Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

“I’m working a lot at the moment, but it isn’t real work,” Radu Jude tells us, as we sit down to talk about his latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. “I used to make a living as an assistant director, and then as a director on TV shows and advertisements. Real work is spending long hours doing things that you hate.”

A stinging satire of contemporary work culture, Do Not Expect… offers audiences a passenger-seat view of the indignities and absurdities of late capitalism. The film follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant hired to interview candidates for a work safety promo. “First of all: I hate personal stories!” Jude interjects, when asked if Angela’s character was based on anyone he’d worked with. “I don't believe cinema should be a means of self-expression. It just creates these artistic products where everybody speaks about their own issues, rather than all the other things going on in the world. However, you learn a lot about human nature in these high-pressure work environments, and all the storylines in the film are based on my own experiences or the experiences of people I have worked with.” 

We join Angela as she drives endlessly across Bucharest, only stopping occasionally to post satirical sexist rants using her social media pseudonym 'Bobita'. “In a way Bobita was cast before Illenca!” laughs Jude. “She invented this character four years ago, during the pandemic, and I knew immediately that I wanted to use it in my film.” Created using a TikTok filter that gives her a bald head and goatee like noxious men's rights influencer Andrew Tate, Bobita continues Jude’s recent fascination with our image-saturated culture, but rumour has it that English-speaking audiences are only getting a watered-down version of her odious hate speech. “It's much more vulgar in Romanian,” Jude tells us, before giving an example that’s far too offensive to print here. “A lot of these insults just look weird in English. I think it's the maximum amount of vulgarity you can get away with in Romania, but I challenge anyone to be more vulgar!”

A Still from Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Angela’s work days are shot on black and white 16mm film by Jude’s regular cinematographer Marius Panduru, and interspersed with colour footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On, which charts the life of another Angela (Dorina Lazar), a taxi driver working in Bucharest at the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. “It was supposed to be a love story with an empowered woman in the main role, which was quite an interesting theme for the time,” explains Jude while discussing the decision to put Angela’s story in dialogue with Bratu’s film. “Putting these two stories together can be interpreted in multiple ways, and I like that it’s vague. I'm a fan of Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘open work’; I don’t want there to be one fixed interpretation.” Jude also recontextualises this footage; he occasionally slows it down and magnifies details that might otherwise be overlooked. “I wanted to highlight these moments of subversiveness in the original footage,” Jude tells us. “The film was supposed to present Romanian society in a warm light, but look closely, and you can see the poverty, and the food lines.”

The Angela of the present represents anyone who's taken on unpaid work to get a foot in the door, or worked extra hours for fear they’ll be replaced by someone who'll do the same job for less. It’s a precarious existence, which is highlighted in a conversation between Angela and Austrian marketing director Dois Goethe (played by Nina Hoss) about a treacherous highway on the outskirts of Bucharest. “The shadow of death looms over the film,” Jude says when asked about the decision to include a several-minute-long montage of the 115 crosses commemorating those who have died on this stretch of road. “The person Angela is based on actually died in a car crash while working as a production assistant. I wanted to create a memorial that showed the reality of this type of work.”

Do Not Expect… closes with a locked-off 40-minute shot in which we observe the making of the corporate safety video Angela has been working on. In it, wheelchair user Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan) is forced to censor the story of his accident. After years of working in this industry, you’d think returning to this type of corporate shoot would be uncomfortable for Jude. “Not at all,” he laughs. “About six years ago I said, 'I don’t want to do this kind of crap anymore!' and decided to concentrate on making my own films. All of a sudden, I felt much better! Now it doesn’t feel like I’m working at all.”

---