Gig workers the world over, “Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World”

Romanian postmodernist director Radu Jude’s newest film premieres locally at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 6 and 7.

Romanian writer-director Radu Jude’s latest internet-informed satire, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World (2023), recognizes both the weight of the past and the fact that only the current moment is relevant. The film strikes back at the proliferation of “content” by trying to subsume it into the history of cinema, rather than the reverse. Commercialism and the manipulation of “documentary” images have been present since the birth of the art form. Over the film’s winding 164-minute runtime, Jude also presents a case for the vitality of cinema and film festivals, even though they’ve recently shown evidence of being beholden to financial and political interests. 

Screening twice at the Bartell Theatre as part of the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival on Saturday, April 6, at 6:15 p.m., and Sunday, April 7, at 11 a.m., End Of The World is, above all, a comedy about workplace exploitation. (Tickets are still available for both screenings as of the publication date.) Our heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked and barely-paid PA/driver/studio factotum, regularly works 16-hour days for the Romania-based production company that mostly services Western European clients. One of them is embattled video-game movie director Uwe Boll (appearing as himself). Another is an Austria-based multinational conglomerate who’s commissioned a workplace safety video, and put Angela in charge of casting it from a list of workplace accident victims. 

Angela’s day-to-day life, which involves a lot of driving around, is shot in 35mm black and white.  Her routine is punctuated by flashes of color, which the film reserves for moments that can be commodified via recording. Those include excerpts from Lucian Bratu’s film, Angela Moves On (1981), a Nicolae Ceaușescu-era drama about a cab driver (featuring verité footage of bread lines in the background), as well as Angela’s TikTok videos in a filter-inspired character named Bobita, a stress-relieving outlet for Angela’s id in the form of the most misogynistic bragging she can muster. (She justifies Bobita as “satire through extreme caricature,” but there’s something to the idea of telling people to “suck your dick” that is universally satisfying.) And finally, there’s the unbroken shot of raw footage for the aforementioned safety video. 

End Of The World stays in constant motion with Angela through a stream of historical and cultural references. Yet, few of the characters have the luxury of academic contemplation of those ideas. Both technology and ideas are subject to the “production for use” doctrine, in that it serves the conversation and the pursuit of making money. The possible exceptions don’t appear interested in any contemplation, such as Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss), who first appears Zordon-like during a Zoom video conference, as she goes over possible subjects for the safety video.

The director of that video, Tibi (Serban Pavlu), overexplains lenses and a “gold diffusion filter,” while Angela sheepishly admits that Romanian workers wouldn’t accept a story from an injured Roma worker. Doris is, in fact, the descendant of the famed German philosopher and scientist, but hasn’t read his works because “it’s different when it’s family.” Jude gives everything and everyone—from the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Jean-Luc Godard, the war in Ukraine, Andrew Tate, Bob Dylan, Thomas Bernhard, and Elena Ferrante, among others—a notable mention, but the attitude is decidedly conversational and practical, not academic.

Jude has mentioned in interviews that he’s not interested in creating a masterpiece—or a perfectly constructed object to be admired, in other words—but more in a work that engages with the world as we now live in it. Jude follows up his illustration of the inanity of culture-war discourse, Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn (2021), with an entry into the canon of what-it’s-like-to-have-a-job films to rival Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear (1953), though one would suspect Jude would reject the idea of a canon altogether. 

Take, for example, the use of the footage from Angela Moves On, which Jude freely admits to disliking on first viewing, before he revisited it years later and noticed examples of crumbling infrastructure hiding in plain sight in this somewhat light workplace comedy about a taxi driver. The older Angela (Dorina Lazar) makes an appearance in Jude’s contemporary footage, and the parallels between the two cinematic characters mark the passage of time. Today, you can’t just be a cab driver; you’ve got to be an Uber driver, a TikTok personality, and several other gigs just to barely scrape by, and Soviet-era political repression has been traded in for HR-approved dictates being read by disembodied voices coming from afar. 

All this might seem a bit despair-inducing, but Jude seems to be trying to get us to wince in recognition of crumbling institutions and how it appears there isn’t really anyone at the helm, if there ever was. In a telling exchange between Doris and Angela during a private car ride, Angela tries to ask Doris about her company’s role in the purchase of Romanian public forests for the purposes of logging, and the poised European gives a very Trump-like answer: she doesn’t know anything about it; they didn’t do that, but if they did, it’s Romania’s fault for not objecting. 

With its acknowledgement that there’s nothing new under the sun, but we’ve got to live right now somehow, End Of The World possibly provides an approach to navigating the Wisconsin Film Festival as a whole: you never know when something from the past or present is going to lay out a path forward (so you’d do well to see the festival’s repertory offerings of Man’s Castle, The World’s Greatest Sinner, Pitfall, or some classic Frank Capra). The world has been ending for who knows how long and appears to be staying that way, so add something to your mental toolkit.