Always Good Movies

Direction: Radu Jude
Country: Romania

After the polemic and somewhat superfluous Loony Porn (2021), the incredibly talented Romanian writer-director Radu Jude continues to claim a spot at the peak of contemporary cinema with Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, another love-it-or-hate-it endeavor that places an independent young woman under relentless observation in a radically changing Bucharest.

Ilinca Manolache plays Angela Raducanu, an exhausted and underpaid production assistant working for an Austrian company that exploits workers and has a reputation for destroying Romanian forests for profit. Overworking to the point of risking falling asleep at the wheel, she navigates the chaotic Bucharest traffic - often filled with macho drivers - to interview handicapped people for a devious TV show. With no time for herself, she finds solace in posting provocative TikTok videos where she impersonates a man with moronic behavior and lousy ideas. Two key moments of the film include a frank conversation with her boss, Doris Goethe (Christian Petzold’s muse Nina Hoss), and an encounter with the wishy-washy German filmmaker Uwe Boll (himself).

Using footage, the film creates a link with Angela Merge Mai Departe, a 1981 feminist Romanian feature directed by Lucian Bratu, centered on a female taxi driver under the communist dictatorship. This raffish and pertinent divertissement brings a lot of truths to light, touching on themes such as neoliberal capitalism, sexism, corruption, exploitation, resignation, and impunity in a tortured urban society that simply has no time to enjoy life.

Jude evokes the social realism of Jim Jarmusch and Jean-Luc Godard - creative in form, tenacious in the storytelling - and infuses a caustic humor that, cutting sharper than a knife, is often quite delicious. More jarring than sweet, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is an eye opener for our hectic times. A must-watch.

Direction: Radu Jude
Country: Romania

Romanian writer-director Radu Jude (Aferim!, 2015) fabricates a subversive parody adapted to the pandemic era and peppered with explicit sex. Following an atypical narrative structure, the film comprises three distinct parts with situations that are not particularly comic but rather wrapped in furious criticism and objection of the country’s social and political states.

A tepid first part, pelted with unattractive images of Bucharest, discloses that Emi (Katia Pascariu), a dedicated History teacher, has her job in jeopardy due to a sex tape leaked on the Internet after her computer was taken to a repair shop. Part two puts the main story on halt, presenting a sequence of ironic sketches that doesn’t spare the country with observations and considerations about politics, culture, family, sexual assault, and even global warming and social distancing.

Things heat up a bit during the third chapter, when the protagonist argues back fiercely in the presence of wrathful parents who demand her dismissal. This teacher-parents interaction is deliberately silly, navigating through a zillion of topics such as personal privacy, kids accessing adult websites, the definition of fellatio, bribery at school, conservative hypocrisy, conspiracy theories about the Holocaust, homophobia, and many more. In her turbulent defense, Emi even recites one of Eminescu’s erotic poems.

When the film was feeling already too long, we are presented with three possible endings, the last of which offering deplorable derision.

Unapologetically, Jude gives the middle finger to the Romanian administration and hypocrite society, sending a wave of mutilation to engulf the crooked system they have created. But on the other hand, the way he found to get attention to his cause was with an excessive anarchy that brings nothing smart in it. Purposely beyond the good taste, this is one of those cases where the satiric catharsis is too severe to be likable.