Stranger than paradise
A Joycean conversation with the great writer and director Radu Jude
The fantastic Ilinca Manolache is a force of nature in Radu Jude’s prickly, sharp, devastating Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. (All photos courtesy of MUBI.)
One of the highlights of last year’s New York Film festival, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is the latest provocation of the great Romanian director Radu Jude.
Like his previous Berlin prize-winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), the new film is a bracing, intelligent, provocative and formally complex meditation about pretty much everything—work, sex, capitalism, representation, the ghosts of Ceaușescu.
Running one hundred and sixty-three minutes, the movie features an extraordinary lead performance by Ilinca Manolache as an acid-tongued, sharp and vibrant production assistant for an Austrian conglomerate who is helping produce a workplace safety video in Romania.
Like all the director’s work, it’s formally bold and elastic, weaving in large blocks of a 1981 movie by Lucian Brutale, Angela Goes On, about a female taxi driver. Jude refashions the material into his own dialectical montage, giving his lead actress the same name, Angela.
Angela (Manolache) has crafted her own doppelganger, or avatar, called “Bobita,” an Andrew Tate-inflected toxic misogynist who spews racist and incendiary hate speech in the form of TikTok videos and clips.
It’s also a deft road movie, with much of the contemporary action shot in almost unstable black and white, and captured from the perspective of Angela’s car as she roams across the cold and somewhat surreal landscapes as she interviews accident victims.
It’s essential viewing, opening this weekend in New York and slowly through the rest of the country. I had the pleasure of talking with the director recently. Normally with interviews, I make slight edits or alterations to the text for context or clarity. I was asked not to change anything from our discussion.
The stream of consciousness is delightfully all Radu Jude, who incidentally is a new Facebook connection.
Patrick Z. McGavin: With your previous film, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which was very much about the social and political conditions of the pandemic, do you see this film as a bookend or continuation of some of those themes about life in contemporary Bucharest?
Radu Jude: Yes, I can see these connections. I was not necessarily aware of all of those while making the film. But, yes, I guess there is a prolongation of some of the themes from there combined with maybe some newer ones. Both films use Bucharest as a kind of not only the background or not only as a character—it’s a cliche to say the city is a character—it's also as a character that I think is a kind of a generator of these stories, these characters, these problems. It’s true that both films have what you said, and this collage style is applied to both of them in different ways in my opinion.
There is a Romanian film critic who saw the film when it was not out yet, and he said it felt like that story is a story of a woman who works in the city, and the story’s about these people who drive in the city. You have both perspectives, basically, because the second part of this film involves a story about a car. The first film was about working, and this one is about cars in a certain way, very, very conceptually.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Were you influenced by the films of Abbas Kiarostami, and how he used the restrictive angles from inside a car, capturing landscapes, buildings, and the architecture of a city?
Radu Jude: I guess so. I think Kiarostami's very influential and very important for me. For this particular film, I haven’t thought of him that much. I haven't thought as much about his films because I used to see them many, many years ago and study them. Somehow I think I have them in my DNA already. I don't need to think about them. They are there. And also the fact that the car culture in Iran, with all their traffic jams and problems, is somehow similar from this point of view, at least with the one in Romania.
What I thought most about was the American road movies where the car is seen as a liberation, like in Thelma and Louise, or Easy Rider. Of course, in Easy Rider, it’s motorbikes, but it's the same kind of freedom as in the other road movies. I was also thinking of Cosmopolis, both the book and the film.
In Cosmopolis of Don DeLillo you have a billionaire, a very rich guy, living basically his day or his life in a luxury limousine. I was thinking of this film as a kind of reverse Cosmopolis where someone is also spending her life in the car but this is not a luxury car. It's just a regular, nasty car.
The satirist, free thinker and stylistically fluent Radu Jude, writer and director.
Patrick Z. McGavin: How did you conceive the work structurally and stylistically, especially in weaving together different blocks, the interpolated footage of the film, Angela Goes On, with the contemporary footage, and the almost documentary-like footage of the interviews?
Radu Jude: One of the things that I'm very much interested in making the films but also as a viewer is the work with the structure, with the architecture of the film. For me it is very important, and I'm always very happy and very fulfilled when I see a film—this is also true for books or for paintings or whatever—where the structure is somehow in part new, or the structure is not the same structure for narrative films, like three-act structure. You’re putting in one story, and then in the same structure, you put in another story.
I think that sometimes you see this more in experimental cinema and less in narrative cinema, and you see it more in literature than cinema. I think I'm more inspired by literature from this point of view than by cinema. I think this comes from a kind of necessity because I'm always thinking when I have to make a film or when I decide to make a film of which form it will take because the form needs to be attuned somehow with the rest of the elements. I struggle quite a lot with these structures.
I changed a lot, and even this project had many many many other shapes, other structures before. Then, little by little, they came to me in a way if I can say by accumulations, so I started with something and then something is put next to that, and then something is putting up. All of this comes together in a way which I cannot really describe or can't judge if it's good or if it's bad.
I think all of them come from a kind of necessity I have for expressing things. For instance, you mentioned this small documentary with the crosses at the margin of the road. That was not at the beginning as a part of the film. But when I decided to put it there, I realized it is another kind of format, another kind of genre. It’s a documentary, and at the same time shows something in a different way from the rest of the film. I don't believe that these parts could mean anything by themselves.
When I did my previous film, Bad Luck Banging, for instance, people were saying, “I think the last part will work by itself or the middle part will work by itself.” And I don't see that. I don't think they could work by themselves. So here it is maybe this idea of montage in these big blocks in putting them together in order to create a more complex picture, if you want because all these come into relations in a certain way.
Patrick Z. McGavin: The interpolated film from 1981, directed by Lucian Bratu Angela Goes On, about a taxi driver, did you see that as a prototype of the social realist, state cinema that was maybe thrown down your throat during your youth?
Radu Jude: Yes and no, I mean, I would say yes, but this film has two things. It's kind of a decent film. It's not one of the most horrible, idiotic propaganda movies that we were fed every day. Those films were like heavy nationalist films. This one is not like that; it’s much more soft from this point of view.
If you look at this film more carefully, despite the fact the director was not attacking head-on the Ceaușescu regime or the censorship as much as could have been possible, it is a very subversive film in many ways. Even by the fact that he cast a Hungarian minority actor, I mean, an actor from the Hungarian minority from Romania. Casting this man was a bit problematic because the censors said, “Why did you take a Hungarian? The story didn't need to be Hungarian.” Because the Cecauscau dictatorship was heavily nationalistic, to invite a Hungarian in the film, in a role like that, was really great. The film is full of these kinds of subversive elements.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Your lead actor, Ilinca Manolache, is just astonishing. Had you worked with her before, or what made you decide she was right for the part?
Radu Jude: Actually it is very simple. I worked with her before in smaller parts, and I always wanted to work with her in bigger parts. For this film, I didn’t have anybody in mind. At some point when I decided to use the avatar, in that second I knew that they wanted to cast Ilinca as well. Basically, I rewrote the whole script with her in mind and her avatar.
I sent the script to her, and I said, “Ilinca, if you like it, I invite you, but also your avatar, Bobita.” She had played with that avatar before. She read it, and she said yes. I cannot imagine someone else doing it. We didn’t do any casting tests. I’d say at first, I cast the avatar and then Ilinca.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Were the accident victims actors, or real people?
Radu Jude: All actors are real people (laughing).
They were contacted through an association for people with disabilities or accident-related disabilities. I don't know what to call this, people with handicaps. They were very eager to be part of the film. Because of their condition, sometimes they don't have many opportunities to do something else and what they do all day. They were really grateful, and I was very happy to have made this decision. I think they bring this documentary element into the film, a feeling of reality in a more powerful way. It felt great to work with them.
Patrick Z. McGavin: I was curious about your influences, of straddling East and West, of the political cinema of Godard, but also great Romanian directors like Lucian Pintile, or the other great dissident Czech, Polish or Hungarian directors of the sixties?
Radu Jude: Difficult to say because all of them are here, of course, like we spoke before about Kiarostami. For this film, I am aware of some, and not aware of others. I'm very aware that James Joyce’s Ulysses is an influence. I’m also aware that John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy is an influence with the structure because he has a narrative, then something from newspapers, then cuts from that with biographies of some real characters. It’s a very patchwork book.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Sorry to interrupt you, but you also have that visual reference to Proust right at the start of the film.
Radu Jude: In a certain way, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Also, just remaining in the text area. I will say that one of the essays I just read just prior to the film and stayed with me was the J. Hoberman essay called, “Bad Movies.”
I really admired what he wrote. I read this essay two or three times before the film. Somehow it liberated me in a certain way. I, of course, am not doing the kind of film he's mentioning in that essay, like Ed Wood movies, or robot monster kind of things. There is the pleasure of accepting what is bad that was very influential. I felt liberated after reading that, and incorporated that thinking into the film. Also Andy Warhold cinema, Warhol as a cineaste, I don’t know about the United States, but I don’t see many retrospectives about him. In Europe and Romania, he is almost unknown as a filmmaker.
Patrick Z. McGavin: You would have been a young kid on Christmas 1989 when Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were deposed and executed. It came about a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Those two events, coming so closely, must have been pretty earth shattering
Radu Jude: Absolutely, but not the Berlin Wall because this is something that you could hear people—I don't know my parents speaking about that—but it seemed like the communist dictatorship would be there forever. It plunged the country for many years into a kind of chaos and the social problems were everywhere. Despite that, the feeling of freedom was really high.
Being a teenager in those years and young was like whoa. I’m teaching at the university now, and I am a bit amazed that these young people are so well behaved and non-confrontational. For my generation, for better or worse, after the revolution, everybody wanted to create another small revolution.
That was an exhilarating time. And then, of course, that was the opening of Romania culturally, to the West or to other cultures. I think, even in the nineties, and early two-thousands, Romania culturally was and still is very isolated in a way. I think what has saved us from being completely provincial in many ways was the internet. With the internet, with the books I mentioned or the Hoberman essay, which was given to me by a Romanian film critic who got it somewhere from the internet. I pirate a lot of movies, a lot of music, and a lot of books, because otherwise it is impossible to find it here.
I think to be on the very end of a province if you use it wisely I think is a good thing, or a good place. You know you’re not in the center, and knowing you’re not in the center of culture or civilization, whatever that means, if you know that it makes you more careful not to fall into the trap of provincialism. I think that’s a good place in the end. I was always frustrated with why are we not like New York, or to be in Paris or to be in London, but not anymore.
I mellowed with this frustration.
