'Don't Expect Too Much' Review: Darkly Funny Media Satire

In Radu Jude's latest satire, the bracing “Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” the Romanian writer-director attacks the viewer with many of the indignities of modern life: gridlocked traffic, rampant misogyny, economic inequality, corporate exploitation, far-right trolls on social media. But perhaps the most insidious offense is the ringtone that repeatedly greets our hapless heroine as he drives around Bucharest in her car to work. Surprisingly joyful and maddeningly invasive, Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” plays every time his demanding bosses seek it out. People have been forced to murder for less.

Although no one dies in “Don't Wait,” the film does tell the heartbreaking story of the woman inside that car, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant who wakes up before 6 a.m. to begin another long, hard day. exhausting. She wears a sparkly dress, but that is the only aspect of her demeanor that shines as she carries out her task, which involves interviewing workers who were seriously injured on the job due to their own negligence, filming their warnings so that their superiors can decide. who is most deserving of appearing in a public service announcement about workplace safety. This cruel “contest” may be the despicable act of the multinational company that employs them, offering the “winner” a cash prize, but for Angela it is just a concert. Considering how abysmal her salary is, she believes she is being taken advantage of just as much as these unfortunate applicants.

Jude's films, befitting their bold and sometimes combative titles in English (“I don't care if we go down in history as barbarians,” “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”), are a volatile mix of comedy, drama and narrative mischief. . , his restless experimentation driven by a passion to push audiences to feel (even accept) society's madness and hypocrisy. Much of “Do Not Expect” is filmed in simple black and white, to better capture Angela's everyday monotony, against which she rebels in different ways. Maybe he'll mock a rude driver or, more cathartically, take to social media to play his doppelgänger Bobita, a bald, eyebrowless, goatee-wearing sexist who mocks “sluts” and swears allegiance to the manospheric figurehead Andrew Tate. It is telling that these digressions by Bobita are presented in striking colors, a break from the desolation that surrounds Angela.

This isn't the only way “Do Not Expect” plays with the disconnect between image and reality. When Angela meets with the mutilated workers, they often tailor her testimony to what they think will be most attractive to the corporation, and her actual circumstance is reduced to a pity-inducing performance. And when the company's outside Austrian marketing manager, Doris (the wonderfully icy Nina Hoss of “Tár”), studies the videos, she judges them solely in terms of key demos and flattering PR (“She's a gypsy,” Doris points out about an applicant). , “So she will show that we are more inclusive”).

But Jude has a larger goal in mind, juxtaposing Angela's travails with another Angela also trapped behind the wheel: the one played by Dorina Lazar in the 1981 Romanian film “Angela Moves On.” That communist-era drama concerned a similarly traveling taxi driver in Bucharest, her misery equal to that of Manolache's contemporary Angela, even though Jude's protagonist apparently lives in a freer society than any. It was once governed by Nicolae Ceaușescu. By eerily slowing down the “Angela Moves On” scenes, which are in color, Jude makes Romania's past seem at once more vibrant and more disconcerting, a regretful commentary on all the Angelas who have come since Lazar's, each at the mercy of an informal economy that leaves many struggling for scraps.

A corrosive rage runs through this 163-minute odyssey that is accompanied by a fermenting absurdity, Jude horrified by the comic stupidity of our inauthentic, greed-driven world. Whether it's a hilariously awkward Zoom meeting in which the obsequious Romanian PSA production team tries to curry favor with Doris (“We want to use a gold diffusion filter,” blurts the hapless director while explaining his cinematic vision) or the randomness of Angela's encounter with Z. -Film auteur Uwe Boll at his best, Boll's most testy, “Do Not Expect” is alive with the chaos of a hyperconnected and deeply disappointing 21st century. Sure, Jude wants Angela's “Ode to Joy” ringtone to be ironic, but the more her annoyingly monotonous melody appears in the movie, every time her face is an expression of pure hatred, the funnier it becomes, an acknowledgment of the barrage of stupid stimuli. perpetually bombarding us.

Manolache has appeared in previous Jude films, but never so prominently, and is delightful company. His character's cleansing disgust exudes the thorny defiance that many of us recognize as a principled protest in the face of insurmountable economic, social, and political evils. Angela isn't retiring to Bobita because she agrees with her online character's cretinous worldview: she's attacking the misogyny and ignorance of our times by embedding herself in them, unleashing her wrath by embodying the worst qualities of public discourse.

One could argue that Jude is doing something similar, advocating that we release our vitriol by laughing at the corruption and poisonous self-absorption that Angela witnesses. In recent years, her films have adopted a burn-it-all mentality that is both subversive and liberating. But as “Do Not Expect” comes to its brilliant conclusion, doubling down on the evisceration of consumerism in this satire, Jude also looks back on her first feature, the hilarious 2009 film “The Happiest Girl in the World,” about a young girl who won a contest. and Now he must film a peppy soft drink commercial to collect his prize. That commercial didn't go well, and neither did the one for “Do Not Expect.” Both reflect Jude's disdain for the way people inoculate themselves against hard truths in order to enjoy a false, happier version of life. His cheerful, fastidious cinema offers a striking remedy. The world is ending, Jude argues, and it can't come soon enough.