Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii

The film that answers the question, What if Abbas Kiarostami made an acerbic, absurdist comedy about the shityness of life in present-day Bucharest? Romanian writer/director Radu Jude unleashes a scathingly funny critique of contemporary society in the form of a two-hour forty-minute film about an underpaid production assistant driving around the city on an eighteen-hour shift doing field interviews for a film about workplace safety being made by a multinational company that couldn't care less about their employees' safety. The protagonist, Angela, is played by Jude's frequent collaborator, the hilarious Romanian actress Ilinca Manolache (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn). In 2021, Manolache created her Instagram character, Bobita, a vulgar misogynist who live streams rants into his phone. Bobita is also Angela's alter ego, and his TikTok channel is one of her many side hustles. As she drags her ass all around the city, she frequently records herself shitposting as Bobita, whose distinct looks come courtesy of a Snapchat filter that gives Manolache the appearance of a bald man with bushy eyebrows.

Like a Kiarostami movie, a great deal of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is spent just sitting in a car with the protagonist as they drive around for what seems like hours. But each time Angela stops to record a potential candidate to "star" in the workplace safety "film," we get drawn into their testimonials and their shoulder-shrugging acceptance of their employer's inevitable negligence. These plainspoken individuals seem as hopeful about being chosen to spin their story on camera—making it appear that they were entirely at fault in return for a small honorarium—as someone auditioning to get picked for a reality show. When Angela arrives at the production offices of the Romanian subsidiary of the company making this film and joins a Zoom meeting with the Austrian woman in charge of the project, Doris Goethe, things really start to get funny.

As someone who has spent far too much of my life making terrible videos for clueless, distracted, entitled people who have no idea what they are doing and worked for hacks who think they are visionary directors but don't even have an understanding of the most rudimentary principles of photography and editing, this movie really hit home. Yet, Jude's picture is not like one of those all too common movies that depict the shallow lives of people who work in the Western media industry and try to make their struggles seem like a metaphor for all of contemporary society (I'm looking at you The Substance). One does not need to know anything about the menial and often counterproductive work of industrial video production to understand the project Angela is involved in or her role in it.

Doris Goethe, a descendant of the influential German writer who has never read any of his work, is played by the wonderful German actress Nina Hoss (Barbara, Phoenix, A Most Wanted Man, Tár). Hoss gives a performance of such staggeringly hilarious disinterest in anything she's involved in it's worthy of a Best Supporting Actress nomination despite her minimal screen time. Her character's interactions with Angela also give us rich insights into our brazen, cynical protagonist's level of intelligence and education in subtle ways that, upon reflection, make you realize that an astute screenwriter wrote this seemingly random, meandering movie. Again, like a Kiarostami picture, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a film that, as I sat watching it, I thought, this is oddly fascinating, but so much of it is so boring that I'll never want to watch it again; then as soon as it was finished, I wanted to start it over from the beginning and watch it straight through right away! How many modern movies can do that?

This was my first Radu Jude picture, and there were all kinds of things in it that I didn't fully understand. It's made clear in the opening credits that part of this movie is "a conversation" with another Romanian film called Angela Moves On, directed by Lucian Bratu, and it frequently cuts to footage of that 1981 picture about a female taxi driver in Bucharest. I think our Angel meets the Angela of the earlier film as an older woman, but I really had no idea even if the '81 film was a real movie at all. (I checked; it is, and the other Angela is indeed played by the star of the prior film, Dorina Lazar). I'm not sure what the connections between the two pictures and the two characters are, but I feel compelled to watch this movie again to see if I can understand it. Again, how many modern movies do that?

The entire film builds to the day the company shoots the safety video testimonial, and it's one of the funniest extended shots I've ever seen in a movie. The long, drawn-out single-take sequence of people trying to capture something on video and having no clue as to how to do it again plays like a twisted satirical Kiarostami film—a darkly comedic version of the extended shot/sequence in Through the Olive Trees. A deeply cynical comedy exploring the harsh economic realities of an undeveloped industrialized European city serving global capitalism that recalls the lyricism-of-the-banal perfected by a great Iranian master filmmaker while simultaneously incorporating a real-life fictional TikTok star in which all forms of media from cell phone videos to the works of arguably the greatest Western writer of all time are viewed as having essentially the same value, feels like a good summation of where we're at in 2024. Thus, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is probably the year's best picture.