‘Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World’ Review: Radu Jude’s Complex Satire Leaves A Bitter Aftertaste – Locarno Film Festival
deadline.comIt’s rare that European cinema impacts on Hollywood but it’s exciting when there’s a trickle-down effect, like the connection to be made between Denmark’s stripped-down Dogme movies, which launched in Cannes in the late ’90s, and Steven Spielberg’s decision to go back to basics (well, for him) with Catch Me If You Can a few years later.
It’s a moot point how many will ever see Romanian director Radu Jude’s follow-up to his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but, like Bob Dylan going electric or the Sex Pistols making their ramshackle debut at a London art school, this wilfully uncommercial but bloody-minded film could be genuinely seminal in its anarchic and totally individualistic approach, slipping discordant, Godardian subversion into a darkly comic, Ruben Östlund-style human drama.
The intro suggests a boring academic exercise, positing the first half (“A”) as a “conversation” with a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Moves On.
Surprisingly, in a world where we’re used to the cliché of visual artists providing a “response” and critics engaging in a “dialogue” with other people’s work, Jude’s film is actually what he says it is, using a 1981 film by Lucian Bratu (Angela Moves On) as its jumping-off point.
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