Two women driving. Womanhood in social context (1981 to 2023) in Radu Jude’s film ”Don’t expect too much from the end of the world” at IFC and Lincoln Center in NYC
The Ally at the Public Theater in New York: Back to the Agora
March 6, 2024
Depending on the point of view, many different things can be seen when an artist revives elements of an archive and places them in a new context for a new audience. Over a span of more than 40 years – since 1981 the year Angela merge mai departe / Angela moves on film was made and up to the year 2023 when Don’t expect too much from the end of the world was released – a lot of changes took place in the Romanian society encompassing them both. Some would say these changes are mostly good: freedom of expression, economic growth, the right to travel for everybody and other things Romanians lacked before 1989 are now just normal. Someone born after 1989 feels entitled to benefit from everything an open society, a market of the neoliberal global economic system has to offer, for better or for worse.
But the “worse part” is what one of the most well-known Romanian film makers in the past decades, namely Radu Jude, is mostly interested in. The dark sky of Bucharest (capital of Romania) at dawn in the beginning of the film is just an introduction for what comes next: lack of light equals lack of hopes and chances, aggressivity, risky speed in the traffic, dangerously accumulated tiredness of overworked and socially frustrated people, violent language, brooding atmosphere of the city and its sad, dirty landscapes decorated with absurd advertisement promising luxury goods or services in the neighborhoods where nobody would ever have real access to them. The heroine, Angela (the amazing theatre and film actress Ilinca Manolache), is a video assistant who will drive all day long to film work accident victims auditioning to appear in a safety equipment video for a German multinational corporation, while being on the edge to be such a victim herself.
The cinematography of the film advances a black and white oversaturated image which highlights the gloominess of the director’s view, coherent with the one in other films of his, such as Babardeala cu bucluc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) where a walk of the heroine through one of Bucharest’s neighborhoods simply hurts the eyes of the viewers. Jude is channeling Romanian playwright Caragiale who once declared in a short story “Simt enorm si vaz monstruos!/I feel enormously and I see monstrously!”.
When excerpts from the quoted period film Angela merge mai departe / Angela moves on (director Lucian Bratu) are inserted in the 2023 film, the difference is shocking: the 1981 socialist society seems close to heaven by comparison, thanks to the colors of the film, the relaxed traffic with way less cars and no speed at all, and the general non-aggressive rhythm of the life at the time, not to mention empowering women effect. The power of the manipulated image is a meta-commentary added by Jude.
But besides the most evident differences Jude intentionally selects for the viewer to compare and analyze, the more subtle ones are those regarding women in these two epochs. Two sets of observations are most evident: the differences between women’s bodies and demeanor and the (lack of) difference in the way women are treated by men.
Ilinca Manolache in ”Don’t expect too much from the end of the world”
Angela 1 (Dorina Lazar) and Angela 2 (Ilinca Manolache) could not have been more different: the first one is composed, dressed as a school teacher and she does not let her hair down except in one or two scenes when she spends the evening with her lover (merely kissing each other), while the other one is an extrovert wearing a very short sequin dress which does not cover her tattoos, making love with her boyfriend in the car and rolling down the car’s window to shout back at the men insulting her because she is a blonde at the wheel – in this case, prejudices against women driving meets prejudices against women who dare to dye their hair blonde. There is a very popular series of jokes about blonde women in Romania, cementing the stereotype as we speak. To fight the surrounding aggressivity and gain a bit more agency, Angela 2 invents a trash-talking alter ego, Bobita, using a face-filtering app, and with his help she exposes the right-wing discourse she deals with in everyday encounters, reaching out more than 20,000 viewers, and becoming a true guru of the social media (Bobita is actress’s Ilinca Manolache creation in real life and the director casted both of them in his film, taking advantage of the alter ego’s success by including his comical yet scary rants in the script).
And yet, there is something that the two women from so different times have in common, a type of inner power glimmering under the surface, bridging the two epochs and bringing them together after more than 40 years. A short scene in which the two of them meet at the same table underlines what they share and gives the viewer a sense of solidarity. They both had to harden up to survive the harsh working and living conditions women are facing in a patriarchal society, then and now.
A feminist film, as well as an overt critique of the neoliberal society which took over Eastern Europe in very aggressive forms after 1989, Don’t expect too much from the end of the world is a way to fight back using images from the archives, a favorite means of the award-winning Romanian film director.
Films at Lincoln Center:
https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2023/films/do-not-expect-too-much-from-the-end-of-the-world/?fbclid=IwAR3TB-kZ5detU74U5UVjq9ZCmcrx9Izk3LP839Nx4hIYUHudUo8O-UksD0U
