Tag: Radu Jude

Do not Expect too Much from the End of the World (Nu Astepta Prea Mult de la Sfârsitul Lumii)

Posted on by victorfraga

With a title as long as this and a duration of nearly three hours (163 minutes), Radu Jude deliberately sets out to challenge and alienate his viewers. Do not Expect too Much from the End of the World is both narratively and aesthetically fragmented, with manifold languages and textures overlapping and abruptly combined in order to create a colourful and rough patchwork of cinematic references. It is tiring and monotonous, and indeed difficult to watch, however not without some remarkable achievements.

It will take you a good 20 minutes before you join the pieces and begin to follow the narrative thread. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a sequin-clad, blonde and scrawny production assistant hired by multinational business in order to elicit statements that suit their narrative from victims of workplace accidents. Her job is underpaid and unfulfilling. Instead, Angela seeks thrills in social media. She has a TikTok alter-ego called Bobita, a super racist, sexist, Putin-loving and vulgar man who boasts his connection to Andrew Tate (incidentally, the British influencer currently lives and is under arrest in Romania). Bobita is as repulsive as the real-life ultra-misogynist, aided by the bizarre filter that turns Angela into a bald man with super-thick eyebrows. A real vision from hell.

Most of the film is in grainy black and white, except for what’s captured by a different media (such as Angela’s phone, or a 4k/8k camera at work), and a strange collage of roadside crosses (devoted to those who lost their lives in road accidents). It’s as if the director was saying that metalanguage prevails over reality. We live in such a visually multilayered that the image captured by naked eye becomes banal and trivial. The jittery camera and the sudden cuts remind us that Jude wishes to freely experiment with these layers. To top it all up, Angela’s predicament is interspersed with clips from Romanian film Angela Moves On (Lucian Bratu, 1981) starring the veteran Dorina Lazar as a taxi driver who who becomes infatuated with one of her passengers. The “real-life” Angela incorporates a very similar affair into her life, namely inside her car. Fiction and reality establish a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, Jude’s film is a mockery of the technical wizardry that constrains the world of cinema.

After numerous interviews and extensive internal meetings, Angela’s employersettles for wheelchair-bound Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan) as the subject of their workplace safety movie. He was in a comma for 13 months because he did not wear a helmet at work. They opt to conceal his foreign surname (because it has a dirty sexual connotation in Romanian), and also the fact that his employer too was negligent. That’s because they failed to provide lighting and to paint a car park barrier, which would have prevented the near-fatal accident. As usual, the blame lies with the victim. The capitalist world has sneaky ways of rewriting the narrative, and subverting dialectics. Angela’s Austrian boss Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss) travels to Romania is order to ensure that the promotional video delivers exactly what it should, without compromising the company’s reputation.

Do not Expect is a blundering movie movie with a crass sense of humour. Angela is particularly fond of crude jokes: “in the US a shop donates a bazooka to Ukraine for every rifle that people buy”, “a blind man walked to fish market and said ‘good morning girls’ to the people”, or a “God granted a man a wish and promised him that his neighbour would get twice what he asked, so the man asked God to pluck one of his eyes out”. German director Uwe Boll (playing himself) complains that film critics who constantly pan his movies, and argues that these horrible people (vile human being such as myself)should be subjected to violence (much like the characters in his films). Uwe is affectionately/infamously known as “the world’s worst filmmaker”. Andrew Tate, Uwe Boll: Jude wishes to celebrate the worst in mankind and in film alike.

The cherry on the cake comes in the final scene: a 30-minute static wide shot of Ovidiu being made to repeat the details of his accident ad infinitum, with his incredulous family standing right next to him. Angela and other crew members often step in front of the camera, in a shambolic effort to direct the poor man to his greatest strength. They have to grapple with a stubborn subject, temperamental equipment and unsavoury weather conditions alike. Ovidiu is finally given green cards to hold (to which they can add any text they wish in post-production). A fabulous mockery of the technical wizardry that defines and imprisons cinema and – more broadly – the visual media. The outcome is clumsy and awkward. Wilfully so. The only problem is that viewers have to wait more than two hours of repetitive action before reaching this dirty anti-climax, in a movie that indubitably overstays its welcome.

Do not Expect too Much from the End of the World premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The Romanian director won the Golden Bear two years ago with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. The UK premiere takes place in October at the BFI London Folm Festival. It also shows at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the Best of Festivals section, and at the 41st Turin Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, March 6th.

Uppercase Print (Tipografic Majuscul)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Two films in one. In the former, we learn of Romanian Mugur Călinescu, who, upon listening to messages from Radio Free Europe in 1981, writes pro-democracy messages on walls in chalk. In the second, Radu Jude presents archival footage from the time. The propaganda scenes, however staged, are exciting and filled with life; the reality, however true, is artificially staged and alienating. They form a curious dialectic: Romania as it really was, and Romania as it presented itself on television.

It starts with a quote by Michel Foucault: “the resonance I feel when I happen to encounter these small lives, reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.” Starting mid-sentence, it is typical for the Romanian director, who likes to present things to you piecemeal, expecting the viewer to fill in their own details.

This quote is more apposite considering the way the stages are set up. Arranged in a circle, they resemble his famous panopticon, and stress the all-powerful surveillance scheme of the Securitate, the secret police force of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

An adaptation by the documentary play by Gianina Cărbunariu — which was assembled through police transcripts and secret recordings — these scenes are deliberately alienating. Characters recite their lines with little passion, meticulously explaining the events around Călinescu’s illegal pro-democratic writings and how the Securitate came into contact with them. They are framed against bright pink and purple lights, with giant tape recorders and televisions in the background, deliberately making everything feel artificial.

Uppercase Print

If these scenes are carefully calibrated, the propaganda is far more chaotic. Ranging from the obvious pageantry found in a dictatorship to songs about children being the future to people being fined for honking their car horns illegally, these scenes form a strange and bewildering counter-narrative. What makes it a disorientating experience is that the links between the two clips are not obvious, forcing the viewer to work through their own connections.

Radu Jude makes active films as opposed to passive ones. You can’t simply sit back and enjoy a film like Uppercase Print; you have to bring your own intellect to bear upon Jude’s, making them challenging cine-texts. Nonetheless, for those patient enough to tackle them on their own terms, they can be immensely rewarding.

If there’s a through-line between this and Radu Jude’s previous film, the more stylistically diverse I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians — which tackled Romania’s shameful role during WW2 — it is the sad fact that people don’t know or reflect upon the mistakes of history.

The entire film comes together in its final moments — which jolt us back into the present day, showing that little has truly changed. One of the men justifies his surveillance tactics by invoking Cambridge Analytica; reminding us that constant surveillance is hardly a concept novel to communism. By analysing Romania in such forensic detail, the film opens up to the world, reminding us that these issues can happen anywhere.

A truly difficult work, its not one I can say I enjoyed as much as I found intellectually stimulating, like listening to a fascinating yet over-long lecturer from an intermittently charismatic professor. Nonetheless, it remains a convincing reminder that Jude is one of the most unique directors working out of Eastern Europe today. I want to see everything he’s made.

Uppercase Print played in the Forum section of the Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Watch it online for free in December only with ArteKino

Scarred Hearts (Inimi Cicatrizate)

Posted on by victorfraga

Following the autobiographical writings of Max Blecher in his continual struggle with bone tuberculosis and constantly plagued by being bedridden, Scarred Hearts is Romanian director Radu Jude’s latest feature, dealing with a plethora of heavy and macabre themes in 1937’s Romania. Accompanied by a distinct visual style and gorgeous academy ratio, it’s a bold piece of European cinema that’s not afraid to patiently let a scene hold and play out, whilst slowly captivating you with its profound writings and opaque poetry.

After visiting a hospital with his father, 20-year-old Emanuel (Lucian Teodor Rus) is instantly submitted to long needles, a full back cast and regular operations to keep his tuberculosis at bay, while it slowly eats away at his back. Lacking any sort of establishing shot or location building, Emanuel – and audiences likewise – are instantly confined to the walls of hospital, accompanied by the vistas of the Black Sea. This period setting imbues the film with a sense of transition between two pivotal moments of modern human history, the two great wars. Just as Fascism and Hitler ate away at an ideologically weakened Europe, so does the tuberculosis to Emanuel’s back. In drawing away from setting its narrative during any conflict, Scarred Hearts channels Brady Corbet’s stunning debut Childhood of a Leader (2015) in choosing to explore a pre WW2 Europe – a film which deserves to be seen by more.

Bestowed with a youthful and fragile body, Teodor Rus’ physicality adds a layer of melancholy to the depiction of a youth being stricken down by an incurable illness, even if the doctors testify otherwise. Debuting for the first time, it’s a performance which is so tricky to capture. In the cinematography Marius Panduru, his bed bound action is caught from a side on perspective and rarely in any close shots, broadening the space which Emanuel and his bed hold in the frame. Rus’ performance is all the more impressive in his character’s constant state of institutionalised paralysis.

Adopting the period setting in the minutest detail, Christian Niclescu’s production design gives the hospital a strong conservative design. Filled with chequered tiles and baby-blue walls, as Emanuel’s health declines, so does the joy which fills these walls, from intellectual debates to sexual relation, resulting in a relationship, with himself and another part time patient Solange (Ivana Mladenovic). These former deeply intimate acts are captured in the words of M. Blecher which intercut the visuals. To some, this may be a hindrance on the narrative. Still, the voids of darkness which fill the white words in the centre of the screen elicit the emotions of Emanuel in a mature and delicate manner and hold the calming nature of poetry in Jim Jarmusch’s tantalising Paterson (2016).

Filled to the brim with themes such as what stimulates the intellectual, the mortality of man and the futility of illness, Scarred Hearts is a heavy, decadent sitting that brings despondency to the brain even after its final scene has played.

Scarred Hearts is available to view for free until Sunday, December 17th, as courtesy of the ArteKino Festival – just click here in order to accede directly to their website.