Wszystkożerność reżysera jest koniecznym estetycznym kluczem do tego, by przedstawić portretowaną przez niego rzeczywistość: Rumunię zawieszoną między dziedzictwem komunizmu a współczesnym zuberyzowanym kapitalizmem, między dawnym komunistycznym Wschodem a peryferiami Zachodu.
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The film Don't Promise Yourself Too Much After the End of the World confirms what we've known since at least the Golden Bear-winning Berlin An Unfortunate Number or Crazy Porn (2021): that its director and screenwriter Radu Jude is the most original in his approach to the cinematic form, the most entertaining and one of the most insightful filmmakers in contemporary Romanian cinema.
The 2021 film was divided into three distinctly stylistically separate parts: the first, maintained in the poetics typical of the Romanian new wave, depicted the problems of a teacher whose world collapses after a tape showing a recording of her close-up with her husband hits the web; in the second we got a film essay presenting an argument on the history of the approach to pornography in Romanian culture; in the third we watched a confrontation between the heroine and her outraged parents, shown in the convention of grotesque comedy.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/ue/rumunia-czy-dolina-jiu-udowodni-ze-mozliwa-jest-sprawiedliwa-transformacja-gospodarcza/
Don't Promise Yourself... has a similarly structurally well thought-out structure. The first part depicts a day in the life of Angela - a production assistant from Bucharest. Her story is edited with excerpts from Lucian Bratu's 1981 Romanian film Angela Goes On, which serves as a commentary and counterpoint to contemporary history. The other is a scene shot in a single, still shot from the set of the production on which Angela is working. Within this limited framework, the director has managed to include an extraordinary wealth of observations, themes and topics, all served with great cinematic nerve and humor.
An omnivorous cinema
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Angela gets up at the crack of dawn and finishes work late at night. She spends most of the day in her car, cruising the streets of the Romanian capital. She is constantly overtired, sleepy, and functions thanks to a succession of energy drinks. At the company, she is the go-to person for everything. She records on her phone people trying on roles in a publicity film being produced for a German client - a furniture company with a factory in Romania - designed to warn against work accidents and sensitize workers to the need to follow health and safety regulations. He picks up the lens from another set. He takes part in a zoom with a German marketing director, whom he later drives from the airport to her hotel in the middle of the night. In the meantime, she still finds time for a quick sexual close-up in the car with a man with whom she has some kind of relationship.
In the credits, among the authors of the literary passages used in the dialogues is Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher who creates his theory by absorbing - like a raccoon in a dumpster - everything around him: Lacan and Hitchcock, German idealism and pop culture, Hegel and contemporary politics, Marx and old jokes from the days of communist Yugoslavia. A similar omnivorousness is observed in the film Jude. The new-wave form is adjacent to a cameo by Uwe Boll, a filmmaker considered one of the worst active directors today. Boll tells the story of how he challenged the critics of his films to a boxing match and did much better in the ring than on the set or behind the editing table. References to literary classics are mixed with obscene humor. Angela gets into a discussion with a German client about Goethe - the German woman is, she claims, a descendant of the writer - while simultaneously recording vulgar videos on Instagram, in which, with the appropriate filter applied to her face, she impersonates Bobik - a maverick misogynist, bragging about her acquaintance with Andrew Tate, her sexual exploits, her wealth and her adoration of Putin. Aggressive satire mixes with serious social diagnosis, corporate newspeak with conspiracy theories from remote corners of the Internet, and contemporary Bucharest with that of the 1980s, recalled in archival excerpts.
Between the old and the new
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The longer the film goes on, the more we are reassured as viewers that this omnivorousness of the director is a necessary aesthetic key to the reality he portrays: a Romania suspended between the legacy of communism and contemporary depleted capitalism, between the former communist East and the periphery of the West.
Bucharest, the country's capital, appears in the film as an overwhelming and monstrous creation, a city brooding and feral, colonized by aggressive advertising, wild real estate development, cars moving around without any rules, failed modernization projects from the communist era, such as the gigantic, monumental People's Palace, the third largest administrative building in the world. To make room for it, Ceaușescu demolished the entire district; we still see it on screen in excerpts from the 1981 film.
Capitalist Romania can handle urban space in equally brutal ways - in one of the film's most gruesomely funny scenes, Angela, in between tasks at work, visits a developer building a development of luxury apartment buildings. Unfortunately, due to the general mess, the cemetery where the woman's grandmother is buried has started putting up new graves on a plot of land owned by the developer, right under the windows of the prestigious new development. The developer calmly explains that, after all, premium customers can't watch funerals and elderly women burning candles from their spacious terraces, and besides, it's his land and the graves will be moved from it. However, everything will take place in accordance with canon law, because his company works with the relevant clergy, not just the Orthodox.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/wampiry-z-pokolenia-z-w-poszukiwaniu-zgody/
Jude regularly juxtaposes images of similar absurdities of Romanian capitalism with the Romania of the Ceaușescu era, which is introduced by excerpts from a film made 40 years ago. His protagonist is also Angela, also spending most of her time in a car - she works as a cab driver. That Bucharest is undoubtedly calmer, less frenetic, the city doesn't look like it's constantly running on energizers or some fatter afterburners. And at the same time, that reality there is extremely gruff - on the streets you see almost exclusively dates of the same model and a few Trabants - suffocating and oppressive. "Communist" Angela, like the modern one, earns dismally, in a "manly" profession she faces either daily misogyny or solicitation of customers.
Watching Jude's film, one gets the impression that just as Romania got one of the worst variants of real socialism, now it certainly didn't get the best variant of capitalism. A Day in the Life of Angela helps show how precarious and wild Romanian capitalism is, that it remains in a deeply peripheral position within the European Union. The Romanian film industry subcontracts for Western clients, Romanian industry for German companies, which are allowed by a corrupt political class to do things in Romania that would be difficult to do in Western Europe.
(Un)truth of image
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Angela from the early 1980s film appears in Jude as a contemporary character, the mother of one of the potential protagonists in the film produced by the company of the "contemporary" Angela. Her son was injured in a furniture factory accident at work, remained in a coma for months, and is now paralyzed from the waist down.
The company wants to use his accident to make a film to raise awareness among workers to wear a helmet at work. The man believes that the culprit for the accident is not the fact that he didn't wear a helmet, but the organization of the work - overtime, lack of lighting in the plaza in front of the factory, rusty infrastructure that hasn't been changed since the fall of communism.
The second part of the film shows, in one still shot, the filming of a social advertisement featuring the accident victim and his family. From outside the frame we hear the director's instructions, the producers' comments, Angela's voice. This static scene, where seemingly nothing happens, perfectly captures how symbolic, structural and economic violence works.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/lustereczko-powiedz-przecie-o-substancji/
A man agrees to appear in front of the camera because he hopes to tell his story. However, with each dub he gets new instructions, taking away his voice and cropping the narrative to a version favorable to the German company. He feels distinctly bad about this, he would most gladly drive his cart off the set, but he needs the money, and for his participation in the film he will get a fee that is large for him.
The one-shot technique is generally associated with the truth of the film image, directly reflecting reality. Here this technique is used to show how the film image fabricates untruth. In a sense, at the other extreme are the Instagram videos, recorded by Angela. The digitally manipulated image, which allows the face to be hidden behind a filter mask, and the language that replicates the discourse of misogynist-populist-right-wing-conspiracy backlash allow us to touch on an important truth about reality, not only that of Romania.
All Our Ends
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As the closing credits pass, one wonders what end of the world the film's title is actually talking about. These endings suggested by Jude are several. When Angela wakes up, her phone shows a telling date: 11.09 a.m. And so the anniversary of the two endings of the world, in whose shadow we still more or less live: the Pinochet coup that aborted the socialist experiment in Chile, ushering in a military dictatorship for years, and the New York attacks, ending the Fukuyama dream of the end of history and beginning the 21st century.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/gdynia-2024-dziewczyna-z-igla-zgarnela-wszystko-bo-jest-filmem-z-innego-kosmosu/
The context of the war in Ukraine, with which the world in which we might have believed that at least in Europe - even on its eastern, near-Russian periphery - full-scale war and forcible change of borders was not possible, comes back again and again in the conversations. In a sense, the reality of modern Romania, integrated in a peripheral role with Europe, with its precariously crafted, rather savage capitalism, is the end of Romanian history, the end of the road from communism, the goal, once reached, there is no more space beyond the horizon to inspire desires and dreams.
The most remarkable thing about all these apocalypses, the film suggests to us, is how ultimately unspectacular they are, how easily their effects become part of the everyday fabric of reality. We are living in a small apocalypse, the film suggests, the director extracting from this state a maximum of sadness, often lined with genuine sadness of absurdity - but at the same time, as the title itself suggests, don't expect too much from it. Unlike in the New Testament, the apocalypse here does not reveal any eternal laws, does not tear the veils and seals, in fact, not so much changes.
