DAN WEBSTER:
It’s that time of year again when film critics release their annual lists of what they like to call “the best” of the year’s films.
I say “they” because even though I am one of those critics, I never claim that my favorite films of the year rank as “the best.” I just simply say they’re the ones that I liked more than all the others that I had an opportunity to see.
Claiming that your own personal favorites are the “best” is only one of the problems that I have with such lists. The other main one is that, especially for outlets such as the New York Times, The New Yorker and the Washington Post, what gets mentioned are all too often films that I have never heard of, not to mention have little chance of seeing until months have passed and they maybe show up on some streaming service.
And, yes, I know I have been guilty of adding one or three obscure releases to my own annual lists. Though in my defense I do attempt to limit my favorites to films that either have screened in Spokane—largely at either the Magic Lantern or AMC River Park Square—or have been available to everyone for home viewing.
Anyway, that’s how my wife (and Movies 101 partner) Mary Pat Treuthart and I ended up on Saturday night watching a film titled, uniquely enough, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
Written and directed by the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, the film—which we managed to rent through Amazon Prime (it’s also available through MUBI)—was No. 4 on a list of 2024 films the New York Times said represents “good, great and miraculous work (that) often flies under the radar.”
Writing for the Times, critic Manohla Dargis describes Jude’s film as “an exhilarating, vulgarly funny, sometimes exasperating jolt” that is a “wild ride” through “a world where capitalism and the ghosts of communism converge (as) the movie touches on Romania’s past and present, the East and the West, high culture and exceedingly low.”
And that, as you might imagine, barely begins to describe what Jude attempts to accomplish over his film’s near-three-hour length.
Our protagonist is Angela (played by Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant for a film production company who spends virtually the entire movie driving around Romania’s capital city of Bucharest doing one job after the next. Up at 5:50 a.m., she is tasked to interview several candidates for a corporate-sponsored movie on safety protocols. Each of the people she interviews has, in one way or another, been disastrously affected by an on-the-job incident.
One guy lost all the fingers on one hand. A woman fell down a flight of stairs. Another guy was hit by a guard rail that a car had collided with and spent 13 months in a coma. All the incidents occurred in unsafe situations that would be mostly unthinkable in America… with an emphasis on mostly.
In between the interviews, taking direction from the boss she dislikes and continually argues with, plus meeting for a quickie with her sometime lover, Angela spends time uploading videos, using an editing function to disguise herself and pose as a heavily eyebrowed character who offers up obscenely profane comments about Romania and the people and places she encounters.
Of course, “obscenely profane” could describe much of what Jude puts on the screen, and not just the brief but graphic nudity and blue language that comes out of Angela’s mouth. He blends her contemporary storyline, which is rendered mostly in black and white, with scenes from an actual 1981 color film directed by Lucian Bratu, about a woman taxi driver. And the mix of the two serves as a commentary both about how Romania has changed, and yet stayed much the same, in the intervening four-plus decades.
By the time we arrive at the Jude’s final sequence, a cynical portrayal of corporate insensitivity, the rage behind Jude’s message is clear. And while the expression of that rage might not cause me to list his film among my favorites of 2024, it certainly makes it into one that I’m not likely to forget anytime soon—if at all.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.