The Only Movie That Feels Like Contemporary Life

The movies might never have split in two if Antoine Lumière had been more interested in a quick buck. Among the audience at the sparsely attended 1895 demonstration of his sons Louis and Auguste’s new invention, the cinématographe, was the celebrated magician George Méliès, who, after years of using still projections in his stage act, immediately saw the potential in a device that could make those images move. Méliès offered Lumière a small fortune for one of the gadgets, which combined camera, developer, and projector in one 10-pound box. The cinématographe, he informed Méliès, was not for sale. And besides, he added, it had “no commercial future.”

Instead of giving up, Méliès devised his own version of the cinématographe, and his own means of using it. Where the camera was, for the Lumières, a scientific instrument that could capture reality, Méliès saw it as a means of surpassing it, generating fantastic visions that transported audiences to other worlds rather than merely reflecting the one they inhabited back at them. Who wants to watch workers leaving the factory when you could take a trip to the moon?

Movies have never mended this primal rupture between realists and illusionists, nor was there any pressing need to. But nearly 130 years after that initial split, the balance between them has grown precariously out of whack. The tools developed to extend reality now often serve to replace it, to massage the color of an overcast sky so seamlessly that not even a trained eye can spot the seams. Even the most quotidian of tales has a trace of trickery, but when a movie like The Holdovers uses exclusive digital tools to emulate the look and even the imperfections of 1970s-era film stock, authenticity has been reduced to a vibe. Like those A.I.-generated shots of nonexistent people, it might look right, but it feels somehow, ineffably, wrong. It’s gotten to the point where, even in a movie as lousy as Madame Web, I’m grateful for the shots that take place on the real streets of New York and not some green-screened facsimile. (A viral tweet juxtaposes an elegantly lit, deep-focus shot of Madame Web’s Dakota Johnson walking through Chinatown with a flat, obviously faked shot of a Queens street corner in Spider-Man: No Way Home.) Even a glimpse of the real world feels like an event.

There’s hardly a shot in in the two and a half hours of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World in which the real world does not intrude one way or another. The movie’s heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), is a perpetually hustling production assistant who’s always doing at least three jobs at once, speeding around Bucharest while juggling phone calls and blaring Romanian rap so she doesn’t fall asleep. She rises early, shoots a quick video for her socials, then sits in traffic until she reaches the house of a man she’s supposed to interview for a workplace safety video—only to find that he and his bandaged arm have gone fishing and she’s come all this way to connect with him over Zoom.

Angela spends a good chunk of the movie in her car, the way the protagonist of Jude’s previous movie, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, endlessly wandered the streets of the city in the middle of the pandemic. Both movies use their characters as a pretext to wander through the world, which keeps intruding on attempts to place them at its center. That tendency is enhanced in Do Not Expect Too Much by intercutting Angela’s story with footage from the 1981 movie Angela Moves On, in what a handwritten title card near the beginning announces as “conversation” between the two films. The 1981 Angela, played by Dorina Lazar, also spends most of her time behind the wheel, working as a taxi driver, but the grind under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communism looks markedly different than the one in the EU era. Old Angela’s life is one of drudgery and repetition, which Jude sometimes emphasizes by slowing her excerpts down to a crawl. Present-day Angela never gets a moment to breathe. Even sex is just an item in the middle of her to-do list, a roadside tryst that nearly derails her afternoon when her lover stains her dress.

Jude shoots the present day in black and white, leached of the beckoning colors of capitalism—an ad reading “Come to the USA” renders the red, white, and blue in dull shades of gray—but it pops into color when Angela shoots a new video for her social channels. Online, thanks to a filter that gives her a bald head and massive, bristling eyebrows, she is Bobita, an alpha-male misogynist who claims to be best pals with red-pill influencer Andrew Tate. (The story is presumably set before Dec. 2022, when Romanian authorities arrested Tate for alleged rape and sex trafficking.) Bobita—Romanian for Bobby, as in Ewing, as in the old prime-time soap opera Dallas—has a mouth like the underside of an 18-wheeler, crudely bragging about the women he’s fucked and how he fucked them, while taking the occasional shot at the British monarchy. Angela’s bedside table holds a well-thumbed volume of Proust, and she pauses one drive to buy a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from a roving bookseller, but given the chance to put on another persona, she bursts forth in a torrent of X-rated liberation. Bobita even has a few choice words to say about Angela’s latest purchase—suffice it to say that when he’s done with Miss Jean, she’s no longer a maiden.

In Bad Luck Banging, a prestigious history teacher’s life is turned upside down when a sex tape she made with her husband surfaces on the internet, a humiliation that’s mixed with exasperation when her professional fate is subjected to the whims of an endless school board meeting. Although he’s obviously an intellectual—Do Not Expect Too Much credits citations from the works of Baudelaire, Žižek, DeLillo, and Errol Morris—Jude is intent on reminding us that even the noblest mind is housed in a decaying shell whose urges and impulses make a mockery of our aspirations. The pandemic made bodies seem not just fragile but embarrassing, an inconvenient reminder that we exist in the physical realm as well as the digital. The more technologies allow us to transcend space and time, the more of an affront it seems that we have to lug our carcasses from one access point to the next.

Modern life is a constant pas de deux between anxiety and boredom, the threat of economic annihilation and the drudgery necessary to stave it off. COVID lockdowns intensified both the anxiety and the boredom, and although the mortal panic has subsided for most, it’s not a lesson one can unlearn. Angela walks through a graveyard—the one where her grandmother was to be buried, until a real-estate developer claimed some of the burial plots encroached on their apartment complex—and the camera lingers on a tombstone that reads, “I was like you, you will be like me.”

The injured workers whose testimonies Angela collects implicitly accept that they’re just meat to be ground up in capitalism’s gears. No matter how grievous their wounds or how hazardous their workplace, they only blame themselves. They also understand that expressing enmity toward the company that’s paying Angela to scout prospects for their safety video might diminish their chances of getting cast in the final version—and thus of getting paid. The best they can do is squeeze out one final paycheck before getting tossed on the scrap heap.

After Angela has collected her testimonies, she heads to a production meeting with the company’s German executives. The newly hired director, who got his chance after the former one suddenly died, proudly lists his bona fides: hundreds of commercials for beer and oil companies and McDonald’s, plus one feature film, an adaptation of the celebrated Romanian novelist Mircea Eliade. He’s got grand ideas of filming the workers in a single, unbroken shot that highlights the truth of their experience, which makes it all the more painful when he abandons his ideals at the slightest prodding from the higher-ups. He wants the look of unvarnished reality but offers to add a filter to the lens to give his injured factory workers “a warm, golden glow.” The one-take approach is his preference, but he’s helpfully shooting in high resolution so the bosses can zoom in for a close-up any time they want.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’s last scene follows through where the commercial director falters, taking the form of a single, unmoving shot that lasts over half an hour. A worker paralyzed by a loose traffic barrier has been stationed outside the factory to give his account of the accident, climaxing with an admonition to always wear your safety helmet (the upshot being, of course, that the company can blame future accidents on workers failing to follow instructions). The worker, played by Ovidiu Pîrsan, tells his story over and over, adjusting it as voices behind the camera call out demands to leave out one part or stress another, an erosion of truth so gradual you could miss the point at which it’s gone for good. As the guilty barrier is moved out of shot—too rusted and unsightly—a slow rain starts and stops, evidence that not everything can be altered on orders from the head office. The shot’s style is Lumière but the content is Méliès, a fantasy, only this time without the hope of escape. These workers are never leaving the factory.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time—since Bad Luck Banging, in fact—that feels the way contemporary life feels, not just its superficial texture but its essence. It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.