Stand clear! Last weekend Dublin Film Critics Circle selected Radu Jude’s mischievous, scathing, sprawling, profane provocation as best film at Dublin International Film Festival, adding to an already impressive haul of international awards and swooning fans.
No other film this year will replicate the monotony, serfdom, coarseness and anxiety of modern existence quite like this day-in-the-life portrait of an overworked production assistant, Angela (played with fierce commitment by Ilinca Manolache), as she drives, hustles and shouts around Bucharest, attempting to cast actors for a work-accident film.
Her Hadean task has been assigned by a multinational company – icily fronted by Nina Hoss – that hopes to paper over its failings with safety protocols. Aye, there’s the rub: Angela must cast a victim of an accident caused by their working conditions to maintain that it’s all their own fault.
Between meetings – and layaways for desperately needed sleep or rough sex – Angela records outrageous TikTok and Instagram videos as her potty-mouthed, misogynist alter-ego, Bobita. “A c**t is like four countries: wet like the UK, split in two like Korea, bloody like the Wild West and glad to be f**ked like Romania,” is one of the milder uploads.
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The director daringly structures Angela’s travails by sampling another Romanian film, Angela Moves On, a 1981 movie that follows a woman taxi driver, also named Angela (Dorina Lazar). Jude zeros in to show queues in Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, yet the earlier Angela’s world seems comparatively courtly. (A cameo from Lazar’s Angela adds another level.) The friendly glances exchanged between women eating fish in a 1980s cafe are superseded by the heroine hastily inhaling a kebab at a stall whose owner chases and curses at someone for begging. There’s no sense of nostalgia in the director’s rear-view mirror, only terminal and dystopian decline.
For a film with a challenging runtime, scratchy aesthetic and confrontational swagger, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World finds a pleasing rhythm and mines much absurd comedy. Welcome to the sixth stage of despair: hilarity.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is on limited release from Friday, March 8th
