Have you ever felt so sad that it made you burst into uncontrollable laughter? That's precisely the emotional rollercoaster Radu Jude's latest picture, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, takes you on. The Romanian director skillfully captures the injustice, inhumanity and absurdity of modern-day capitalism through the life of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, sleep-deprived production assistant at a Romanian company serving Austrian clients. Angela is on a quest to find people injured at the firm’s worksites to feature in a safety video.
Jude opts for a dual narrative, intertwining Angela's present-day struggles with scenes from the 1981 picture Angela Moves On by Lucian Bratu. This method illustrates the parallel challenges faced by two overworked women named Angela, one in Ceaușescu-era Romania and the other in the contemporary period. Despite the absence of Ceaușescu, Jude’s film suggests that the fundamental issues, including sexism and social.
Jude opts for a dual narrative, intertwining Angela's present-day struggles with scenes from the 1981 picture Angela Moves On by Lucian Bratu. This method illustrates the parallel challenges faced by two overworked women named Angela, one in Ceaușescu-era Romania and the other in the contemporary period. Despite the absence of Ceaușescu, Jude’s film suggests that the fundamental issues, including sexism and social.
- 12/8/2023
- by Liza Alpaidze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is Radu Jude's deepest inquiry yet into our modern, image-saturated world. TikToks, a proto-feminist film from socialist Romania, a would-be Uwe Boll movie, and gritty black-and-white 16mm shots of a crowded city all coagulate into (another) grim satire about the the state of current-day Romania—and, inevitably, the state of the world, which, of course, seems to be ending. As we follow Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked film production assistant, the window of her car, much like a cinema screen, gives us a unique vantage point on a cacophonous Bucharest. Swearing in traffic, absurd arguments, work accidents: Jude throws us into a world of society-wide exhaustion, exacerbated by the tribulations of late capitalism. Yet who’s at fault? No one and everyone, all at once. Exploitation further...
- 10/19/2023
- MUBI
For Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, writer-director Radu Jude may have captured more footage from the passenger seat of a car than Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. Cinematographer Marius Panduru, shooting on high-contrast 16mm black-and-white film, renders the traffic-jammed streets of Bucharest as a nightmare vision of modern life. Our guide through this hellscape is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked and under-slept Uber driver and production assistant. She’s always on the verge of nodding off while driving, and watching cars stream by through the window is a quietly anxious experience.
Angela is conducting at-home auditions with several working-class employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job. One of the workers will then be selected to appear in a safety advisory video and share their story—or a company-approved version of it—as a cautionary tale slash ass-covering gambit.
Angela is conducting at-home auditions with several working-class employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job. One of the workers will then be selected to appear in a safety advisory video and share their story—or a company-approved version of it—as a cautionary tale slash ass-covering gambit.
- 9/9/2023
- by Seth Katz
- Slant Magazine
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.On the steep, cobbled street leading down from the GranRex cinema in Locarno, soon after emerging from El Rio y la Muerte, a deeply engrossing account of a bitter blood feud nourished by generations of Mexican machismo, I thought about Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. This was hardly an isolated incident. I had thought about Jude's movie while taking a bus to the other side of town the day before. I would be thinking about it again on a Zoom call the following week. Conversations with colleagues, a sandwich lunch on a bench, even some of my crisp-hotel-bed dreams were colored by the film, glancing off it, bumping into it, minding their own business only to be startled by it leaping out of a nearby shrubbery. When the guy in the...
- 9/6/2023
- MUBI
“Rossellini’s films,” Jacques Rivette wrote in a letter to Cahiers du Cinéma dated 1955, “have more and more obviously become amateur films––home movies.” The Frenchman saw the label as no indictment, but proof of their exhilarating vitality. In trading a cinema of ideas for projects that felt like “souvenir films” of Ingrid Bergman’s performances (1954’s Joan of Arc at the Stake; an episode in the 1953 anthology We the Women), the Italian director was finally able to move with “unremitting freedom,” and craft tales filled with the most quotidian details of his life: “everything [in them] is instructive, including the errors.” This idea of a gradual shift toward a more amateur and porous approach to filmmaking is also a great way to think about the cinema of Radu Jude. Long before the formal somersaulting of his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Romanian director’s films have hopscotched across genres and tones,...
- 8/7/2023
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
Nobody can be both the magnifying glass and the ant burning up under its glare. Nobody, that is, except shaggy Romanian shaman Radu Jude who, with his Locarno competition entry “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” follows up 2021’s Berlinale-winning “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” with a dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work. Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.
Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…...
Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…...
- 8/7/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
It’s rare that European cinema impacts on Hollywood but it’s exciting when there’s a trickle-down effect, like the connection to be made between Denmark’s stripped-down Dogme movies, which launched in Cannes in the late ’90s, and Steven Spielberg’s decision to go back to basics with Catch Me If You Can a few years later. It’s a moot point how many will ever see Romanian director Radu Jude’s follow-up to his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but, like Bob Dylan going electric or the Sex Pistols making their ramshackle debut at a London art school, this wilfully uncommercial but bloody-minded film could be genuinely seminal in its anarchic and totally individualistic approach, slipping discordant, Godardian subversion into a darkly comic, Ruben Östlund-style human drama.
The intro suggests a boring academic exercise, positing the first half (“A”) as...
The intro suggests a boring academic exercise, positing the first half (“A”) as...
- 8/5/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) is set to begin production in Romania on his next feature, Variety can reveal.
“A Case History” analyzes the relations between individuals and multinational companies in the mad dash of new Romanian capitalism, starting from the real story of preparing and shooting a problematic work safety video. Principal photography is slated to begin in summer or early fall.
“The film is composed of two parts which respond to each other, forming a diptych of sorts,” Jude told Variety. “Each of them explores a certain aspect of the main theme, and the final picture is obtained by juxtaposing the two of them in what we can call ‘a tale of cinema and economy.’” It is a film about work relations, but also a film about images and the way they are made and their place in society.
The first...
“A Case History” analyzes the relations between individuals and multinational companies in the mad dash of new Romanian capitalism, starting from the real story of preparing and shooting a problematic work safety video. Principal photography is slated to begin in summer or early fall.
“The film is composed of two parts which respond to each other, forming a diptych of sorts,” Jude told Variety. “Each of them explores a certain aspect of the main theme, and the final picture is obtained by juxtaposing the two of them in what we can call ‘a tale of cinema and economy.’” It is a film about work relations, but also a film about images and the way they are made and their place in society.
The first...
- 2/10/2022
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
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