Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023) opens with the chapter title “Angela: A conversation with a film from 1981”. The film in question is an unassuming slice of socialist life titled Angela Moves On and directed by Lucian Bratu (1924-1998). It is an interesting choice on Jude’s part. Jude first emerged in the late 2000s as a second-rank contributor to a New Romanian Cinema whose leading figures at the time were Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu and Corneliu Porumboiu. And by and large this New Romanian Cinema didn’t engage with the Romanian cinema of the Ceaușescu era. To the extent that it did conduct a conversation with selected Romanian directors from the state socialist past, it was either with anti-Ceaușescu rebels like Lucian Pintilie and Mircea Daneliuc (the New Romanian Cinema tipped its hat in their direction) or with their opposite number, Sergiu Nicolaescu, a leading director of Ceaușescu-approved patriotic epics (both Puiu and Mungiu, in their early days, explicitly defined themselves against Nicolaescu). What is interesting about Jude’s choice, Angela Moves On, is that it’s the work of a director who was neither a rebel nor a conformist, who aspired towards a modest decency, quietly striving to keep his representantions of contemporary Romanian life as uncompromised by official propaganda as he possibly could. 

In his review of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, J. Hoberman describes Angela Moves On as “sociological propaganda” (in Jacques Ellul’s sense): “[a]lthough the movie was shot during a period of severe austerity, Angela’s problems have less to do with economic hardship than with problematic men [...]; it focuses on a personal problem to paper over a much larger social one.”[i] This is true, but it is not the whole truth. There are ways in which, beyond its bland appearance (Hoberman notes the “blandly cheerful music”, but Angela Moves On is stylistically undistinguished in general), Lucian Bratu’s movie is a nonconformist one. Its understated acknowledgement that good socialist citizens can sometimes live non-standard, somewhat messed-up lives is not common in Romanian films from its era. The heroine is a 40-year old divorcée (from an abusive husband) who supports herself by driving a cab. The film’s feminism can certainly look mild and not at all unexpected in a film made in a socialist country, but the truth is that by 1981 Ceaușescu’s version of socialism had become very conservative – abortion was outlawed and divorce was discouraged (even in cases of physically abusive marriages) through bureaucratic hassle and social stigma. Speaking of abortion, Bratu’s Angela undergoes (a necessarily illegal) one in the course of the movie. It happens off-screen and it is only alluded to, but it is not at all framed moralistically by the filmmakers, which is truly remarkable in a Romanian film from that era. Radu Jude includes in his own film the moment in which Angela’s boyfriend finds out about it and slaps her. In another unusual touch (given the growing nationalism of the Ceaușescu regime at the time), the boyfriend is a proud Romanian of Hungarian ethnicity. (Considering the ideological climate of 1981, it is probably significant that the actor playing him, Lázló Miske, was billed in the film’s credits as “Vasile” Miske, his ethnicity being thus de-emphasized. Radu Jude begins his “conversation” with Bratu’s film by playfully correcting this: in the credits of his own film, the Romanian name “Vasile” is crossed out and “Lázló” is written over it.)

The conversation mainly concerns the city of Bucharest; more specifically, the experience of being a woman driving through it in 1981 and 2023. Jude’s protagonist, also named Angela, is a production assistant shooting casting videos for an Austrian corporation; she also does some Uber on the side. Confronted with Jude’s cross-cutting, it is impossible to avoid the impression that the Angela of 1981 is driving through incomparably milder traffic in what looks in general like a happier world. (Bratu shot in color and in mostly good weather, and drenched his images in innocuous music, while Jude mostly worked on 16 mm black-and-white.) The Angela of 1981 is a taxi driver and, as Julia Gunnison writes, her work is inherently social, her cab a “site of encounter”, connecting her with the city (even if not always in pleasant ways). On the contrary, in the much more congested Bucharest of 2023, as filmed by Jude, “cars foster isolation”: Gunnison notes that, “[w]hen Angela rolls up a window to shield herself from the hostility of other drivers, city sounds dim to a muffle and the car becomes a sealed-off cave”.[ii] Of course, Radu Jude is not sentimentalizing the 1981 representation of the city. He is well aware of what Veronica Lazăr has called “the political-cinematic conventions of the Ceaușescu era: the representation of the city was mandatorily positive, the locations were carefully chosen and the shots carefully framed to keep out undesirable details, the language used by angry drivers in traffic altercations was clearly sanitized”.[iii]Moreover, as Julia Gunnison writes, Bucharest in 1981 “was on the precipice of tremendous change: communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s urban-planning projects were beginning to alter the city, as was his radical austerity policy, designed to pay off Romania’s national debt. [...] Car ownership in the 1980s was heavily regulated, and by the end of the decade, the city had only 100,000 cars [compared to 1.2 million in 2022]. As austerity measures wreaked havoc on the economy, driving was rationed just like electricity, heat, and food.”

Radu Jude’s conversation with Angela Moves On is founded on the belief that, although the 1981 film didn’t document Bucharest in an unproblematic manner, there is a city documentary buried in Bratu’s fiction. Take this view of a peaceful street which later in the 1980s would be razed to the ground to make place for Ceaușescu’s gigantic People’s Palace. (Jude’s Angela drives at one point in the vicinity of the Palace and mentions the displacements it caused – the demolished houses, the relocated residents.) Take this passer-by’s suspicious expression, or that one’s hostile glance at Bratu’s camera – at times, Jude slows down the old film the better to inspect it, to isolate glimpses of unstaged street life in the backgrounds of Bratu’s shots. All of this amounts to an affirmation of cinema’s documentary dimension: film as material trace. 

By the end of Jude’s film, this Bazinian affirmation has been heavily qualified. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World climaxes with the shooting of a workplace safety video that is really a corporate ad: a mutilated worker is paid a few hundred Euro to basically say in front of the camera that the accident was his own fault. And he doesn’t even get to say it: after doing everything to purge the mutilee’s scripted speech and the shot itself of anything that might incriminate the company, the makers of the video decide to just have him hold a series of blank sheets of paper, on which they will later add digitally whatever messages most suit them. Unlike Bratu’s cinematic sanitization of Ceaușescu-era Bucharest, their trickery will be undetectable; the image has become so much more malleable during the last 40 years. 

It had been Angela’s job to find the worker. It had to be someone not only cooperative, but also not too badly disfigured and not too dark-skinned. Angela’s fellow-members of the film crew speak very callously about the candidates they have rejected. Describing the case of one such candidate to the German corporate supervisor, someone concludes cheerfully that “we included him out”. That’s an echo of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn as quoted by Fritz Lang in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. Jude has been a Godardian at least since his 2018 breakthrough I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,[iv] and Do Not Expect Too Much is his Contempt – a Contempt for a late-late-capitalist and post-cinematic world. It was Fritz Lang who represented stubborn individual artistic vision in Godard’s film, whereas Do Not Expect’s suitably declassé figure of the stubborn artist is another German director – Uwe Boll. This gives us the measure of how far film itself has fallen. Still, Jude’s tone is not elegiac. He spends no time actually lamenting the image’s loss of materiality. His cinema is forward-facing, responsive to the social media age, buoyantly engaging with the new possibilities – for mise-en-scène and montage – opened up by Zoom and TikTok. 

Cinema has mutated into something else since the days of Angela Moves On, and so has the city of Bucharest. First came the displacements of the late Ceaușescu era, so radical, so traumatic that, as Julia Gunnison writes, the city remains in some ways “the product of Ceaușescu’s vision”. At the same time, “capitalist architecture – skyscrapers, billboards, private parking – is everywhere, and a jumbled aesthetic emerges from the collision of these two competing systems”. And, as Gunnison notes, “displacement continues” in this “hybrid landscape”. Jude includes a subplot in which his Angela is trying to solve some grotesque family business. A real estate developer has invaded the cemetery in which her grandparents are buried; their remains (which in the case of her grandmother are rather recent) are to be exhumed and reburied somewhere else. The ground may be sacred, but not as sacred as the real estate developer’s right of ownership over it. The monstruousness of the city’s growth is one of Jude’s satirical themes: blocks of flats are being built everywhere, seeming to suffocate everything. This used to be the complaint against the blocks of flats built by the communists: that they’re taking all the space and air, stunting individuality and freedom. Jude’s then-and-now montage suggests that unreined capitalist urban development is no better. 

All in all, his brilliant film makes a case for the capacity of the cinema – a 20^th-century medium, an emblem of yesterday’s modernity – to stay relevant as an art of the present, to keep seizing the contemporary.