From your previous film, Bad Luck in Sex or Accidental Porn (2021), filmmaker Radu Jude said he tried to make “a historical film about the present”. The description applies perfectly to his successor, Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the Worldwhich takes Iranian cinema’s fetish mode of transportation, the car, to weave a metafictional web about 24 hours in the life of a production assistant.
Yes, we wrote “Iranian cinema”, and we know perfectly well that Jude is Romanian, and it is also true that memories of Week-end by Jean-Luc Godard — but there are so many cars in this film that we always think of Abbas Kiarostami or Jafar Panahi. That is, of course, if Kiarostami and Panahi had a sarcastic, knife-edge sense of humor.
It also makes sense to invoke the Iranians because (albeit in another register) Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a film about the incarnation, the staging, the performance of the real. Angela, our heroine, is supposed to interview figures who have had accidents at work to choose those who would look best in an institutional film that is essentially a facade to project virtue. Between these visits, he makes videos for TikTok in which he pretends to be a influencer macho and stupid whose toxic masculinity is taken seriously by many, and he acts as a crasher in a film set of Uwe Boll, “the worst director in the world” (playing himself).
Confused? We have only scratched the surface: Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World it’s not one film, it’s two, three, four, five, in a fragmented but never dispersed collage, a mix of roller coaster and ghost train, a crossing of languages and images that dialogue with each other and with the viewer to build a merciless, devastating portrait of our world. Angela’s adventures in Bucharest traffic, taking her mother to the grave where her grandparents are buried, visiting the lawyer who manages the luxury condominium that will occupy the cemetery, serving as a driver for her Austrian boss (surprise, it’s Nina Hoss), are a denunciation as sarcastic as it is elegant of the uberization of work and savage capitalism.
And there is still archival footage of Romania past — in fact, excerpts from a 1981 film about a female taxi driver, Angela Moves On, and Jude inserts the characters from that film, played by exactly the same actors, 40 years later, into Angela’s rounds. And we haven’t even talked about the single 30-minute shot that ends the film (the real-time shooting of that institutional security video), nor about all of this being inspired by true stories from Jude’s assistant days.
What really matters to say about Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World is that it is one of the films of the year, an intelligent x-ray, in high definition, of the times we live in, which talks about very serious things halfway between resigned grumbling and indignation on the verge of exploding. Or that it is a splendid example of reinvention and redefinition of the boundaries of what a film can be, integrating the artistic and the popular, the artifice and the sincere, into a whole that is constantly catching the spectator off balance and uses fiction to reach the essence of the real.
And is there a better feeling than discovering something genuinely intelligent, playful, that plays with what cinema can be without losing sight of what it was and is?
