about the city filming potential (injured) candidates for the film, Angela is uploading to TikTok, using a deepfake filter to pose as social-media influencer Andrew Tate, or someone very like him, posting stories about banging girls in the ass or how he guns his Maserati about town and generally protesting way too much about what a very macho man he is. In 1981, Angela Coman (Dorina Lazar) in her taxi, the ubiquitous Dacia 1300 (a rebadged Renault 12, car fans will know), deals with come-ons, drunks and the everyday nonsense that is a taxi driver’s lot in a coolly schoolmarmish fashion.
Tellingly, the modern era is shot black and white and on high-contrast grainy 16mm film, while the older film is sunny and colourful. There’s no way of getting confused about which one we’re watching. They act as counterpoints to each other. When modern Angela grabs some lunch, so does 1982 Angela. When one gets sexist treatment, so does the other. And so on.
Eventually the two women meet – Angela and Angela – the woman from 1982 now an old woman with a stick. And they have in words a conversation that’s already been going on in juxtaposed images about how the old Communist world, under the dictator Ceausescu – “…an imbecile. He destroyed Romania,” modern Angela says – measures up to the new one. Enslavement in the old corrupt regime versus enslavement to a job so demanding that modern Angela is at every moment on the verge of falling asleep at the wheel, no matter how much coffee she drinks. Sunny 1982 versus dark and monochrome 2023. There is comparing and contrasting, and 2023 isn’t always the winner.
In the film’s second half we see the making of the short film Angela Raducanu has been involved in setting up. Stuck in a wheelchair he’ll never leave, the injured man chosen as the finest example of workplace injury has his story interviewed out of him. But on each take there’s a nudge here, a tack there, and as time goes on the man’s story becomes less particular, more general, less accusatory, less authentic.
Here director writer Radu Jude is back in the territory of his first film, The Happiest Girl in the World, presenting film-making as a grim comedy of relentless compromise, lies and corporate capture. The embodiment of all this is corporate suit Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss), supposedly a great-great-great granddaughter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet, playwright, polymath and so on. How the mighty have fallen.
It is a comedy in the way that Radu Jude’s films often are. Like Bad Luck Banging or I Don’t Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians, there’s a through-the-fingers quality of extreme discomfiture. Ilinca Manolache is vivid and funny, and Dorina Lazar is benignly humane and together they offset some of Jude’s more nihilistic tendencies. The few short scenes they have together are the best moments in the film.
What looks initially like a gimmick – one film in dialogue with another – actually turns out to work really well, with the older film in effect keeping the newer one on its toes. Even so, Jude’s tendency to make his point and then make it again is fully evident. It goes on a bit, maybe. But, hey, it’s not the end of the world.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
