For the first time since 2017, when he unveiled The Dead Nation (a documentary on the Romanian Holocaust) in the Signs of Life section, Radu Jude returns with a feature film to Locarno, this time in the main competition – with the second-longest film of his career, (surpassed in length only by his 2020 documentary The Exit of the Trains), Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World: a sharp continuation of the explorations that he opened up in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, both in terms of social critique and of a deeper reflection on the nature of images and montage.

Without going into too many details about its plot, the narrative Don’t Expect… is divided into two halves. The first, mostly shot in black and white, follows the travails of Angela (Ilinca Manolache, brilliant in her first lead role in cinema), a production assistant for a media company that makes corporate videos. We see her driving all over the aggressive streets of Bucharest for an entire day – a point that Jude uses to renew his declaration of war against cars – as she is trying to cast the protagonist of a workplace safety video: but none of the people that she speaks to seems to have been injured solely out of their own fault. The second half, shot entirely in color, divided by the first through a macabre symbolic sequence, consists of the actual shooting of said video – an occasion for Jude to create a bridge with his 2009 debut feature, The Happiest Girl in the World, while offering some of the longest shots in his entire body of work. I can’t help but point out that it’s interesting to see that two of the titans of the Romanian New Wave – Jude and Cristi Puiu, lying at opposite ends of the political spectrum – have both released films this year that contain poignant self-referential gestures, relying on long single shots; not so much resurrecting the aesthetics of their early films, as much as taking their formal rigor towards their natural apex.

This is the first time since Aferim! (2015) that Jude shoots fiction in black-and-white – but something is markedly different about his cinematography (and it’s not just the grain). The tracking shots that followed his protagonist from a distance are replaced by long, static shots, as countershots also make their way into the film’s grammar, yet, the crucial difference lies in its extensive use of close-ups. Marius Panduru’s camera has never approached the faces of the actors this much – almost recalling Dreyer’s famous strategy of shooting faces up close in The Passion of Joan of Arc: the closer you get to it, the more expressive a visage becomes, meaning, the more physical defects we see, the more we hint at the spiritual and moral ones.

And there’s plenty of such defects to see throughout the film, which begins with a naked, swearing Angela waking up in the early hours of the day – as a major point of suspense is her chronic exhaustion: as she drives from one place to another, from extremely poor neighborhoods to affluent areas of the city, one is constantly under the impression that, despite the loud music that she is blasting to keep herself awake, she’s always on the verge of getting into a car accident. (I remember few Romanian films more anxiety-inducing than this – and I must say that it’s particularly harrowing to watch this film in a cinema in Bucharest, and to have to take the same streets to go back home.) Still, it’s delightful to see how Jude always employs new faces in his films – beyond Manolache’s tour de force, and the discovery that is Ovidiu Pîrșan, a first-time, non-professional and disabled actor, it’s a joy to see Zita Moldovan, one of the most talented Roma stage actresses in Romania, on the big screen, even if only in a small role.

In between the protagonist’s manic crisscrossing around the capital, Jude weaves two visual threads. The first consists of fragments from Angela Goes On (1981), Lucian Bratu’s late communist drama that has strong feminist undertones, which is at times rendered in slow-motion, while the second one adapts a digital character that Manolache has constructed in past years on her social media accounts: a seedy, lecherous caricature of Romanian toxic masculinity that swears like a sailor. While this formal gamble – certainly a bold one – doesn’t always work out in practical terms, it does indeed create the backbone of a secondary thematic plain: one which concerns moving images and their production – be they analog or digital, produced under a communist dictatorship or under neoliberal capitalism, meant for screens big and (very) small, while passing through the aesthetics of cinema (at one point, the film makes a nod towards Godard’s death), thus reinforcing the film’s aim to create a social fresco.

To put things briefly: the film’s main topic is exploitation. The exploitation that lies at the heart of of outsorcing production to countries with cheap labor and precarious systems for protecting workers, be it during work, or through other safety nets. The similar exploitation of white-collar workers in agencies and corporations, who craft (media) products meant for export. The self-exploitation that results from pushing yourself to work excessive hours and from finding yourself unable to say no.

The power dynamics at play – however much they might hide under fake smiles – could not be any clearer than here, especially this amazing scene where Angela picks up a German boss, Doris (Nina Hoss, Christian Petzold’s muse), from the airport, trying to strike up a conversation starting from the fact that the corporate chief is supposedly a descendant of J.W. Goethe (to quote Morrisey, „the eighteenth pale descendant / of some old queen or other”). And the main subject ends up attracting an entire series of related late-capitalist topics: the obsession with private property, exacerbated individualism (defined par excellence by personal cars), the uncontrollable expansion of real estate businesses, the phenomenon of burnout, the fact that cities are growing increasingly uninhabitable, and the retouching of reality by advertising.

I’ve always found it somewhat strange that the only (truly great) film to discuss Romania’s status as an economic periphery/hotbed for exploitation by foreign capital, as seen through the lens of the corporate world, is a foreign one – Maren Ade’s monumental Toni Erdmann, which Veronica Lazăr and Andrei Gorzo described as “a neo-Chaplinesque comedy where the inhumanity of capitalism is opposed by the kind subversiveness of a clown-like hero (…) things are no longer about the so-called modern times of Ford assembly plants, but rather, about these times – of global, financialized capitalism”. But there is no Wilfried Conradi here. No one to notice the people of this land, from the handymen one can find in the markets to the coquettish ladies living in the city center, nobody to observe its (macro-)economic inequalities. No prankster father who deftly, and quite unsubtly sneaks into the belly of this world in his attempt to help his daughter regain her humanity, which has gone lost between numbers and quotas, between empty conversations in obscenely expensive restaurants and shopping malls, between dreams of efficiency and redundancy.

There is no Toni because there simply seems to be no humanity left to regain for Jude’s characters – and if it does exist, it does so in small glimpses, like in the gesture of the disabled Roman woman who wants to make a small gift to Angela; other than that, it has been irredeemably lost. (Inequity is also a given in this world – and, as such, is ripe for being exploited.) All of this is the result of the film being made from the perspective of the ones being exploited, rather than the innocent gaze of the jovial Westerner who, all of a sudden, is confronting the horrors that his civilization has generated. Nor is there any need for an Edmann-shaped mirror to be held up to this world, because nobody seems to be under any sort of illusion about what is happening around them – at best, they’re faking it, hiding their feelings of profound disgust in front of the others, letting them loose when they’re alone: like in the scene when Angela, sent to bring some dishes of finger food to a conference room, spits all over the plates.

Don’t Expect Much from the End of the World is perhaps Radu Jude’s bleakest, most critical film – and that’s saying something for the director that almost single-handedly revived the public awareness of Romania’s history of enslaving the Roma people and its bloody involvement in the Holocaust. It’s bleak precisely because it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Mark Fisher’s famous axiom goes – a natural addendum to Stanislaw Jerzy Lec’s titular aphorism.

“Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World” had its world premiere today, the 4th August, in the main competition of the Locarno International Film Festival.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.