REVIEW: Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii [Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World] [2023]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 163 minutes
Release Date: October 27th, 2023 (Romania) / March 22nd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Radu Jude
Writer(s): Radu Jude

It’s later than you think.

Writer/director Radu Jude calls his latest satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World an “amateurish film of surfaces with no depth.” It makes sense considering how little happens narratively despite its almost three-hour runtime. It makes sense too considering he’s constantly adding filters and montage to that narrative via scenes from Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On and TikTok. Reality is obscured—sometimes to feel more palatable and others to expose the hellish cesspool we still pretend it isn’t. So, similar to the anecdote about the Lumière Brothers directing their early “documentaries,” Jude has in many ways directed one himself.

You see it most with the juxtaposition between Bratu’s film. In it, Dorina Lazar’s Angela is a taxi driver working in Bucharest. And, in Jude’s film, Ilinca Manolache’s Angela is a full-time PA/part-time Uber driver in the same city almost half a century later. Where one goes, so too goes the other. What was a vibrant community is now bumper-to-bumper traffic amidst giant buildings. Political corruption has ravaged the country and it’s plain as day even without the numerous callouts from the script like our Angela’s mother having to deal with the burial plot of her parents being sold or an Austrian company exploiting Romanian workers and forests for profit.

And while Angela’s online alter ego Bobita (a cellphone filter, unibrow-adorned “friend” of Andrew Tate) is a great way to show how we exploit the systems exploiting us in order to make ends meet (if not to just blow off steam and survive another day), the real evil is less overt. It arrives from the likes of Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss)—a woman quick to hide behind her marketing title whenever confronted with the ills of her company’s history. Just think about the premise of the corporate “PSA” that has Angela swerving in and out of traffic as men threaten to rape her out their car windows. The client wants to use real victims of the company’s obvious negligence to warn their workers to be more careful.

It’s actually a brilliant con. They aren’t paying these former employees off. They’re paying them for services rendered. That those “services” are pretty much an on-camera confession that absolves the company of wrongdoing for their injuries is simply icing on the cake—especially when one of the prospective “actors” is still currently mired in a lawsuit against them. What choice do they have, though? This is guaranteed money they desperately need. They know they’re being gaslit to their faces. They know talk about “well you should have warned us it was unsafe” is hollow deflection. This is a black-and-white power struggle between the poorest citizens in the EU against outside corporate entities treating them like slaves.

The result is a scathing indictment on the Wall Street-controlled, capitalist-driven dystopia we call the twenty-first century. And it’s not that we had it better back in the 80s. Between the dangers of being a woman taxi-driver shown in Bratu’s film and the deep-seated racism of Jude’s projection of that Angela through another (Dorina Lazar), the world has always been messed up. Less about providing answers to fix things or stop this never-ending cycle of profiteering, however, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is simply looking to expose these truths alongside the double-speak and bribes of those in power.

And while much of the film is very funny (Bobita is hilarious, the reactions from Angela’s friends about Bobita are even funnier, and recruiting Uwe Boll to play himself is inspired), it can get very somber very fast. Whether a silent, five-minute-long interlude of Christian crosses marking people who were killed in traffic accidents or the tragic, almost thirty-minute long-take of Ovidiu Pîrsan’s testimonial (one he believes is about the factory acknowledging fault until everything gets twisted into a confession of his own) that ends the film, it’s all a case of avoidable misfortunes being rendered unavoidable by our silent complicity. Because, in the end, most will just “go with the flow” as Doris says. Why rock the boat if we haven’t yet fallen off ourselves?