Driving Through Bucharest: A Journey Through Alienated Labor
Driving endlessly through hazy, sun-deprived Bucharest to scout potential interview subjects for a corporate video, an overworked and underpaid production assistant named Angela battles traffic, construction, and the weight of her own eyelids. The irony that she’s risking life and limb to help produce a PSA for job-site safety is not lost on our heroine, and neither is the fact that her overlords are only truly interested in exercising caution when it comes to covering their asses (they’re offering victims not-so-subtle hush money in exchange for participation in the videos). Angela’s white-hot loathing of her time-sucking, gas-guzzling gig is palpable, but it’s also sublimated beneath steady, pounding waves of boredom. Blond-tressed and statuesque in a sparkly, sequined T-shirt, she’s an unlikely and indelible embodiment of alienated labor.
To blow off steam (or maybe just to stay awake), Angela punctuates her errands by recording outrageously profane videos in character as “Bobita,” a racist, sexist, xenophobic alter ego addressing “a nation of sluts and pimps.” “You won’t catch me dead here,” crows Bobita, who’s been modeled, visually and rhetorically, after Andrew Tate, the notorious kickboxer turned social media star recently under house arrest in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape. Angela’s scenes are shot in black and white on grainy 16 mm celluloid, but when she transforms into Bobita, the format switches to cellphone video, with Tate’s visage digitally superimposed over her own. The result is a wonderfully layered sight gag that renders Bobita as a blurry, androgynous refugee from the uncanny valley, at once hyper-macho and strangely coquettish. Tate, who got rich off his grift as the king of toxic masculinity, would not be amused.
The Apocalyptic Vibes of “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”
He might be the only one: Bobita is the comic creation of the year, a spleen-venting Greek chorus in a modern odyssey through a crumbling European metropolis. As its title suggests, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World has distinctly apocalyptic vibes; where some movies evoke dystopia by way of special effects, writer-director Radu Jude simply keeps his lens trained on everyday life, refracted through multimedia prisms that distort it like a fun-house mirror. In this degraded present tense, everybody—even a posturing shock artist like Bobita—can be infamous for 15 seconds. To paraphrase the author of “The Hollow Men,” this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a TikTok.
When Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World premiered last fall at various international film festivals—including Locarno, Toronto, and New York—it made an explosive impact. Imagine a dirty bomb blowing a hole in all that surrounding art-house austerity. Such shrapnel-like sharpness is Jude’s stock-in-trade: In a pop-cultural moment that’s increasingly come to be defined by political provocation, the Bucharest-born director’s staunchly incorrect sensibility places him in the vanguard of contemporary edgelord auteurs. After cutting his teeth as an assistant director on his countryman Cristi Puiu’s harrowing, pitch-black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)—a film widely credited with kick-starting the influential movement known as the New Romanian Cinema—Jude made his feature-director debut with The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), a gentle but pointed comedy whose preteen protagonist is tapped to star in a car commercial, only to receive a harsh lesson in the realities of the hard sell. The theme of behind-the-scenes satire continued in 2018’s superb I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, in which a young female theater director attempts to dramatize a dark chapter in Romanian history only to suffer threats of government censorship. Her struggles with the project—and the attendant questions about the ethical representation of violence and genocide—provide the spine for a movie that both celebrates and subverts the impulse to re-create the past.
In 2021, Jude scored international headlines—and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival—for his kamikaze comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a delirious, satirical tour de force in which a female history teacher becomes a local pariah after a homemade sex tape gets uploaded to an X-rated website. Carefully divided into three parts that increasingly veer away from straightforward narrative—including extended, stylized digressions into Godardian essay-film territory and documentary interludes depicting work and play in the shadow of a pandemic—Bad Luck is swift, confrontational, and self-consciously obnoxious; a shot of a priest wearing a face