A satirical film full of sarcastic criticism of the modern working environment. Just like in the sex comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn in 2021, it is so successful in making its point that we can see the same effect in this film. Although this film is funnier than Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, it is also more desperate. In Radu Jude’s story “Cinema and Economy in two parts”, Angela, an assistant at a film production company in Bucharest, is a frustrated but hard-working member of the labour economy, grinding away in a 16-hour shift, just like most of us. Exploited, Angela is both inside and outside the film she is working on. Her sequinned mini dress emphasises her incongruity and indifference. She is so aware of the absolute dysfunctionality of working life….
Bobita crystallises the excesses of social media. Made in 1981 under Ceausescu, Angela Moves On is an example of what Jacques Ellul calls “sociological propaganda”. Shot in colour and using upbeat music, the film focuses on a personal problem to cover up a much larger social problem. Bobita’s nonsense, by contrast, parodies imagined domination and shows us social weakness. Thus, we move back and forth from the lies of the 1980s to the lies of the 2020s. Jude deliberately slows down the state-approved film from the 80s to emphasise food queues and misery. And he shows what’s blatantly not shown in the film. He shows us the good old days of the Uranus neighbourhood, which Ceausescu destroyed to build his huge palace. And then he greets us with an anarcho-egoist Bobita as a direct satire of a dictator. Everything is so beautifully woven… This film, which makes references to the history of cinema from the first Lumiere film to the death of Jean-Luc Godard, turns into a celluloid möbius strip in a scene where the Two Angela meet.
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World is a film of ideas. It is an essay on the production of the image. The director, Radu Jude, was 12 years old when the Romanians overthrew the Ceausescu and thus spent his childhood under the communist dictatorship and his adolescence after the overthrow of an extremely incompetent and destructive regime. A product of corrupt socialism and ruthless neo-liberalism, manipulating the social order with promises of carrots and wrenches, and a time when neo-liberalism put competitiveness above all else.
The part where Angela finally manages to meet the “most suitable” worker and leads him towards changes that put the blame on everyone except the company is a blatant criticism of modern capitalism. It is an exquisite production in which corporate hypocrisy is revealed in all its nakedness. Because in today’s working life, individuality is at the forefront and the person is responsible for everything they do. For example, an unemployed person’s inability to find a job is his own fault. In lands where chronic unemployment and nepotism prevail, those who create this situation get away with it by blaming you. In today’s guided post-industrial society, it is not work that creates surplus value, but exploitation itself.