Review - Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
With its long title and a bit longer running-time, Radu Jude's formal and stylistic tour de force makes the case that capitalism is just as bad as communism, through the less fortunate's POV.
If you don’t have a Mubi subscription yet, this is your reminder. I have a lot to say about this film, and while I don’t spoil anything important about the plot, it would be better if you knew something about this one beforehand.
Yes, it’s obscure, weird, off-putting. Maybe you watched the director’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn a couple of years ago and left disgusted (I did too) or feel too intimidated to watch a long (2:44 minutes is not thaaaat long) film. If you do, I hope you feel the same way I did. And if you didn’t, I hope this essay makes you reconsider.
Soulless Apocalypse: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Production from Romania, Croatia, France and Luxembourg. Released in 2024.
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is a silent film from a time when filmmakers weren’t making them anymore, Chaplin was sticking to his own tradition despite the medium moving forward. Despite the poor aging of his filmmaking style -which is understandable- the timeless quality of the ideas contained within the film still resonate today , with its sharp view of The Tramp (Chaplin’s signature mustached character) as a member of the working class who acted as machines in their jobs and had little to no quality of life outside of them. The sympathetic view towards working class suffering is something many filmmakers take a liking to throughout film history, with well-known examples like Barbara Kopple’s hard hitting documentary of rural striking workers in Harlan County, U.S.A. and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and The Gleaners and I, both verité-style films of differing forms regarding working class survival outside the system.
Two directors who managed to bring out differing ideas and the best quality of working class-centered films are those of Aki Kaurismäki and Radu Jude, who themselves reflect very different parts of Chaplin’s Modern Times. While Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (one of my favorite films of last year) had its ending parallel the hopeful quality of Chaplin’s ending, with two lovers joined together walking away from the frame with little else to hold on to, Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World seeks other references, as it mirrors Modern Times’ big screens with corporate bosses giving orders with little respect to those who receive them, with similar moments of Nina Höss’s character, a corporate marketing head type of a multinational company, being on a Zoom call to just make sure everyone’s doing their jobs and keeping her self-perception of allyship to workers rights despite being the exact opposite. Jude’s film is creative, entertaining and sometimes agonizing to watch as it is not nearly as hopeful as Kaurismäki’s already gut-punching film. Yet, with its irreverent sincerity, it is most likely the best film I’ve seen from 2024 so far.
The comparison between Kaurismäki and Jude is interesting as both seem to mirror the filmmaking styles of arguably the two most influential directors that came out of the French New Wave: Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. Bresson’s style, much like Ozu, is stripped down, with little movement, music, acting or anything aggressive that may take out what is being presented as ultimately sincere through strong-willed efficiency. His and Ozu’s common style -coined by Paul Schrader as transcendental style- was one of the main precursors to slow cinema, and like many of his contemporaries, Kaurismäki used a similar framework of static framing, expressions and cutting to achieve something truly affecting. Some of his films may seem hopeless, like his 1990 classic The Match Factory Girl, but it almost always leads to a sincere feeling of appreciation.
In contrast, Godard’s style is not one of stripping down the medium but rather its complete deconstruction. He never wanted an essential expression of cinema through only using the bare essential tools, but rather relished in challenging what a film could be, and always reminding the viewer of the inherent artificiality of his work, which he achieved through his famous jump cuts in Breathless but further on to greater effect as he eschewed narrative and coherence entirely, with a recent example being is recently celebrated Goodbye to Language.
Like Godard, Radu Jude thrives in cinematic deconstruction, always with the main goal of finding truth behind the medium that he can express to his viewers. His previous film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, dedicated the whole middle part of the film to an alphabet of political critique, and used pornographic content and multiple differing endings to remove the veil of disbelief in his viewers but also to challenge their own perceptions and hypocrisies. I never liked Bad Luck Banging… that much as I felt it leaned too much towards the deconstruction that it lost its justification as a feature film and felt more like an op-ed with visual aid, despite being somewhat entertaining.
In Do Not Expect Too Much…, Jude’s critique is still hilariously unsubtle. Yet, his style evolved to somehow show his ideas of critique of globalized free market capitalism in a way only cinema could achieve, through beautiful grainy 16 mm and black-and-white cinematography, direct comparisons to a previous Romanian film made and set during its Communist regime, a timely use of vertical facing phone cameras to disrupt, or rather, escape, the everyday, and sharp left turn of an ending that lasts north of 30 minutes and is deeply impressive as it is agonizing.
All of this and you might say: what is this film even about? In essence, the film follows Angela, a production assistant (or rather a glorified driver) who drives throughout Bucharest to film a casting for a safety at work video for a multinational Austrian company that has its factories in Romania because of cheap labor costs, and similarly treats its workers like animals. The irony in this central conceit is that Angela herself is working around 16 hours a day, something she even hides from one of their company’s clients (Nina Höss) -who is comfortable enough to feel self-righteous despite the blatant lie.
While the camera follows Angela in that beautiful grainy cinematography, it cuts between different moments of her driving, alluding to the most famous of Godard’s jump cuts in Breathless, which also serves to show the many mistreatments she suffers from her boss and from the people who surround her, who either catcall her or take their time and effort to deeply insult her driving. She briefly escapes her four wheeled prison through live posts of her posing as a Andrew Tate look alike, as she weaponizes ironic humor to have an outlet for her deep discontent while serving as a very profane escape from her otherwise normal livelihood.
One of the most interesting choices Jude makes is in cross-cutting between the film’s main plot following Angela, and that of Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela merge mai departe, which follows a female taxi driver. Within this film, Bratu presented her world as still having its problems but ultimately hopeful, but all of that is also a farce, as it was made during the Romanian communist regime. Our Angela’s suffering is contrasted by the other Angela’s firm demeanor and decency, but Jude takes his time to show the cracks in that fictional world, as he slows the frames and closes up on certain characters and moments, faces and expressions, that break the constructed reality. Jude never seems to compare communism favorably against capitalism, he would know as he lived through the communist regime. Rather, as someone who lived within a flawed system that favored a select few, he knows enough when to critique the systems of power that belittle those who don’t have it. And so, by cross-cutting between both films and freezing certain frames, Jude argues that the current globalized capitalist system is as flawed as the communist regime he lived through was, with the difference that big government power is traded for big corporate power.
As Angela finishes her casting duties after a very long day, the film shifts back to color and seemingly digital photography to show the filming of the work safety video, all in one take. The result is agonizing, but impossible to look away from, as the seemingly well-intentioned video devolves and the true intentions of the company becomes clear: the entire effort is a hush money scheme for those workers who suffered work-related accidents not attributable to them. They may make claims in the court system, but those last too long and require so much money that those less fortunate do not have the resources to withstand those kinds of efforts, so they are forced to settle for less.
If the system is rigged in favor of those with all the money to spare, is it enough to make a few changes? Maybe Jude wants another Berlin wall to fall and build the global economy from the ground up. Until then, while Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves looks for hope within that despair, Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World faces it head-on, and leaves the viewer sad, angry, confused, or a combination of the three. Un-subtlety becomes Jude’s biggest tool, but with such a mastery of style and form, how can I not be amazed?