Trust me, I have less than zero expectations by now
(Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii)
dir: Radu Jude
2023
This is a lot of film to unpack.
I can’t say I know much, if anything, about Romanian cinema, having not knowingly ever watched a film from there as far as I know. I know about this director here, and Cristian Mungiu, and that’s about it.
And I know even less about Romania itself. Based on this flick, or these flicks…I am not going to pretend I know anything about Romanian life, but I do have impressions. I have opinions.
The title of this flick intrigued me too much for me to ignore it, and now, after nearly three hours of this experience, I feel like I can talk about it, finally.
There is a lot of driving in this flick, as in, a lot of a camera focused on a woman, being our main character Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache), driving around the city of Bucharest for hours and hours as she tries to make her living. There are also scenes from a Romanian movie from the 1980s called Angela Moves On, about a woman driving a taxi around the streets of Bucharest, interspersed throughout the movie. Both of the leads are called Angela. And later in the movie our main character Angela meets up with the actress who played Angela in the earlier movie, being Dorina Lazar, again playing that character as if she’s a real person.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. I don’t know enough about anything to really know. There are the obvious elements of paralleling of their lives and times onscreen, but there’s also the element that films contemporary Angela in some / many of the same places that 80s Angela drives through or around. And some of it shows how little the place has changed, whereas some scenes are shot in areas where nothing remains due to the depredations of former despot Nicolae Ceauşescu.
The traffic seems pretty bad, but the traffic in any major city would be pretty bad. I can’t tell, to be honest, if the traffic is any worse there than anywhere else. I can’t imagine that the traffic in Delhi, Dhaka or Jakarta is any better.
She seems like she’s an okay driver. We watch hours and hours of driving to get around the city in order to interview people on camera to find subjects for an industrial workplace health and safety video. She works for a film production company, and is being sent hither and thither at the behest of their Austrian clients.
In between these visits to impoverished people who are now also disabled because of the negligence of their employers, and her wrangling with some developers who’ve corruptly appropriated land from the local cemetery, and then tried to cover up the corruption by fraudulently purchasing it, necessitating the disinterment of Angela’s grandparents so they can be buried elsewhere maintains an atmosphere like contemporary Romania is not the post-communist utopia many would have hoped it would become post the fall of the Berlin Wall and the execution of the Ceaşescus. It’s almost like…things are still shitty and no-one knows who or what to blame anymore.
Angela’s employers at the film production company aren’t that concerned with her wellbeing either, as she drives endlessly, sleep-deprived, binging on energy drinks, but the client they’re answering to doesn’t particularly care about anyone’s wellbeing either. The film they want to film puts the blame on the employees who were hurt on the job, rather than putting the blame where it squarely belongs – on the indifferent negligence of the employers.
The last part of the film, and probably the last half hour, are mostly a continuous shot (there is an edit or two) of the “successful” person hurt while on the job, who, surrounded by his family, tries to tell his story, but keeps having the production crew whittle down his story until it loses all meaning. Answering as they do to the Austrian clients who own the company that would be at fault, they keep telling the wheelchair-bound Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan) to leave out elements that they deem unflattering to their masters.
From a story about a chap compelled to work way overtime in a location that’s poorly serviced by its owners to the detriment of the workers, where health and safety elements were entirely left out, and a dangerous and avoidable incident resulted in a chap ending up in a coma for over a year, it’s farcically reduced to “I should have worn the helmet they told me to”, which is an abject lie.
The director of the commercial, pretentious fuck that he is, outlines how the old Communist era videos also used to blame workers for their injuries. How is this any different? It reaches its absurdist peak when Ovidiu is reduced to holding green placards up, to mimic Bob Dylan in the clip for Subterranean Homesick Blues, upon which they’re going to superimpose the text that the employer ultimately decides on using greenscreen / chroma key later on.
Halfway through the flick, when Angela’s bosses send her somewhere to pick up some camera lenses, Angela gets to meet infamous German director Uwe Boll, playing himself, and talking about that time he invited a bunch of film critics who’d criticised his terrible films into a boxing ring, and then beat the shit out of them.
Why is that in the film? It’s hard to say. Is it because it’s funny? Well, it’s better than anything in Boll’s actual films, which are universally panned for a reason. Although to be fair I’ve only watched about four or five. There could be something well-made, or even borderline average lurking in his filmography, but it would be something of a miracle. The stuff I’ve seen of his is worse than student short films, even after the decades that he’s been at it.
He’s there, I think, because a lot of this flick is the director telling us how conversant he is with film history, and literature and history in general, and the fact that a lot of film productions happen in Romania because it’s cheap. There are out of nowhere anecdotes constantly, like one about how Chaplin did over 300 takes for a single scene in City Lights in which he didn’t like the way the actress was saying a line.
And this was in a silent movie. There’s constant, constant references, the most gratuitous of which is probably Tod Browning's Freaks, which made my jaw drop. Many of them I get, some of them not, and no-one outside of a Romanian audience is going to get the references to corrupt Romanian politicians. Yet what it creates and sustains is an atmosphere in which practically anything can happen, and, even if it feels completely spontaneous and that there’s no script, that everyone knows exactly what they’re meant to be saying, doing or quoting.
At times when she’s driving another driver hurls abuse at Angela, and during the filming of the work safety video towards the end someone leans out of an apartment window and abuses them for filming in his neighbourhood. I’m about 60 per cent sure they were scripted events, but I’ll never know for sure otherwise.
I haven’t even mentioned the car-based sex scene Angela has with…some guy? Boyfriend? Married guy on the side which is pretty, uh, frank and earthy in its depiction and dialogue?
And then there’s Bobiţâ…
How do I even describe what Bobiţâ is? Seemingly at random, Angela stops whatever she’s doing, grabs her phone, puts on a strange Instagram filter that changes how she looks as she’s recording, making her (mostly) look like a guy with a shaved head and a goatie, as she adopts a deeper voice and then records herself saying the most vulgar, horrifyingly misogynistic things you could possibly imagine, in between gross jokes and fawning over Putin and a certain famous British misogynist who is facing human trafficking and sexual violence charges in Romania, whose name I will not sully my review with, and you could be forgiven for thinking “what the absolute fuck am I watching?”
The first couple of times it’s confronting and strange, occasionally it’s somewhat funny, and in the end when you perhaps accept that she’s putting on this persona as an outlet, as a way of de-stressing from her very stressful days, or even that she’s being honest when she says it’s a satirical extreme that’s meant to mock what it seems to be supporting, well, you could be left even more confused than before. She does it with such conviction, no matter how terrible it looks, that you have to wonder whether it’s for clicks or likes, or whether there’s enough people she’s fooling online for it to be worthwhile.
The profanity that pours from Angela’s mouth as Bobiţâ… my gods, you feel like echoing the actor playing her mother in several scenes and just muttering “Language, Angela…” in despair.
If there is an overall theme it’s that Angela, in this day and age of the gig economy and where apps rule the world, is as exploited by the film production company as much as the production company is exploited by the Austrian manufacturing company which exploits its own workers as badly as they were exploited back in the day by the communist system, except now under the banner of free market capitalism, with even less protections than before.
And that’s about as much of a muddle as I can make out, and we’re all played for fools. In the end we know the family of the worker harmed on the job will get screwed over, but maybe they’ll get a few bucks out of it. That’s the most any of us can hope for. No justice, but maybe a few bucks?
When Angela is ferrying an Austrian exec from the company around town (the great Nina Hoss), upon being told “isn’t Romania the poorest country in Europe?”, Angela feels compelled to say that compared to the companies in the EU, the Albanians would be even poorer. Everyone needs someone else to put down, in order to feel like they’re not the lowest of the low – someone else has to be brought lower.
There is a heap, an absolute truckload of anti-Gypsy scenes in the flick, and until told otherwise I’m going to assume they’re there to highlight just how prevalent prejudice towards them is throughout the country. I am aware that to some the use of the term “gypsy” is considered a pejorative, and that Roma or Romani is preferred, and I’m all good with that, it’s just that talking about them when they make up 8 per cent of a country’s population, and the country is called Romania for completely different reasons, could create some confusion.
It’s horrible watching scenes where random shopkeepers or people on the film crew abuse the Roma who appear for begging or just for existing, telling them to go back to India, which seems really weird, and it’s shocking even if they were scripted or rehearsed, and even more so if they weren’t.
Just to make a final point about how weird and freewheeling this flick is, how seemingly random sometimes, when Angela and the Austrian exec are talking in the car about the dangerousness of the roads in Romania, Angela mentions a section of road so dangerous that there are something like 600 crosses installed along the roadway, to mark the sites of fatal car crashes. I’ve seen something similar in other countries in Europe, especially Greece, but I’ve also seen it here in Australia. But if we thought Angela was exaggerating, the film then shows us those crosses for five minutes straight.
I timed it. Five minutes of nothing but mostly iron and marble crosses, along a roadway.
A three hour flick takes a lot of patience, and even more than that it takes an audience that’s open to watching something that doesn’t have a clear plot or anything close to a coherent storytelling method. It’s by no means random, and in no way feels like a disparate agglomeration of stuff for stuff’s sake. It does have the overall structure of “a day and a night in the life of an overworked film production assistant”. But a lot happens over those three hours. Much of it is amusing, hence the black comedy label, much of it is baffling, but it ultimately gives us a glimpse into the contemporary world and contemporary economics, from a significantly different angle. It’s a deeply cynical exercise born of experience, but instead of despairing, it argues for battling on and blazing through, regardless, in order to survive, and say our piece, even if it’s screaming into the void.
It’s a bit of a slog, but I feel like I got a lot out of the film. The woman playing the main character is an absolute force of nature, and deserves all the roles in all the films, Romanian or otherwise. She’s a character herself so much larger than life that she deserves more films, definitely. And the scenes from the earlier film from the 1980s were also an interesting counterpoint (alongside the terrible gender politics and dated assumptions), but they add the poignancy and pathos that films like that could evoke, that is entirely absent from the contemporary scenes for a plethora of reasons.
8 times I expect nothing from the end of the world other than peace and quiet out of 10
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“I can’t go on like this, Mr Vladimir.”
- “That’s what you think.” - Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the
World
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