At null throttle

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This article was published 19/04/2024 (890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Filthy, funny and furious about the state of late capitalism, this all-over-the-place comedy-drama (in Romanian, with subtitles) is like social realism on acid.

Filmmaker Radu Jude, a provocateur who’s been compared to both Jean-Luc Godard and John Waters, wraps his pointed political message in a rude, raucous circular road trip. The results are discombobulating but difficult to ignore.

Angela (the absolutely indelible Ilinca Manolache) is an overworked, underpaid, sleep-deprived production assistant for a sketchy film company. Her horrible bosses are currently working on a workplace-safety film commissioned by a multinational corporation based in Austria.

The rudimentary storyline — Do Not Expect is more about attitude than narrative — takes place over two of Angela’s 18-hour days and involves her driving all over Bucharest to record audition videos of people injured in job-related accidents.

The resulting educational film is supposed to demonstrate “the care we have for our workers,” as one executive piously says, but it ends up blaming employees for injuries caused by the company’s callousness, cost-cutting and crappy equipment.

The closer the crew gets to the final take, which features Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pirsan), a man who’s been hit by a rusted metal gate, the further things get from the truth.

Most of Do Not Expect is shot in scruffy black and white, focusing on the foul-mouthed, unflappable and hilariously matter-of-fact Angela. Underlining the awfulness of the gig economy, Jude shows her eating, sleeping and having sex in her car.

Maybe a third of the film’s epic 163-minute runtime involves driving, and Angela is often sitting in stalled traffic or navigating hair-raising lane changes. Expect a lot of screaming, swearing and aggressive gear-shifting.

Meanwhile, Jude is stacking his film with films-within-films, Zoom meetings, texts, memes and the stew of social media to examine the shifty gaps between reality and representation.

He breaks up the heroine’s story with manipulated clips from an (actual) 1981 Romanian film called Angela Moves On, about a Communist-era cab driver with job problems and man troubles, playing with parallels between the two Angelas.

These layers are further complicated when the real-life stars of Angela Moves On, Dorina Lazar and Laszlo Miske, show up as elderly characters in our Angela’s work day.

Uwe Boll, a famously bad filmmaker known for challenging critics to boxing matches, makes a chaotic cameo appearance playing himself. Famed German star Nina Hoss drops in as Doris Goethe, purportedly the great-great-great-granddaughter of 18th-century polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (She’s in marketing, and unfortunately has no interest in talking with Angela about Faust.)

Perhaps the most bizarre slippage between competing realities is when Angela makes TikTok videos using a wacky, unstable filter to appear bald and bushy eyebrowed, playing a purposely noxious alter-ego called Bobita.

Bobita is a bargain-basement “alpha-male” influencer who spews vile — and unbelievably obscene — misogyny. This is partly parody, partly performance art, partly a reminder that Andrew Tate, the king of toxic masculinity, is currently under indictment for human trafficking in Romania.

At one sharp comic crux, the very well-read Angela buys a Muriel Spark novel from a roadside seller, shortly followed by Bobita going into an obscene sexual riff on the real “prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

The Bobita sequences are the clearest example of the film’s jam-packed, tonally deranged vibe. But there’s more. So much more.

Jude riffs on Eastern Bloc history (“Ceausescu was an imbecile who destroyed Romania,” comments one character), capitalist excess, corporate greed, government corruption and bureaucratic incompetence. One moment he might be making serious, sorrowful points about the suffering caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The next, he’ll be hilariously lampooning pretentious, name-dropping film wonks.

It’s hard to figure out how all this too-muchness works, but it does, to excoriating effect. The film’s extended final scene becomes a stalemate between dark absurdist comedy and white-hot rage, finally subsiding into the rueful fatalism of the title: In Jude’s sour cinematic worldview, even the apocalypse is anticlimactic.

Do Not Expect comes to paid streaming service Mubi on May 3.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com