Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

There's something very natural about Ilinca Manolache in this gritty and occasionally quite funny story of "Angela". She seems to spend much of the film driving her car around the streets of Bucharest garnering interviews from the victims of industrial accidents. Why? Well apparently some Austrians are making a safety film and they want a real person to go on screen advocating the common sense of adhering to the rules! Don't go pole vaulting over a volcano kind of thing. As she becomes increasingly weary, being sent from one end of the city to the other, she encounters some of the more moronic road users and that allows the dialogue to get ripe and lively - much to the chagrin of her mother. Anyway, eventually she alights on one would-be contributor who seems quite happy to do whatever is required for his €500 fee - but it's at this point, and through the subsequent quite scathingly delivered production process that I found the whole thing pretty much ground to an halt - despite the briefest contribution from Uwe Boll. The pithy and characterful "Angela" becomes trapped in a repetitive series of similar scenarios - interspersed by some foul-mouthed and sexually charged rants from her alter-ego video blogger "Bobita" and the odd deferential reference to the recent death of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Meantime - and these scenes are in a nicely photographed-to-look-dated colour, we flit back to the Romania of Ceausescu where "Angela Moves On" - a fictitious film from 1981 depicts the life of a taxi driver who finds her daily grind not dissimilar to the modern day story. Misogamy and sexism thriving unfettered! Unfortunately, after about an hour I was really struggling to stay interested. It all went from being entertainingly plausible to overly and rather unpleasantly contrived and at just shy of 2¾ hours long, it really does lose it's way just once too often. To be fair to the writers, the pace of the dialogue is thick and fast and it does take a few swipes at the modern day opt-in culture, but we spend far too much time in her car - she changes gear a lot - and I'm afraid I really rather gave up. It could easily have lost an hour, tightened up what's quite a fun and politic premiss and been much better. As it is, it's all just a bit disappointing.

Some may find it discouraging to look upon the world with a robustly cynical outlook, yet, given prevailing conditions in the world today, it may sometimes be unavoidable, an attribute reflected in many contexts, including art and cinema. And that’s just what Romanian writer-director Radu Jude has done in his latest feature outing, a biting, darkly satirical comedy-drama that lays bare many of the everyday frustrations that his countrymen experience in areas like politics, corruption and economic opportunities. The film tells this story through the experiences of Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, underpaid, sleep-deprived movie production assistant as she struggles to make it through her daily work routine, an unappreciated effort not unlike that thrust upon many contemporary Romanians. To compensate for the tedium of her career and to let off some considerable pent-up steam, Angela makes short videos of her own featuring a foul-mouthed, sexually provocative male alter-ego, Bobitja, who swears like a sailor and describes explicit erotic encounters that would make a porn star blush. She also wrestles with the many self-serving demands of her arrogant Austrian corporate sponsors and a bloated Romanian bureaucracy that proves ineffectual in resolving property ownership issues related to her family’s cemetery plots. Moreover, the picture draws uncanny parallels in the living and working conditions experienced by the nation’s present-day residents with those who lived under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu in the 1980s, presented here through intercut thematically linked film clips from the 1982 Romanian melodrama “Angela merge mai departe” (“Angela Moves Forward”), the story of a taxi driver whose circumstances mirror those of the beleaguered PA. It all makes for quite an intriguing and engaging mix of story elements, one the holds viewer attention well for about two-thirds of the release, especially in its deliciously bawdy, ribald humor. However, with a 2:43:00 runtime, it becomes somewhat trying as a comedy (and as a movie overall), serving up an excess of almost everything. Unlike comparably long offerings such as “Triangle of Sadness” (2022), which manage to successfully sustain their humor for such a lengthy duration, this effort starts getting repetitive, running out of gas to keep propelling it forward, especially in the somewhat exasperating final half-hour. Like Jude’s previous release, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” (“Barbardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc”) (2021), this outing definitely could have benefitted from some judicious editing, particularly in its endless footage of the protagonist driving through heavy Bucharest traffic. To the filmmaker’s credit, “End of the World” deserves kudos for its irreverence and its ambitious inventiveness and willingness to try the untried, but this is yet another example of a project where the creator fails to kill his darlings, an undertaking that could have been accomplished successfully in lobbing off about 20 minutes of extraneous material, especially in the closing moments. This one is worth a look if you’re willing to be patient with it, as that’s essential to make your way through all the way to the end. But, if you don’t go in with that attitude, you might be expecting too much from the end of the film.

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