For a film in which not a lot happens on the surface, there sure is plenty going on in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. While the main storyline goes around in circles on the streets of Bucharest, other stories intrude like shards of glass reflecting glimpses of competing realities. Something has been shattered, and then the pieces have been reassembled into a mosaic that calls itself a film. In some ways, this is what cinema was made for, far afield from the Hollywood Save-the-Cat formula which sometimes generates well-told stories but just as often results in tired exercises in audience pandering. Do Not Expect, written and directed by Radu Jude, does not go there, and instead plays like an alternate conception of filmmaking that prizes immersion over story and the slow unveiling of truths over the quick reveal.
Shot in luminous black and white, the film’s main storyline sticks tightly to the point of view of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant who is having a very long day. It’s actually a bit of a stretch to call it a storyline since so much of what we witness of Angela’s day seems to have no bearing on events which take place before or after. This is a clue that we’re not operating according to the standard beats of a rising-action plot pyramid. We witness Angela in a glittery dress, grooving to the radio in her little car as she jockeys through traffic in modern-day Bucharest, honking at bad drivers, flipping the bird and incessantly chewing gum and blowing bubbles. Jump cuts move us along in her commute, which teases tension ‒ is she about to get into an altercation? ‒ but then she’s still driving, in a different part of town, and honking and cursing at someone else. Look at this woman, the film commands. Really look at her. Manolache possesses the charisma and poise to keep it interesting. It’s a rare thing for an actor to be more magnetic in repose than while emoting, but that’s the trick she pulls off here. She’s un-look-away-able.
The purpose of Angela’s driving is to pay visits to the homes of candidates for an infomercial being produced on behalf of an international company to highlight workplace safety. Each of her candidates has been injured in a work-related accident, and Angela’s job is to film their testimony on her phone while gathering impressions of whether they’d be suitable spokespeople for the company. Their tales of woe hint at bleak factory conditions if not corporate malfeasance, but Angela keeps the conversations grounded and personable, sharing off-color jokes and then cackling at her own punchlines. A picture of her personality emerges ‒ free-spirited, boisterous and coarse ‒ which contrasts with her quiet self-possession behind the wheel. And so much of her driving, despite her exhaustion, feels like freedom.
The day-in-the-life flavor of this story strand is punctured by seemingly random intrusions of unrelated footage. Inserted like commercial breaks into Angela’s adventures are quick clips of grotesque TikTok videos in saturated color. She appears with a face filter which renders her into a cartoon of a bald man with a mono-brow and goatee, and in this persona, she rants like a party bro about all the fine bitches she’s been nailing at the club. Pure fiction, one imagines, for the likes and clicks. It becomes evident that this is Angela’s way of occupying her mind and expressing herself amid the drudgery of her day. At one point she claims that it’s critique by way of satire, but it’s also clear that she just enjoys being a clown, and isn’t remotely shy about showing it.
Even stranger are the intrusive clips of archival footage showing snippets from the story of a different woman (Dorina Lazar) driving around Bucharest in another time. This turns out to be footage from the 1981 Romanian film Angela Merge Mai Departe, directed by Lucian Bratu. It’s the story of another woman named Angela who found romance and disillusion while working as a taxi driver in the city. These clips drop into the flow of Do Not Expect at seemingly random moments, although we begin to notice parallels: a scene of contemporary Angela scarfing a sandwich is interrupted by a similar scene of ’80s Angela; when one has a conversation with her mother while driving, the other does too. An expectation arises that some sort of synergy is taking place and that the storylines will intersect or rhyme at some pivotal moment. Consider it spoiler avoidance that this review will refrain from revealing whether or not that happens. (Either option is radical.)
Putting the viewer to the test, the film’s final act compresses a huge amount of narrative payoff into a single static shot which lasts roughly 40 minutes, right up until the hand-lettered credits appear. The scene involves the shooting of the informercial with the selected candidate (Ovidiu Pîrsan) and his family outside the factory where his injury was sustained. Dialogue from off-camera both encourages and berates them, and we briefly glimpse Angela goofing around in the background filming more of her TikTok nonsense, but she barely registers as the story veers in an entirely different direction. That’s where the film missteps, leaving its most charismatic character to fade away without completing anything like an arc. But maybe that’s the point. Near the end, someone calls the actor by her real name, Ilinca, instead of “Angela,” as if a spell has broken. There’s a sense that this is less a single story than a deconstructed collage, revealing while obscuring essential aspects of Romanian culture and history.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood features a long sequence of Brad Pitt driving through late-’60s L.A. with the windows down and the radio playing. There’s a hypnotic beauty to watching this movie star cruising past bygone drive-thrus and cinemas and diners with neon signs glowing in the twilight, while doing nothing more than grooving to the period-appropriate tunes. One imagines Tarantino painfully cutting the footage down to the few minutes that appear in the film. In Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude indulges a similar vibe in Angela’s constant commutes through the urban tangle of modern-day Bucharest, but the difference is that he indulges that vibe to the fullest. Roughly half the runtime of this nearly three-hour movie is devoted to front-seat views of our heroine traversing the city and being authentically herself. When she finally pulls over to catch a quick nap, she reclines her seat out of frame, but the sun continues to blaze on her glittery dress. Shimmering light quivers in the car’s interior as if a disco ball is turning somewhere. Don’t expect too much to happen, the film seems to say, because this is where the real story is.
Photo courtesy of MUBI
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