When Andrew Tate got arrested in Romania last year, we hoped we would never have to see his face again. In Romanian director Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Tate’s spectre appears as a TikTok filter to darkly critique misogyny and burnout under late-stage capitalism.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is Jude’s second entry at VIFF, following 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. It captures the bullshit people put up with and inflict on others to stay afloat, and how disturbing humour can help us cope.
Angela Radacanu (an electric performance by Ilinca Manolache) is an overworked production assistant on a series of workplace safety films for an Austrian company that manufactures in Romania. She wakes up groaning at 5:30 a.m. to drive around Bucharest for 16 hours, shooting videos of disabled survivors of workplace accidents.
That would bum anyone out, but Angela has a weird cope up her sleeve: A TikTok filter with a unibrow and shiny bald head turns her into Bobița, a knock-off Andrew Tate that spews profanity (watered down in the English subtitles) to her followers. Whenever the depressing tedium of the job becomes too much, she whips out her phone and channels her alter ego.
“I’m here at an atomic fallout shelter full of sluts,” she grunts at her phone while on break at a shoot at a bunker-like factory. Her face eerily shifts in and out of the filter, strands of long blonde hair suddenly appearing behind her AI-generated beard.
On TikTok, she’s an alpha male who boasts about fucking women like herself “in every hole.” In real life, she’s a bitterly exhausted girlboss trying to make it in an industry that views both her and the exploited workers she films as props.
She satirizes the violent power fantasy of American masculinity, but she also strains towards the ease that it promises.
The shifts between her behaviour as an efficient camera assistant, a bad-mouthing driver and misogynistic TikTok caricature are abrupt, but also oddly consistent. After all, no matter what role she’s playing, she’s always performing. With her sharp wit and irreverent feminist humour, she could be Romanian Fleabag.
The film is also in black and white, except for when she’s filming her TikToks — and when colourful clips from a 1981 Romanian drama randomly intercut into Angela’s story. The film, Angela Moves On, features a female taxi driver, also named Angela.
Both Angelas drive around Bucharest and deal with patriarchal nonsense, but the clips from the older film are colourful, spirited and highly sterilised, Anything darker would have been censored under dictator Ceaușescu. This contrasts with the dissociation, anxiety and late-stage capitalist drudgery of driving through Bucharest now.
One of the film’s most coherent points is its commentary on how international companies exploit Romanian workers. Many of the workplace accident victims that Angela films have complaints with the Austrian company for putting them in unsafe working conditions.
On camera, Angela has to insist that they blame their injuries on their own choice to not wear helmets. But for one woman that slipped off a beam while working overtime, a helmet wouldn’t have saved her.
It’s a blunt and effective commentary on how institutions place blame on individuals for system-wide failures. For the quick cash, most of the workers bemusedly say the lines that Angela — an unwilling mouthpiece for the Austrian corporate overlords — feeds them.
For all its dark humour and sharp commentary, the movie is a bleak three hours long, bloated with repetitive shots of Angela driving through Bucharest.
The expansive run time does a great job at making us feel the frustration of Angela’s endless errands. By the end, we wanted to go home and lay down almost as much as she did.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is playing at The Cinematheque on October 8 at 9 p.m. Tickets are available here.