Romanian film-maker Radu Jude was a Golden Bear winner at Berlin last year for his wackily entitled Covid-era movie Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Now he is back with another garrulous essay-movie-slash-black-comedy collage, speckled with literary quotations, jokes, cinephile sideswipes and references to Romania’s most notorious foreign resident: our very own Andrew Tate. The title is a maxim from the Polish poet and aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec.
It’s another skittery, jittery movie, an experimental adventure in which narrative is of merely incidental importance, compulsively testing the limits and textures of contemporary experience, always digressing and interrupting itself and intrigued by the world as filtered by the movie screen, the Zoom screen, 4K, 8K, livestream and TikTok and raising a continuous white noise of complaint about modern Romania: the degradation of its public space, the misery of its continuing infatuation with strong leaders, its racism and its incompetent embrace of capitalism and the free market. It’s also a movie about the production of the image: one of the characters dully ponders the fact of Jean-Luc Godard’s assisted death – though perhaps Godard’s spirit lives on here in Radu Jude.
I wasn’t sure about the final section of this film: a very extended continuous locked-off shot of a family group whose story discloses the way in which workers are exploited: I felt it leaked some of the energy out of the film, though undoubtedly mimicked the precise way in which corporate employees, gig freelancers and the subjects of a film can be casually neglected in the same sort of way. But there is such a fizz of ideas here.
The subject is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a harassed and sleep-deprived production assistant for a Romanian film and video company in Bucharest – where a sign grimly announces it as a “martyred city”. Her employer, with whom she appears to have a short-term contract as negligible as the relationship between Uber driver and passenger, has a commission from a chilly Austrian business with branches in Romania whose diffident marketing director is played by Nina Hoss.
The Austrians want them to create a safety video, exhorting workers to wear safety clothing and equipment, containing a testimony from someone who has been disabled at work, and prepared to say on camera that it was all down to their failure to wear helmets etc – in other words, to blame themselves rather than the bosses. Poor Angela has to drive around endlessly and frantically, using her smartphone to audition disabled people who are prepared to do this in return for the promised thousand €1,000 fee. It is a miserable life for Angela, whose only pleasure is posting clips on TikTok where she pretends to be Andrew Tate: spewing misogynist bile and adoration for Vladimir Putin. She even gets to interview the cult German director Uwe Boll (playing himself) famous for his bad-taste pulp shockers and his loathing for snobby critics. These videos are in colour; the rest of her life is in grainy monochrome.
Along with all this, Jude samples clips from a Ceaușescu-era Romanian film from 1981 entitled Angela Moves On, starring the now veteran Romanian actress Dorina Lazar as a taxi driver who finds herself in a relationship with one of her passengers. At one stage, Nina Hoss’s character marvels at the monolithic and grotesque “Ceauseșcu palace” in the middle of the city: the 1981 film has a scene set in the rather pleasant “Uranus” neighbourhood that was razed just after that to make way for this colossal monument to the tyrant’s ego.
Are the two Angelas in parallel universes? Not quite. The two women are occupying the same fictional space: this very same former taxi driver in the 1981 film, now much older and played of course by Lazar in the present day, answers the door to Angela (the older woman is thrilled by the karmic duplication of their names and the similarity of their jobs). Her son is now a wheelchair user, hoping to be in the video. Her lover in the 1981 film, played by László Miske is there, too – now her ageing but sprightly husband, gallantly flirting with this younger Angela. It is this wheelchair using son Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan) who gets the €1,000 gig, but finally causes an extended crisis by insisting on camera that it was the employers’ fault.
And the rest of the time we just see Angela’s stressed, wearisome existence and perhaps the high moment comes when she has to drive Nina Hoss’s haughty character to her fancy Bucharest hotel from the airport and tells her that the roads are so dangerous (due to lack of urban planning or safety) that they are virtually lined with makeshift crosses: memorials to those killed on the highway. Jude then brings the film to a halt and plays in an extended still-image montage of these real-life Romanian roadside crosses of all shapes and sizes: some raggedy, some expensive-looking. Jude invites us to see how the whole subject is playing on Angela’s mind: her father’s grave has been exhumed because a corporation claims to own that part of the cemetery.
The result is bitter and strange and fragmented and often bizarrely funny. It’s a film that freewheels around and refuses to alight on a particular tone, or decide what the central point really is, or to tell us precisely what sort of a satire it is, or if it’s a satire at all. Opinions may divide about that final section – as I say, I wasn’t sure. But this is a cinema of ideas, and the Romanian new wave is still reaching impressive crests.