In his new film, Radu Jude mixes social criticism with bubble gum and TikTok

The titles that Romanian film director Radu Jude chooses for his films are works of language art in themselves. Already a personal favorite I don’t care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018). Then it arrived in Berlin with a Golden Bear award Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn. And now from this week it is via arthouse streamer MUBI Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to see. The film was awarded the special jury prize at the Locarno Film Festival last year and can also be seen in a selected number of film theaters from July 4 thanks to the unsurpassed Previously Unreleasedprogram of the Eye film museum. These are titles that already indicate what kind of films we are dealing with: somewhere on the cutting edge of satire and irony.

Jude (1977) started his career as an advertising filmmaker. He emerged on the currents of the Romanian post-communist Noul Val (‘new wave’) at the beginning of this century, and made his debut in 2009 with the Dutch co-production The Happiest Girl in the World. And now his name guarantees smart films that tell a compelling, well-constructed story in the most casual way, while being full of philosophical quotes, pop culture, ideology criticism, media analyzes and unexpected essayistic intermezzos that make them memorable after a second or third viewing. contain enough material to write a PhD research about.

It’s wonderful when filmmakers not only take their audience seriously but also challenge them a bit. For example, you don’t have to know the title Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is taken from the Polish aphorist Stanislaw Jerzy Lec to get the meaning of those words. But what a gain it is to google his name after watching the film and discover that Lec survived two world wars and a German labor camp, emigrated to Israel after WWII, returned to Poland and made life difficult for himself there as a critic of the communist regime. Lec’s biography is exemplary of the type of films Jude has started making in recent years. They are always about the moment when different timelines in history collide and what emerges from the fault lines.

We also see that Do Not Expect. Two tenses run together. In the present we are introduced to the overworked, gum-chewing production assistant Angela. She cruises around Bucharest in a glittery dress looking for main characters for a corporate film about safety in the workplace. Meanwhile, she spews foul-mouthed misogyny into the airwaves on her Andrew Tate parody account Bobita.

There, film and reality begin to intertwine. Director Radu Jude told the Locarno Film Festival last year that actress Ilinca Manolache indeed has such a TikTok alter ego. Whereupon he decided to write it into the film.

Film history

When we recently spoke to him again via Zoom, he added that a second, historical storyline of the film also came about more or less by chance: “While writing the script, I looked in Romanian film history or used it as a reference there were already such urban road movies with a woman behind the wheel. That’s how I came across Angela Moves On (1981), about a female taxi driver. The closer I looked at the film, the more I discovered that there were all kinds of things that must have escaped the eye of the communist censor at the time. Signs of poverty. Lines in front of shops. I then edited it into the film in hyper slow motion.”

That Dorina Lazar, who stars in Angela Moves On also played a role in it Do Not Expect would get, it only made sense from that moment on. And so the actual Angelas and their virtual media doppelgängers begin to intermingle. Jude: “There is also a certain autobiographical element in the film. When I started, I had all kinds of jobs on film sets, from commercial filmmaker to director of soap operas. Sixteen-hour working days were defended with a certain romanticism. Angela is partly based on a production assistant friend who died in a fatal accident after falling asleep at the wheel. There is a montage sequence in the film of roadside memorials that references this. I am not nostalgic about communism, but I am critical of the capitalism that has replaced it.”

He says that dabbling in the world of telemarketing and advertising, as well as his introduction to TikTok and other social media, has given him a certain fascination, if not “affinity with tasteless media expressions.” Or, he qualifies: “An interest in film images that are not necessarily artistic.” Reason why he so shamelessly cuts through the gritty chic of his black-and-white images with Bobita’s TikToks: “They all belong to the domain of cinematic images. There is actually no hierarchical difference between superior artistic and inferior trash images. Composer John Cage already said in the 1970s that we can transform the ‘ugly’ and the ‘impure’ through art. I totally agree with that. It all depends on the context.” Provocative, teasing: “If I bad taste use, it becomes good taste.”

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