Lost in Romania

 The long and the short of it from Radu Jude:

DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (B+) - This sprawling, raunchy, rollicking black comedy, ostensibly about hyper-commercialization, captures the zeitgeist of our crude, unraveling modern culture. Writer-director Radu Jude ("Aferim") takes our ad-addled Tik-Tok gurglings and shoves them back down our throats.

 

Ilinca Manolache stars as Angela, a harried, overworked production assistant supporting a multinational company's making of a self-serving workplace-safety film. She spends most of her time driving, often alone, captured in a claustrophobic side shot from the passenger seat of her car. She is addicted to bubble gum -- popping bubbles like a schoolgirl -- and recording herself spewing raunchy misogynist rants, employing a cheap video filter that transforms her into "Bobito," a bald bro with a monobrow and patchy facial hair.

Angela is perpetually jaded and a model of practicality as she pinballs around Budapest and beyond to attend the shoots of victims of workplace accidents who are manipulated into portraying their stories in just the right way to satisfy the expectations of the filmmakers (and shift blame from the employers). The film climaxes -- if a half hour hunk toward the end of a 2-hour 43-minute movie can be called that -- with a degrading scene of an industrial worker, surrounded by his family, forced to repeat and tweak his horrific tale over and over outside the scene of his accident, even as rain spatters them and the sun eventually starts to set. 

This might be Jude's self-loathing spilling out; he seems to be revealing the slimy truths of the filmmaking process in general and the unreliability of all narrators and witnesses. Angela's brute of an alter-ego represents the two ways of coping with the blurry crudeness of the modern, tech-tonic world. At times she'll wander just a few feet away from a shoot and we'll hear her wildly inappropriate MAGA-tinged rants while ordinary folks are trying to conduct business. Like many fame-seekers and online influencers she ironically has no app filter for her id.

Jude is a provocateur, an Eastern European Godard, smacking us across the face with a hand mirror. He splices in manipulated clips from an actual older film (Lucian Bratu’s 1981 drama "Angela merge mai departe"), about a cabdriver, also named Angela, who brings to mind Angie Dickinson's "Police Woman" -- all for no readily discernible reason. 

Break this into two pieces in order to ingest the nearly three hours of egested fulminations. Manolache can be riveting, with her streetwise manic energy. Stay for Nina Hoss ("Transit," "Barbara") as the floating head in Zoom videos, the Big Sister from abroad directing the peons carrying out the project. This is a fine rebound for Jude, whose more recent effort, "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn," aired similar grievances about our online doom but in a much less acerbic and assured manner than he pulls off here.

BONUS TRACK

THE POTEMKINISTS (2022) (B-minus) - Jude knocked out this 18-minute short during COVID, a glib riff on Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," reduced here to a conversation about erecting a statue to memorialize Romania's role in the battle of Russian mariners. As the New Yorker critic Richard Brody summarizes, "a voluble sculptor (Alexandru Dabija) reveals to a cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Draghici) the historical truth behind the fictional elements of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic ... namely, that the real-life battleship’s rebellious sailors didn’t return to tsarist Russia but, rather, demanded and received asylum in Romania."  

Brody sees a "sharp and sardonic discussion" that "touches on Romania’s sufferings under Soviet rule, Russia’s latter-day aggression, and the contentious politics of official commemoration." I saw a lot of clips from "Battleship Potemkin" distracting me from the meandering dialogue. Snippets of the conversation were engaging, especially the glib parts, but I wouldn't say this is must-see cinema.

BONUS TRACK

In his short, Jude takes a jab at our present-day horrors by quoting a poem from 100 years ago, "Century," the third in a troika of poems by Osip Mandelstam, from 1922:

You brute of a century, who could look
into the centers of your eyes
and with their blood glue back
two centuries to a severed spine?