Review: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)
Capitalism is killing us -- just ask a Romanian gig worker
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)
Written and directed by Radu Jude
Much of this black comedy film from well known Romanian director Radu Jude is a day in the life of a 30-year-old Romanian gig worker. At the end of her youth, Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is an Uber driver and glorified gofer. She spends her days fighting her way through heavy traffic in Bucharest, a city supposedly much changed by capitalism into a labyrinth of shop fronts, office buildings, housing blocks, tram lines and heavy traffic — it’s like London without the red buses — trying to stay awake at the wheel after who knows how many 18-hour days. The only thing that distinguishes her from tens of thousands of similar young people without decent work in that former communist capital is that she actually does have an official job as an underpaid production assistant for an industrial film company that shoots short films and commercials for international clients.
But in addition, whenever Angela gets a breath or finds herself outside the car, she takes a TikTok video of herself, but not as herself. Using a filter that automatically changes her appearance to that of a bald, bearded, monobrowed, absolutely toxic male called Bobiţă, she spews sexist, racist, hateful boasts about his hoes and strippers and luxurious trips overseas. Here’s a sample culled from my memory of the contents of these clips — let’s call it a composite; don’t @ me1:
This is Bobiţă, and this is my London hotel, where I just left my penthouse and eight 16-year-old whores. We were going to go shopping at the Harold’s Department Store but instead they threw themselves at me and all beat off on my forehead. I had to fuck them all before I could eat my sandwich from room service.
Again, not a direct quote, but very much in the spirit of over a dozen clips she completes. These clips are clearly both a release for her rage (she does them “So I won’t go crazy,” she tells her mother) and an attempt to become something more than — or at least, other than -- a tired woman who sits in her car for almost her entire waking hours.
(At one point she does take a few minutes to have sex with her boyfriend, albeit in her car. For some reason this hurried, feverish humping made me think of the scene in “Do the Right Thing” where the Spike Lee character takes a leisurely hour off in the afternoon to have sex with his girlfriend in her bed. True, he doesn’t have to commute to her apartment; she lives around the corner. But when it comes to comparing sex-scene critiques of capitalism, I’d say Radu Jude wins.)
Cinematically, while Angela’s life as an errand-runner is filmed in the grainiest black-and-white – did they blow up 8mm footage? – the TikToks appear, as the filter that imposes Bobiţă’s visage occasionally slips to reveal her real appearance, in gorgeous color. Also in color are passages from a 1981 Romanian movie, “Angela Goes On”2 showing a woman named Angela as a taxi driver in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. She has to deal with the same sexism as modern-day Angela, though in our day it’s expressed more directly. These sequences act as context for the 21st century film, sometimes literally: if you look carefully, director Jude has set scenes of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” in exactly the same locales as the ones depicted in the 1981 film. Just because 21st century Angela has a mobile phone and swears, don’t think things have changed much in forty years. Despite the fall of communism, neither the attitudes toward women nor the way society wears them out, have passed away. So much for the Communist utopia (“the end of the world”?) or the capitalist dream.
This movie is more than two hours long, and a little tiring, but the main character is more tired than you are, so show some respect and keep paying attention.
There are two other color sections in the movie. The first comes during a scene at the end of Angela’s very long day when, still in the grainy black-and-white that characterizes her everyday existence, she picks up a VIP from the company that is paying her employer to shoot their industrial film. We’ve seen this woman previously, when Angela attends (dozes through) a production meeting and the VIP, a sleek corporate iceberg, skypes in from Vienna.
Conversing with Angela on the ride from the airport to her hotel, the woman notes that “the drivers here are very aggressive.” Agreeing, Angela tells her about an infamous Romanian highway with an average of over two fatal accidents per kilometer. The movie then jump-cuts to color footage of the roadside crosses that mark these deaths along the highway. Each shot is about two seconds long, and there are something like 180 crosses, some freshly painted and decorated, some rusted, some with names and dates still visible, most of them not. Some are surrounded by weeds, or litter, or gently waving grass; some are behind little fences that do nothing to protect them. We see them at a steady clip, in silence, for five minutes.
Then the film cuts back to Angela’s car. She drops off the VIP at her hotel; on her way out she speaks to an elderly, uniformed doorman who might well have been working there since the dictatorship. “I can’t go on, Mr. Vladimir,” she groans, momentarily inhabiting “Waiting for Godot.” The doorman replies: “That’s what you think.”
The final color scene is even more searing than the footage of the accumulated crosses. It’s a 35-minute single take that ends the movie, showing the shooting of the industrial film that Angela and her official employers – remember, she’s a production assistant – have been putting together. The industrial film is intended to be a safety PSA for the corporation’s employees; it shows a man who is now wheelchair-bound telling of his industrial accident and warning former co-workers to always wear protective equipment. The filmmakers do several takes of the man’s statement. I won’t say any more about the scene, which shows the man and his family patiently waiting between takes, the film workers arguing, Angela shooting another Bobiţă vid in the background. Except that it delivers the final verdict against the system that has all of them, with the exception of the VIP, exhausted.
I haven't said this before, but I'm doing this unpaid film reviewer gig without any support whatsoever from the movie industry or a journalistic enterprise; unlike real reviewers, I don't receive (nor do I have any idea of how to procure) screeners of new films that I can watch at my leisure and rewind so that I can get the exact line from a scene. I go see films in the theater when I can. In this case, I drove from Reno to San Francisco to watch this and another movie at my much beloved former neighborhood cinema, the Roxie. Labor of love here.
I’m indebted to the New Yorker review of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” by Justin Chong (who undoubtedly receives screeners if he wants them) for this information.