New Wave Escapism

A Review of Radu Jude's 'Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World'

Most movies intend to hold the audience’s attention from beginning to end. Some achieve this by ensuring each moment elevates the dramatic stakes (see: flashbacks to traumatic backstory) or adds to the entertainment value (see: helicopter explosions or one-liners). Others achieve it via an opposite impulse: pushing the audience away. Enter Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. 

Not twenty minutes into the screening I attended, a woman dressed in designer work attire – very much resembling the multinational corporate bureaucrat played by Nina Hoss in the film – stood up and walked out of the theater. It was early enough that there was no mistaking her leaving for anything other than protest. The moment she chose to leave made sense too; it was the third time the film had cut to footage of a 1982 Romanian movie rendered in extreme slow motion for a duration suggestive of avant garde provocation. 

The first couple times this footage appeared, it was bemusing. By the third time it felt like an aesthetic affront – the slow motion effect stretching the audio into an ominous bass tone reminiscent of a software meltdown.¹ It didn’t help that the primary narrative through-line offered little respite from these interruptions: a droll day-in-the-life drama centered on a production assistant named Angela, who spends more than half of the movie driving all over Bucharest, recording auditions for a multinational company’s work safety video. 

The people she meets up with are the victims of horrendous accidents that occurred in the company’s warehouses, incentivized to participate in the auditions on the promise that, if selected, they will receive cash compensation for telling their story. As she records their auditions, Angela reminds the participants to omit any accident details that could hurt the company’s image, so as to increase their odds of being selected. Through these directorial nudges, the underlying purpose of the project becomes clear: displacing the onus of workplace safety onto the company’s overworked, underpaid employees – a perverse inversion of worker solidarity in which the victims of unsafe working conditions are hired to admonish their coworkers to follow safety protocols better than they did.   

As this partial synopsis suggests, even compared to the formally inventive films that occasionally sneak their way into Academy Award nominations, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a hard sell for most moviegoers. But, after holding out for the full (near-three hour) run time, I’m confident in asserting that what all the more impatient viewers out there will miss is the most satisfying unmasking of the ideologies that shape our electronically mediated reality since Manufacturing Consent (1992). And there is something about that accomplishment that feels very necessary to understanding our cultural moment. 

Like the documentary that follows Noam Chomsky as he journeys through the media industrial complex of the early 90s – giving dissident lectures and participating in interviews and debates all over the world – Radu Jude’s postmodern film simultaneously speaks within the spectacle it critiques and beyond it. It breaks the viewer out of the passivity of the information age while encouraging the independent and critical reflection essential to self-actualization and grassroots political progress. 

It is a film I’ve been craving for awhile, one that scandalizes the narrative hand holding that defines a lot of contemporary cinema and television – i.e. the tendency to suggest how to feel (with music), what to think (with dialogue), or who to be (with morally instructive endings). Instead, it is a movie that requires participation, and thus offers an unconventional kind of escapism. Not escapism as in taking respite from the drudgery of everyday life under late stage capitalism via “escape” into a content wheel spun by studios whose aesthetic ambitions are often hampered by the profit-motive, but escapism in the sense of crashing through the illusion of the moviehouse as fantasyland and bypassing the notion that drudgery can only be alleviated with entertainments manufactured by the corporations that embody the institutional logic that produces said drudgery in the first place. 

Ok, that was a mouthful. Maybe you’re thinking, “what a bunch of academic hoo-hah.” (If you really are, thanks for reading anyway – please like and follow.) But if you believe movies can do more than just hold one’s attention and maybe – with a little tolerance for pretension and tedium – enrich or expand your experience of the world, then you might consider what Radu Jude’s movie bothers to contemplate that many other critical darlings do not: the existence of those who make the neoliberal engine churn, the individuals occasionally referred to as “essential workers” or, more aptly (in a socio-economic context), “gig workers.” Hence the central juxtaposition between the labors of the present-day Angela and the Angela of the 1982 film.

At first, there is only a superficial parallel between their lives: they are both named Angela, they both drive around Bucharest for a living, and they both have odd encounters with strangers throughout their days. Often, an instance in present-day Angela’s timeline will cue a similar instance from the 1982 film before cutting back to Angela in the present. The differences in the cinematic styles of the time periods can be quite jarring, but as more individuals come into the Angelas’ orbits, the generational juxtapositions become more articulate and compelling. 

We have the Ceaușescu-era cinema, a deceptively wistful aesthetic for life under dictatorship, and Radu Jude’s Romanian New Wave cinema, which throws the former into sharp relief by confronting its halcyon color with black and white naturalism. These styles are also in conversation with the Tik Toks Angela records on her smartphone and a climactic, uninterrupted long take that serves up a brutal faux-ethnographical critique of the totalizing cinema of neoliberalism: corporate media and advertising.

This formal structuring of the film is not merely conceptual, nor intended to troll the casual viewer, nor test the attention spans of the proud cinephiles out there. It’s too funny to pass for pretentious intellectual exercise anyway. Rather, these juxtapositions exist to shake the viewer out of their submersion in the language and aesthetic compromises of neoliberal capitalism so that they may look back on their lived reality from a distance, without losing that simultaneous, disturbing sense of recognition. 

So what does our world look like according to Radu Jude? His Joycean tale suggests the following: a culture held together by a thin membrane of meme content and short form videos, social interactions reduced to the language of corporate legalese and pop news headlines, and a pervasive sense of imminent doom. 

The present-day Angela embodies these phenomena in her exhausted performance of everyday life while simultaneously resisting them through her social media performance art: an influencer persona named Bobiţă, her satirization of a fringe misogynistic fame-and-fortune chaser akin to Andrew Tate (who she references in her first Tik Tok in the movie). When asked if she is worried people will mistake her offensive posts for sincerity, she retorts, “No. I hope some people are still smart.”²

Angela is, by every indication, a brilliant young woman with a sharp sense of self, despite the many external forces that seem hellbent on suppressing that self. We see her potential and how it is squandered on the gig work she performs for individuals who are either more privileged or more willing to compromise on their values than she is. Perhaps this is why we see a copy of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time on her night stand. Like the narrator of Proust’s work, she feels time slipping away as she dreams of more fulfilling ways to occupy it. She tries her best to steal time back from the multinational corporation in the thirty second fragments she allots for her social media art – although this act of resistance is an unfortunate compromise for someone clearly capable of so much more. 

There is a bittersweet acknowledgement in Jude’s reference to Proust, for even as we lament the circumstances of her character, Ilinca Manolache (the actress playing Angela) is indeed communicating something of real substance through her performance of burnout under late stage capitalism, just as the real life Proust is accomplishing something of value by writing about his fictional stand-in’s failure to do so. Not to mention, Manolache is the real life author of the social media art in the film (apparently Bobiţă was her own invention).

Still, we cannot forget that the social reality that gives rise to this observation is quite grim. Jude provides one unflinching reminder of the existential reality underlying so much fretting over the menial and frivolous corporate tasks that dictate present-day Angela’s performance of everyday life: the hundreds of grave posts lining the street she flies down every day. This unexpectedly tranquil sequence gives us special insight into Angela’s consciousness. One wonders what it would mean for her to have this hellish existence taken away should she ever fall asleep at the wheel. A sense of squandered potential? Insignificance? Relief? She crushes convenience store coffee and blasts the radio all day to avoid the answers to these questions, or at least keep herself from becoming the star of another work safety video.

The darkest motif in the film is its insistence that, even in death, the mechanisms of private property know no bounds. At one point, between interview appointments, Angela makes a stop by the Deloitte offices in Romania to speak with a corporate representative about a luxury condo development beginning construction beside the cemetery where her grandparents are buried. The corporation is in the process of exhuming bodies where they are legally within their rights to do so. Angela’s only consolation is a reduced rate for her grandparents’ plots at the new cemetery. But the corporate rep she speaks with, who keeps a copy of “Capital” by Kenneth Goldsmith to tease clients who confuse the paean to twentieth century New York City with Karl Marx, insists that they aren’t the bad guys. It isn’t Deloitte’s fault the cemetery dug burial plots outside its legally defined property boundaries. 

It is this very deflection of responsibility that underlies the basic ethos of the professional class in the film. When Angela asks Nina Hoss’s character if her company is responsible for the rampant deforestation in Romania, first she denies any knowledge of this, as a representative of the marketing department. Then she adds, even if it were true, it would be the fault of the Romanian people for allowing their state to give permission to multinational companies to cut down the trees in the first place. 

For this multinational executive the world is not so complicated. As she advises Angela, the best one can do is look out for oneself and not worry about the actions of others. She keeps her head down and avoids the discomfort of considering her relationship to the greater system of oppression she passively enforces and profits from. She has no patience for anything that disrupts that reality. As a result, much like her doppelganger who walked out of the Laemmle Royal on Santa Monica Boulevard, she remains oblivious to the workings of the brilliant mind before her. She is content with the box she’s put herself in. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still looking for a way out. In Radu Jude’s movie, you can see the light peeking through.

1. A gesture to the dark realities underlying the colorful communist-era images?

2.  This sense of decline, both intellectual and moral, permeates the entire movie. Even the title – Do Not Expect Too Much at the End of the World – suggests this decline via an allusion to the all-too-familiar Frederick Jameson quote about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.