After winning at Berlinale 2021 with Badluck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude contended in the main competition of Locarno Film Festival 2023, where his last irreverent film has earned him a much-deserved Jury Prize. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World has kept the audience glued to the chairs for nearly three hours. Minutes passed by in the blink of an eye as every single shot was too surprising to make you perceive time. Radu Jude has in fact the power to hide underneath a layer of grotesque laughter all the inherent ugliness of human society. The current as the past one, which are somehow engaged in a constant dialogue throughout most of his filmography, especially through an intelligent use of film archive. That is indeed the personal language of the Romanian director, which comes in handy not only when he directly recounts Ceaucescu’s dictatorship (a narrative that reached its peak in 2020 with Uppercase Print – between television programs and theatrical staging of Securitate files).
His last two works are an example of the effectiveness of this dialogue: the present can still converse with the Battleship Potemkin in his latest caustic short film The Potemkinists, and the Angela protagonist of Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World can safely converse with the 1981 of the protagonist of Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On.
The two eponymous women are presented alternately, and in the reality/fiction of the metacinematic film of 2023 they will meet for real. They do move on, perhaps in a more physical than metaphorical sense, like hamsters running on a wheel: the ancient one travels around Bucharest in her cab all day as in her car does the modern one, a young production assistant for a filmmaking company. Between the glass walls of their car windows and in some dingy apartments (reminiscent of the director’s operation in Everybody in Our Family) the images of Romania flow continually, showing a country which hasn’t changed much in forty years. Starting with the prevailing sexism.
With the same patience and precision of an anatomopathologist, Jude eviscerates the carcass of our world, just when we are witnessing the hypothesis of its nuclear (or climatic) end. And he does so without leaving anything out. Ukraine war and Putinism, the memory of Covid, media manipulation, art in the service of power and the social injustice that crushes the weaks down; a system that devours those who are not in power. All this is set against the interspersed backdrop of Tik Tok and the cerebral dumbing down that the social media era has entailed.
A patina of alienating tragicomedy envelops all the above, amalgamated within a discourse that comprehends them all. The (apparent) exhaustion of many dictatorships has in fact been succeeded by one that is all-encompassing and no less corrosive, perhaps only more hidden, or slower; Capitalism. Here described in its finest gears, shown through every single one of its pawns. Even those seemingly disconnected from the chessboard.
This is a current topic in the Romanian director’s cinematography. He already addressed it perfectly in The Happiest Girl in The World, which also shares the advertising set with the present work.
In fact, 2023 film revolves around Forbidden Planet, a promotional spot for workplace safety that an Austrian company commissioned to the Romanian video production company that Angela works for. For almost the entire duration of the film we see her going house-to-house interviewing victims of workplace accidents (mostly due to poor site maintenance). They all hope to be “selected”, but as the audience will later find out, the coveted selection is not about building a case to bring down the companies responsible and receive a financial compensation to repay the physical harm received, but quite the opposite. A way to bribe the victims. The video in fact – unbeknownst to its protagonists – is not a J’accuse but a self-accusation. Facts are manipulated, or rather the perspective on them is altered through supposed interpretations that give the film an almost Kafkaesque tone. Thus, the young worker, forever destined to a wheelchair after being crushed in every sense by a rotten system and a company that doesn’t give a damn about the fate of its employees, is suddenly transformed into the culprit of his own fate.
That’s how we see him in the finale with his family: it’s the shooting day.
Almost 40 minutes of a fixed-camera shot shows the familiar picture portrayed as they sign their death warrant. A signature without letters. Like those signs inspired by Bob Dylan’s Subterrenean Homesick Blues’video. Only these are green and empty because they are to be filled in post-production with the words that the commissioner of the work will deem valid. After all, it is precisely images and their influence on reality -public and private- that have obsessed Jude since the days of his first short film Lampa Cu Ciacula, a tale of a father and son transporting a broken television set into town to be fixed.
The Locarno award-winning film is also a more sophisticated tile which completes the mosaic of nowadays humanity: squashed like an insect by its own kind. So are those 600 road accident victims scattered along a short stretch of road, whose headstones the director shows. Crosses lost in the middle of a wheat field, asphalt, eaten by nature or corroded by time.
He shows them in silence, one after the other, in a sequence lasting a handful of minutes that testifies to how Jude is not only ruthless but also pitiful, not only desecrating but also sacred.
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World is in fact a liturgy, a secular funeral mass, sardonic, tragic, fierce and highly intelligent at the same time, to commemorate the imminent death of our gangrenous planet.
Thomas Stern Eliot said, “This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper”. With Radu Jude we understand that it will probably end with a selfie, on a Tik Tok video. With some weird filter.
We really are something grotesque.
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