Radu Jude is able to tell you about his Godardian “collage” cinema with disconcerting simplicity. And the Golden Bear that the Romanian filmmaker, aged 46, won at the Berlinale in 2021, for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – the story of a teacher whose life is turned upside down after the disclosure of a sexual video on social networks – has changed nothing. The director seems freer than ever, at least that is the impression that emerges from his latest feature film, the abundant Don’t expect too much from the end of the world, Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Festival.
We met him there, in August, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, in Switzerland, alongside Romanian actress and incendiary blonde Ilinca Manolache, who carries the film with the rage of her character. Here is young Angela, an overworked production assistant, who interviews employees who have suffered a work accident, with a view to creating a film on prevention. Ironically, Angela takes reckless risks behind the wheel of her car to ensure her appointments, in a mise en abyme of performance and disaster…
In the editing, Radu Jude interweaves this dizzying epic with extracts from a Romanian film dating from 1981, which features another Angela, a taxi driver: Angela merges but leaves (Angela continues her journey), by Lucian Bratu. The heroine in a pleated skirt travels the same roads of Bucharest as contemporary Angela, in a disturbing treasure hunt about the eras and the condition of women. The most Rabelaisian of Romanian directors has always liked to connect his fiction to the traumatic past of his country (the Ceaucescu dictatorship, the seamless transition to the unbridled market economy, etc.).
“Evil creature”
It is the resurgence of a memory which is at the origin of the film, explains Radu Jude: “A few years ago I had facial paralysis. Nothing serious, but it made me think of my early days, when I was doing lots of jobs on set. I started as a third assistant, I shot telenovelas, commercials, teleshopping… I remember a boy who was a production assistant, like Angela: he drove constantly, fell asleep at the wheel and he died at 22. I knew him very little, but it was shocking. »
In the passenger compartment of the vehicle, Angela is filmed in profile, shifting gears frantically, glancing at the camera. On social networks, the production assistant has a male avatar who vomits horrors on girls, and she posts her salacious videos between two meetings. It took a certain amount of nerve to accept the role. Ilinca Manolache, who comes from the theater, explains: “I created this male avatar well before the film. I wanted to criticize this way of objectifying women, insulting them and dominating them on social networks. These masculinist videos are a hit with teenagers. Radu Jude absolutely wanted me to include this evil creature in his fiction. »
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