SubFilm: Do Expect Much From "Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World"

"Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End of the World" follows Angela, a non-union PA for a full day as she drives around Bucharest recording "auditions" of injured workers to be included in a workplace safety video being produced by the company that employed these workers. All of the auditions include the workers statement on how unsafe practices on the job site led to their injury. Angela then asks them to mention if they were wearing their hardhat because "the company wants them mentioned, they just bought a bunch".

I often hear of people talking about art speaking truth to power, I feel this movie takes the opposite view, it speaks truth to the powerless. It doesn’t burnish it, or condescend or glorify it.

Angela is neither hero nor villain. She is a wonderful character, intelligent and curious while also vulgar and dismissive. Reading poetry at stop lights and recording coarse Andrew Tate parody tiktoks. She complains endlessly about power while obeying it diligently. She rattles off historic injustices out of one side of her mouth and then obediently drives the marketing executive of the company that injured the men and women she spoke to all day to her hotel, making banal and respectful chit chat.

I feel a kinship with this woman, though separated by half a planet, a gender and a language. I suspect any film worker would, and any worker in general.

The film follows her for about 36 hours. Uwe Boll is in it, fresh from complaining about homeless people dying ruined his upscale Gastown restaurant and playing himself crowing about beating up film critics in a boxing match. Boll is on set half-assedly making a forgettable sci fi movie and removing safety and comfort gear from his stunt performers. It would be tempting to say he is being lambasted for this but the film makes no explicit moral judgements, Angela adores him. Power is just shown in its nakedness. Boll has power here, he can do as he pleases. Angela has no power, she does what she's told. There is no moral. The world is over in that way. Its just power, people and people's bodies being mangled by power.

The 2023 story is intercut with clips from Angela Merger Mai Departe a 1982 Romanian film, about a taxi driver named Angela driving around Bucharest. The Socialist Republic of Romania, deeply in debt to western creditors, spent the 1980s imposing austerity measures which lowered the standard of living and may have contributed to the collapse of the Socialist Party, execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Romanian Revolution of 1989.

These two women, separated by 40 years and the collapse of European communism, are united in being stuck in traffic. Was the first Angela, the taxi driving Angela, more possessed of an optimism? Was she more supported? The clients that taxi Angela picks up, are they in better straits than the injured workers PA Angela interviews?

Or is taxi driving Angela showcasing the cracks in Romanian society that will eventually lead to the revolution, and then the economic exploitation of Romanian workers and resources by foreign corporations?

I don’t have an answer other than, “Yeah you could see it that way.” Both Angela’s stories are just stories of the society they live in, the difficulties they face and their resilience in the face of those difficulties. Resilience, and a complete lack of satisfying solutions.

After an errand at a hotel Angela steps outside sighs, and says to the doorman."I can't keep doing this."

To which he replies, "You will."

I’ve had similar conversations with other film workers on alternating sides. And I suspect other people in other industries have as well.

We will. And in a way that’s what you come to hate the most, that your strength has become your chains. That the harder you work to get ahead the more they take and then expect. That you hand other people your time and labour and have become a partner in your own exploitation.

And even when you grasp that, as Angela does over and over again, discussing with insight and intelligence all the ways her boss is screwing her, that Romania is screwing Bucharest, that the EU is screwing Romania and on and on, all there is to do is sigh and get on with it.

Angela is a woman I’ve worked with. Angela is me on a tired Thursday when the cheques are late and everything sucks and like Angela all I can do is tell a joke or two to briefly distract my coworkers. And those jokes, like Angela’s, often fall flat. But if I don’t at least give voice to my perception of the absurdity of my daily life and my work, will that voice in my head die? Or drive me mad? Or push me to take some sort of action?

What catharsis or satisfaction can I expect? The world has ended.

It is an incredibly long, slow, strange, film. I’ve thought about it at least once a day since I watched it. It’s one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time, and I don't think there's anything quite like it.

I was entertained.

And I feel weird about everything.