Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD   ***1/2

Radu Jude

2023

IDEA:  Working for a media agency that's been hired to film an occupational safety PSA for a multinational conglomerate, production assistant Angela drives around Bucharest gathering interviews with injured employees of the corporation.

BLURB:  With Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and now Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude has cemented himself as a truly world-class Marxist auteur, as confrontational and formally audacious as Godard or Makavejev. Once again, he mercilessly trains his crosshairs on global capitalism and its draconian systems of exploitation, moving seamlessly between fiction, documentary, and essay with a vernacular so bracingly of-the-moment it puts to shame most movies that purport to tap the zeitgeist. Jude is particularly concerned with late-stage capitalist labor economies, and through the travails of his protagonist, the harried but brusquely no-nonsense Angela, he pieces together a darkly absurdist sociopolitical jeremiad about people at the mercy of a corporate hegemony that scarcely hides its complete lack of principles. The potency of Jude’s critique has much to do with his keen understanding of both world and film history, of how images serve as invaluable and increasingly manipulable ideological tools. Do Not Expect… is literally structured as a dialogue with the past, intercutting its own story with scenes from the 1981 Romanian film Angela Moves On; in this “conversation,” as in the numerous intertextual quotes, allusions, and parables that make up Jude’s densely written script, the film exposes the structures of power that proliferate across time and location, undergirding our lives in newer forms but remaining as barbaric as ever. It’s the callous greed of a corporation that wants to rebury the bodies in an adjacent cemetery taking up its space; the neglect of a government whose lax construction laws are reflected in the 600 crosses lining a 250 km stretch of road, filmed by Jude in a solemn, totally silent montage that halts the narrative for several minutes; and in the multinational conglomerate that forces its liability in workplace accidents onto its desperate, overworked and underpaid employees. If Jude tells us to not expect too much from the end of the world, it’s probably because it won’t look much different from the dystopia we’re already living.