‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’ Review: Radu Jude's Darkly Funny Examination of a Crumbling Society
Radu Jude delivers his boldest piece of work yet in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a sharp black comedy that defiantly portrays a society destined to consume itself and leave everyone behind.
Within the first few minutes of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii), Angela (Ilinca Manolache) films herself on the street for a TikTok video, in which she boldly says, “I’m up early. Last night, I was with my mate Andrew Tate,” as she alters her face with an Andrew Tate-lite filter, playing Bobita, a famous internet personality who doesn’t care about the demeanor perpetuated through her persona. She constantly goes after the royal family while praising the likes of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and defends her videos as being in line with the caricatures of Charlie Hebdo.
This is the façade she creates on social media, but, in reality, she is a production assistant working long hours to audition disabled workers for a safety video a multinational company has commissioned. We follow her through one day’s work, in which she travels from one place to the next, meeting different people with harrowing stories to tell, whilst Jude consistently cross-cuts with clips of Lucian Bratu’s Angela merge mai departe (1982), showcasing the life of a taxi driver (Dorina Lazar) during Ceaușescu’s reign.
This examination technique was pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard, who continuously inspected cinema history through his films by directly recalling other works to communicate with his craft. This didactic approach reached its apex with his Histoire(s) du cinéma, in which he quotes multiple classic films to investigate what the current century has done to the artform and what the artform has done to the century.
Jude’s approach isn’t as didactic as Godard's, but as he continuously freeze-frames clips from Bratu’s film, slows them down, and even extremely zooms in to examine each frame of the film, there’s a real sense of communication he wants to give by showing Angela merge mai departe, and what the “present-day” Angela is doing now. In fact, life during Ceaușescu seemed easier than in present-day Romania, where workers had to sell their souls to feed the capitalist machine. Of course, that wasn’t the case, but this juxtaposition is striking, especially during its latter half, in which Jude daringly cuts between Do Not Expect’s sex scene and Angela’s betrayal of Gyuri (László Miske). Communicating with the past and present is constant, but never more often than when this specific moment occurs, in which Jude deftly shows how symbiotic his film (and the past film) actually are.
It gets even more interesting when Lazar and Miske reprise their roles from Bratu’s film, in which they act as the parents of Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan), a disabled worker who will ultimately be chosen for the safety film Angela is working on. Jude gives Lazar’s Angela time to “fill in the gaps” in her relationship with Gyuri since the film’s events and shows how they’ve evolved in a post-Ceaușescu world. For them, their spirit remains as they were in Bratu’s film, but for Manloache’s alienated Angela, the story is not as clear-cut as in Angela merge mai departe.
Jude’s filmic examination is embellished in following Angela’s day, in which her only moments of actual ‘color’ throughout her workday are when she becomes Bobita, whether for making silly TikToks in a bathroom on Queen Elizabeth II’s death, through Bobita’s Andrew Tate filter or in saying, “Fuck off!” with German film director Uwe Boll, playing a sef-deprecating version of himself in the best scene of the year where he recalls how he boxed his worst critics (and won). “That is history of cinema!,” Angela says, while Boll subtly jabs at how “I shot thirty films, they watched two,” and his critics gave bad reviews for all of his films. Is this real life?
This scene sets the mood Jude wants to give throughout the picture, exposing how absurd Bobita’s personality truly is, while contrasting the real-life Angela as her ‘black-and-white’ life isn’t as colorful as her TikTok façade. That’s why the only instances of color in Jude’s A) part are when she shoots her TikTok videos (other than the powerful montage of crosses all over a road near Buzau), while the rest of her mundane activities aren’t as evocative as she wants it to be.
This alienating life is constantly exacerbated by drawn-out sequences in which Angela drives her car and is forced to counter aggressive drivers, going from one place to the next, with very little rest in between (chugging energy drinks to keep her awake and playing vulgar, hardcore music at full blast on her speakers). Manolache deftly portrays Angela’s alienation through her exasperated physique, mostly depressed and tired at how very little her superiors regard her work and wellbeing, while the higher-ups are the ones who make the most money and decide how to “shape” the publicity campaign.
Speaking of, in the most scathing scene of the entire thing, the filmmaking team met with executive Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss) on how they would shape the campaign. Instead of striving for honesty and authenticity, the team is more concerned not only about the physique of its disabled workers (one of them won’t take part because he looks “too sad”), but about what they should say. Forget what really happened or if the unnamed company has any remorse for Ovidiu being in a coma for a year and paralyzed from the waist down. It’s all about constructing a message, and the message is what’s more important instead of the workers’ safety.
And that’s how our current society is constructed: profits above all else. Who cares if someone works inhumane hours as long as they feed the higher-ups of this society? When Angela tells Doris about her working conditions as a production assistant, her facial expressions show how unconcerned she is about it because her conditions are the best, just as the company doesn’t care what message they convey through Ovidiu’s story during the film’s unbroken, 40-minute-long final shot.
The final shot also encapsulates Jude’s entire thesis if the cinematic cross-cutting between Angela merge mai departe, the Bobita TikTok videos, and present-day Angela’s life wasn’t clear enough. This society is destined to capitulate, one way or another. It may not happen immediately, but it’s going to since it treats every single middle-class or low-income human being like a pure machine that will completely ignore them once they’re over-exhausted and disabled. As Ovidiu speaks his truth, the advert's director (and producers) ensure he will have nothing of value to say when the advert takes a vastly different direction, as Lazar’s Angela says, “Look what’s left of humans.”
There isn’t much to look at anymore because our humanity is now distilled through the prism of TikTok videos and social media façades we like to create to appease the better part of ourselves and showcase to everyone how bountiful and colorful our lives are. We like to make ourselves believe we live this grandiose life, but since the color in our actual lives is completely gone, our existence has been reduced to feeding a machine that will never satiate itself. Life will never reward or fulfill us, no matter the constructions we create within our digitized identities.