Do not expect too much from the end of the World

 Film criticism can involve different types of "spoilers."  A critic can "spoil" a movie by revealing a surprising plot twist or disclosing the fate of a character.  Revealing the ending to a film can be considered a "spoiler" and bad form in certain contexts.  And it's possible to "spoil" a movie by summarizing its content in such a way that violates carefully contrived narrative effects.  This latter problem inevitably arises when describing Radu Jude's2022 film Do not expect too much from the end of the World, a movie should be experienced, perhaps, without any advance explication.  Jude's picture reveals itself only gradually and, in fact, its full premise isn't really visible until the last half hour of a movie that runs about two hours and 45 minutes.  The viewer experiences this Romanian film as confusing, chaotic, and, even, pointless for much of its duration -- however, this effect is carefully devised.  In fact, the picture makes perfect sense and, indeed, is rather profoundly meaningful when considered in retrospect.  But, in real time, Do not expect... is shot and edited in such a way that we have to work out what is happening on-screen from hints that are distributed throughout the frenetic action that the film portrays.  The effect is to precipitate the viewer into the world of the film's female protagonist in a way that requires us to piece together what we are seeing from fragmentary clues.  Be assured -- all the clues are present and the film coheres nicely, but Jude's mise-en-scene is intended to dramatize the dissolution of rational meaning that carries the apocalyptic weight encoded in the movie's title.  Things don't fit together at first and the center can't hold -- this sense of chaos and fragmentation is integral to the film's point of view.  Therefore, if you intend to see this movie (it's available for rent on Amazon Prime on the MUBI platform), I encourage you to stop reading right here and simply buy the movie (it costs $4.99).  The picture is excellent and I encourage you to see it. But if you desire additional information persist in your reading.  You have been warned.

Angela rises early in the morning.  We see her naked, arms covered with tattoos.  She puts on a sequin dress that seems inappropriate for the activities in which we see her involved.  She drives to various appointments, interviewing people who have been badly injured in industrial accidents.  The traffic in Bucharest is hellish -- it seems that she is stuck in traffic for about half of the film.  When Angela reaches the people she is scheduled to interview, she films the conversation on her cell-phone and sends it somewhere. From time-to-time, she talks on the phone.  It's evident that she has some sort of important appointment scheduled for late afternoon.  She's so exhausted, however, that she is afraid she'll fall asleep at the wheel and crash.  In fact, in several scenes she seems about to drift off into sleep and, at least, on one occasion people honk at her furiously when she falls asleep at a red light.  She pulls over to sleep for a few minutes and, also, apparently naps a little during her important meeting at 4 pm.  She meets a lover around 10:00 at night and has frenetic sex in her little car.  She, then, hurries to the airport where she picks up an Austrian woman (played by Nina Hoss) who is a film producer.  This summarizes the first two hours of the movie although only imperfectly.  

Complicating Angela's nightmarish and harried transit through Bucharest and its suburbs are several other factors:  Angela's grandparents are buried in a cemetery that is claimed to encroach on a building development.  She goes to the cemetery with her mother.  Construction work is underway and graves are about tobe exhumed and moved.  Angela visits the corporate headquarters for the developer and discusses the situation with an executive there -- he offers reburial of the remains supervised "by an elite funeral director."  On the wall of the office, there is a portrait from a burial in Fayum, a 2000 year-old artifact from the Roman-Egyptian world.  About every ten minutes, Angela takes time (although often while driving) to record on her phone bits in which she appears as a obscene thug, a gangster with a bald head and uni-brow.  She uses a filter to depict herself in the form of this caricature thug; in the form of this alter-ego, she makes all sorts of wildly racist and misogynistic remarks that she posts on-line.  Her intimidating alter-ego is called something like Bobitzka -- he describes himself as a religious nationalist with a Dostoevskyan persona.  Angela's adventures are intercut with excerpts from a 1981 Romanian movie about a female taxi-driver, also named Angela.  These excerpts are shot in somewhat hazy color; the scenes of Angela hurrying to her appointments are filmed in icy and analytical black and white.  The 1981 movie is mined, as it were, for shots of people on the street staring at the camera, or weird moments of stasis on screen -- the film is sometimes frozen or blurred.  As it turns out, the film about the female taxi-driver, whose struggles parallel Angela's hurrying here and there in Bucharest, derives from some sort of documentary premise.  At one point, Angela,who is going to interview a man who was badly hurt when a barrier gate was flung into his head and in a coma for a year (he woke, as he tells us, with his back raw and red with bedsores).  This man's neighbor, or, perhaps, roommate is the taxi-driver who is now an old woman.  We see Angela parking her car near the rather ruinous apartment building where Angela, the taxi-driver, now lives.  The patch of grass on which Angela parks her car is an abandoned railroad right-of-way.  In the 1981 movie, we see trains transporting the wretched little cars on a flatbed moving on the railroad that was, apparently, operating at that time.  Taxi-driver Angela's story in the 1981 film is about how she met her husband, an ethnic Hungarian is first shown passed-out dead drunk in the back of her hack.  Angela, our harried heroine, learns that Angela the taxi-driver married the ethnic Hungarian, but he continued to drink and so the romance leached-out of their marriage.  Angela, our protagonist, asks about when the Hungarian husband died, but we are surprised to learn that the man is still very much alive --  just in another room in the apartment.  The husband introduces himself to Angela and praises Viktor Orban as a great man.  About ninety minutes into the film, we come to understand that Angela is an overworked PA (Production Assistant); she is filming  interviews that are auditions for a short film that a Vienna company wants to produce. The movie is supposed to dramatize the company's concern for the safety and well-being of its employees and, further, warn about the hazards of not properly using personal protective gear, that is, things like safety helmets.  It's in pursuit of casting someone to dramatize the company's alleged safety concerns that Angela has been driving madly around town, interviewing people in wheelchairs or disfigured by industrial accidents.  At a studio, somewhere in the country, Angela tries to nap during a ZOOM call.  The call is between an elegant-looking Austrian woman who is the great, great, great granddaughter of Johann  Wolfgang Goethe and the Romanian production company in a chalet near Bucharest.  The Austrian woman, Fraulein Goethe in turn works for the CEO of the company in Vienna, a firm that has outsourced its manufacturing functions to the cheaper labor market in Romania -- hence, the concern about workers compensation accidents.  The plan is to film the announcement about plant safety and the consequences of industrial injuries on the morrow; the Romanian director figures out what lenses he is going to use and observes that he will shoot the scene in a single take using a filter to produce "golden light."  The Austrian woman takes a red-eye flight to Bucharest where she is met at the airport by PA Angela.

This part of the film is frantic and elliptical, cutting frequently between the somewhat romantic and soft-focus 1981 film, apparently an actual movie that Jude uses in his  own film, the obscene tirades of Angela's Bobitzka, and the nightmarish traffic jams and near-miss accidents in Bucharest. There is a remarkable sequence in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas in which the hero Henry Hill has to do some errands, commit a few crimes, and, also, pick up ingredients for an elaborate Italian meal that he is making at home.  The camera follows his increasingly desperate and rushed efforts to accomplish these tasks while inhaling huge amounts of cocaine and trying to hide from a police helicopter hovering overhead.  The entire first two hours of Do not expect too much... has the same frantic tone as the Scorsese episode -- Angela is exhausted and keeps on encountering vicious and aggressive drivers who call her names and threaten her while she rushes from one dispiriting location to another in an overcrowded and polluted Bucharest.  (This part of the film also bears some resemblance to Murakova's The Asthenic Syndrome and similar films and, also invokes, Alexei German's pictures.)  It's exhausting to watch Angela's exertions -- there's simply not enough time in the day to accomplish everything that she is trying to do, including her rushed sexual encounter with her lover in the car under a freeway overpass.  Angela is ambitious, extremely intelligent -- you have the sense that everyone in Romania is enormously overeducated for the jobs that they perform -- and shockingly hardworking.  But she's been set up to fail.  Nonetheless, she fits her obscene postings as the viciously misanthropic Bobitzka into her day as well.  (Angela is not particularly attractive -- no one in Romanian "New Wave" pictures looks like they are a movie star; these just seem to be normal folks picked up on the street.)

The last forty minutes is extremely funny.  It is, in fact, a single shot sequence with the man in wheelchair who's skull was bashed in by a barrier attempting to speak his lines about his accident and the need to make proper use of personal protective gear (in his case a helmet).  The camera takes up a vantage so that it can survey the ugly alley where the accident occurred, the metal barrier that wounded the man visible in the back of the shot, together with a big dog house and big dog prowling around.  The man in the wheelchair sits next to Angela, the lady taxi-driver who is robust and seems to be about eighty years old.  Two of the man's daughters stand behind him.  The shot doesn't go well.  The director isn't really interested in anything that the injured man has to say and, ultimately, decides to cut his account down to nearly nothing.  The Viennese company doesn't want to admit that the man was working 17 hours a shift and exhausted from his labors when he was injured; furthermore, because of the war in Ukraine, the accident victim's account of making chairs for the Russian market has to be excised from the interview.  In the end, it becomes apparent that the accident victim really can't be successfully controlled and that his interview will devolve into his own concerns about low pay, overtime, and the negligence of the driver who smashed through the barrier and, so, ultimately not be useful as a public service announcement about workplace safety.  The barrier is dismantled and hidden.  Someone hits on the expedient of filming the sequence like the Bob Dylan video (shot by D. A. Pennebaker, I think) of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" -- that is, the guy in the wheelchair flipping through cards on which the words that he is speaking have been written.  The cards used in the Romanian alley are "green,"  that is, for "green screen" and have nothing written on them.  The titles will be added by computer in post-production.  Now and then, it rains.  The accident victim becomes increasingly frustrated.  Some gypsies have to be rousted from the alley -- everyone in this movie openly despises gypsies except the PA Angela who may have Romany blood herself and who, in one scene, gives some money to gypsy beggar.  Angela, who is mostly offscreen in this scene, keeps sneaking off to the side of the alley to record on her cell-phone rants and harangues by Bobitzka.  Ultimately, the shot is completed with the injured man saying nothing, just flipping through the title cards.  In the middle of conversation, the movie just shuts off; the screen goes black.  

The film's major point is that Romania has been colonized for its cheap labor force by the rest of Europe.  (The Romanians admit that they are primitive and poor but take pride in the fact the Albanians have it even worse.)  The Germans act in a hypocritically solicitous manner but they are part of system that mercilessly exploits the Romanians.  Romania's complex and tragic history is the subject of allusions -- we see the vast imperial palace built by Ceaucescu (it now seems to be a Marriott Hotel where the Austrian woman spends the night  -- she doesn't make it to the shoot in the alley because she is hungover from drinking with some "guys" in the hotel bar.)  The economy in Romania is collapsing due to inflation in fuel prices caused by the War in Ukraine.  There is a subtext about American and Western films being made in Romania -- and, indeed, the credits of just about every big-budget Hollywood picture will attest that the film was mostly made in Hungary and Romania.  Of course, the Romanians who are desperate for Western dollars and euros collude in their own humiliation.  They are willing to work like slaves to please their German and American masters.  And everyone is embittered, filled with rage, on the verge of homicide over parking spaces and traffic jams.  In broader terms, the film depicts a world that is, in effect, post-human.  Bobitzka stands as the paradigm character for this brave new world, someone (who is no one) who unleashes vitriolic rants and insults on everyone around him.  But there is no Bobitzka:  the grotesque figure represents, I suppose, Angela's displaced anger at how she is misused by the system.  Things have always been problematic in Romania.  The taxi-driver lives in a quaint part of 1981 Romania called Uranus, a neighborhood that was razed so that Ceaucescu's palace could be built in its place.  The dead aren't resting serenely in their graves.  In Bucharest, even corpses are perambulating around the landscape.  Heartless Capitalism, now the rule for 33 years, has proven to be just as bad as the heartless and kleptocratic communism that it has replaced.  The film is purposefully perverse -- Angela mentions a road that is so dangerous that there are 600 roadside crosses to accident victims along a distance 260 kilometers.  The movie, then, spends about ten minutes showing us these roadside shrines, one after another.  The last forty minutes, conceived as a single take, also represents an alarming formal choice -- it's the hardest way to do things and to make the film's point, but we are engaged and can't look away.

The film's title is, perhaps, explained by an anecdote told by Angela, I think.  A porno movie was being made.  But the middle of one of the sex scenes, the leading man lost his erection.  He had to retreat from the shot and watch a dirty movie on PornHub to get it up again.  "This is the end of the world," Angela says.