Radu Jude, Romanian cinema’s foremost exponent of punky, subversive audience-baiting provocation, returns with the gloriously titled Do Not Count on Too A lot from the Finish of the World. And as could also be anticipated from the director whose final film was the eye-bogglingly specific 2021 Berlin Golden Bear-winning satire Unhealthy Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, this image is kind of equal elements an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke within the eye to traditional cinema. I liked each enraging minute of it.
Like Unhealthy Luck Banging, the movie is split into chapters: the primary follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache, glorious), an overworked manufacturing assistant interviewing potential topics for a office security movie for Doris, an Austrian consumer (Nina Hoss). Captured in unsentimental black and white, a lot of this unfolds as a profile shot of Angela as she burns across the streets of Bucharest in her minivan, blasting music to remain awake. She has a satirical TikTok alter ego, the crass, ultra-macho obscenity-spewing Bobiță – “I criticise by means of excessive caricature,” she explains, “like Charlie Hebdo.” The second chapter, filmed in a single, static take, exhibits the topic of the protection video as his spirit is damaged and his story is steadily moulded to suit the company message.
Inside these chapters are additional mini-digressions; a throwaway remark a couple of perilous stretch of freeway is adopted by a montage of roadside memorials to lives misplaced. And Angela’s story is punctuated by clips from one other movie, Lucian Bratu’s Angela Strikes On (1981), a portrait of a feminine taxi driver in Bucharest. Themes of employee exploitation are woven all through, however the takeaway right here is the unpredictable anarchy of execution and a bracing explosion of concepts and anger.
