Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World review – giddy Romanian experiment – The Guardian
Romanian film-maker Radu Jude was a Golden Bear winner at Berlin final 12 months for his wackily entitled Covid-era film Unhealthy Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Now he’s again with one other garrulous essay-movie-slash-black-comedy collage, speckled with literary quotations, jokes, cinephile sideswipes and references to Romania’s most infamous international resident: our very personal Andrew Tate. The title is a maxim from the Polish poet and aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec.
It’s one other skittery, jittery film, an experimental journey through which narrative is of merely incidental significance, compulsively testing the boundaries and textures of latest expertise, at all times digressing and interrupting itself and intrigued by the world as filtered by the film display, the Zoom display, 4K, 8K, livestream and TikTok and elevating a steady white noise of grievance about fashionable Romania: the degradation of its public house, the distress of its persevering with infatuation with robust leaders, its racism and its incompetent embrace of capitalism and the free market. It’s additionally a film concerning the manufacturing of the picture: one of many characters dully ponders the actual fact of Jean-Luc Godard’s assisted loss of life – although maybe Godard’s spirit lives on right here in Radu Jude.
I wasn’t certain concerning the last part of this movie: a really prolonged steady locked-off shot of a household group whose story discloses the best way through which employees are exploited: I felt it leaked a number of the power out of the movie, although undoubtedly mimicked the exact approach through which company staff, gig freelancers and the themes of a movie may be casually uncared for in the identical type of approach. However there may be such a fizz of concepts right here.
The topic is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a harassed and sleep-deprived manufacturing assistant for a Romanian movie and video firm in Bucharest – the place an indication grimly proclaims it as a “martyred metropolis”. Her employer, with whom she seems to have a short-term contract as negligible as the connection between Uber driver and passenger, has a fee from a cold Austrian enterprise with branches in Romania whose diffident advertising director is performed by Nina Hoss.
The Austrians need them to create a security video, exhorting employees to put on security clothes and gear, containing an affidavit from somebody who has been disabled at work, and ready to say on digital camera that it was all all the way down to their failure to put on helmets and so on – in different phrases, accountable themselves quite than the bosses. Poor Angela has to drive round endlessly and frantically, utilizing her smartphone to audition disabled people who find themselves ready to do that in return for the promised thousand €1,000 payment. It’s a depressing life for Angela, whose solely pleasure is posting clips on TikTok the place she pretends to be Andrew Tate: spewing misogynist bile and adoration for Vladimir Putin. She even will get to interview the cult German director Uwe Boll (enjoying himself) well-known for his bad-taste pulp shockers and his loathing for snobby critics. These movies are in color; the remainder of her life is in grainy monochrome.
Together with all this, Jude samples clips from a Ceaușescu-era Romanian movie from 1981 entitled Angela Strikes On, starring the now veteran Romanian actress Dorina Lazar as a taxi driver who finds herself in a relationship with one in every of her passengers. At one stage, Nina Hoss’s character marvels on the monolithic and grotesque “Ceauseșcu palace” in the midst of town: the 1981 movie has a scene set within the quite nice “Uranus” neighbourhood that was razed simply after that to make approach for this colossal monument to the tyrant’s ego.
Are the 2 Angelas in parallel universes? Not fairly. The 2 ladies are occupying the identical fictional house: this exact same former taxi driver within the 1981 movie, now a lot older and performed after all by Lazar within the current day, solutions the door to Angela (the older girl is thrilled by the karmic duplication of their names and the similarity of their jobs). Her son is now a wheelchair consumer, hoping to be within the video. Her lover within the 1981 movie, performed by László Miske is there, too – now her ageing however sprightly husband, gallantly flirting with this youthful Angela. It’s this wheelchair utilizing son Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan) who will get the €1,000 gig, however lastly causes an prolonged disaster by insisting on digital camera that it was the employers’ fault.
And the remainder of the time we simply see Angela’s confused, wearisome existence and maybe the excessive second comes when she has to drive Nina Hoss’s haughty character to her fancy Bucharest resort from the airport and tells her that the roads are so harmful (resulting from lack of city planning or security) that they’re just about lined with makeshift crosses: memorials to these killed on the freeway. Jude then brings the movie to a halt and performs in an prolonged still-image montage of those real-life Romanian roadside crosses of all styles and sizes: some raggedy, some expensive-looking. Jude invitations us to see how the entire topic is enjoying on Angela’s thoughts: her father’s grave has been exhumed as a result of a company claims to personal that a part of the cemetery.
The result’s bitter and unusual and fragmented and infrequently bizarrely humorous. It’s a movie that freewheels round and refuses to alight on a specific tone, or resolve what the central level actually is, or to inform us exactly what kind of a satire it’s, or if it’s a satire in any respect. Opinions could divide about that last part – as I say, I wasn’t certain. However it is a cinema of concepts, and the Romanian new wave remains to be reaching spectacular crests.
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