“Don’t expect too much from the end of the world”, cinema of extremes

A multinational commissioned an advertisement on workplace safety from a production assistant. Angela, a cash woman, a little hysterical, travels around Bucharest in search of meaning, and therefore of a suitable casting. Most of the encounters she meets are improbable. Entrepreneurs and harassers, rich or poor, disabled and sex obsessed, it circulates furiously during his journey. A digital avatar, another Angela from a forgotten film, and even the Mad Hatter’s clock will venture there.

It almost seems like a reality TV popess in search of an ideal casting for “Secret Story”. In any case, it is this extreme commodification of ideas, people, objects and beings, which here passes the sieve of revolutionary criticism because it is infinite. “Don’t expect too much from the end of the world” thus seems to constantly reinvent itself while functioning like a loop that closes on itself. Radu Jude works identically. After a large handful of unclassifiable films including a scandalous Golden Bear, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn», Here he comes back with a vitriolic footage where even the form renews the discourse.

You have to dare to end a film of more than three hours with a fixed sequence shot of almost forty-five minutes. You have to have the audacity to entrust the whole thing to an actress who overdoes it to the point of exasperating everyone (who can still stand her chewing gum, which she chews from start to finish?). It takes pride to sign a film outside of all standards, at the risk of suffocation. Without adhering to the project more than reason, it is this audacity that we like in the Romanian filmmaker. This madness which never seems channeled but leads us without respite or brake into a narrative trance without guardrails. And that’s also why we recommend it.

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