Viennale 2023: Q&A Radu Jude (NU ASTEPTA PREA MULTDE LA SFÂRS, ITUL LUMII)

Radu Jude doing a Q&A after the screening of NU ASTEPTA PREA MULT
DE LA SFÂRS, ITUL LUMII at Gartenbaukino.
NU ASTEPTA PREA MULT DE LA SFÂRȘITUL LUMII
(DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD)
Radu Jude | France, Croatia, Luxembourg, Romania 2023
In his latest film, Radu Jude has chosen extraordinary actress Ilinca Manolache to play a character on a mission: to find and cast one of the various employees of an Austrian company based in Romania who have suffered accidents due to the company’s negligence; the lucky worker will play the central role in an institutional “film”. Most of the story consists of Angela’s various trips to meet with these victims, driving through the city while arguing from time to time with her superior on the phone and on breaks filming herself with a filter that turns her face into that of an uninhibited, chauvinistic man ranting at the world. Jude adds another symbolic counterpoint to this dialectical game by editing in fifteen sequences from the 1981 film ANGELA MERGE MAI DEPARTE by Lucian Bratu, whose protagonist is a woman taxi driver. The result is a film that functions as a merciless criticism of how 21st century capitalism even alienates those who have given their approval to be exploited, a contemporary portrait of Bucharest in which its dispersed microphysical violence is felt without being spoken out loud and an oblique essay on the relationship between memory and the perception of reality and images. (Roger Koza)

[@war-painter]

Radu Jude is a creative artistic genius, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE his latest film Do Not Expect to Much From the End of the World. Iilinca Manolache is dreadfully, mordantly funny. Now I gotta go back and watch all his other films.
Inspirational! Romania is happening creatively.

[@mjleger]

There was no discussion here of the reference to Forbidden Planet on the clapperboard, which brings up the similarities in the title to Wim Wenders' Until the end of the world, with both films having a "mad scientist" whose work conflates machine intelligence with the id-subconscious and its destructive powers, represented here in more than one way: the old Soviet-era film, the new avatar social media "content," with all of its crudeness, and the German company, which distorts social truths as a matter of course. Unlike Forbidden Planet, this external force has no potential to save the day. Club Soda in Montreal is mostly used as a music venue and the character of Angela embodies the contradictory class location of the executant (media) petty bourgeoisie. A lesson in risk management for the destructive class.