Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

There's something very natural about Ilinca Manolache in this gritty and occasionally quite funny story of "Angela". She seems to spend much of the film driving her car around the streets of Bucharest garnering interviews from the victims of industrial accidents. Why? Well apparently some Austrians are making a safety film and they want a real person to go on screen advocating the common sense of adhering to the rules! Don't go pole vaulting over a volcano kind of thing. As she becomes increasingly weary, being sent from one end of the city to the other, she encounters some of the more moronic road users and that allows the dialogue to get ripe and lively - much to the chagrin of her mother. Anyway, eventually she alights on one would-be contributor who seems quite happy to do whatever is required for his €500 fee - but it's at this point, and through the subsequent quite scathingly delivered production process that I found the whole thing pretty much ground to an halt - despite the briefest contribution from Uwe Boll. The pithy and characterful "Angela" becomes trapped in a repetitive series of similar scenarios - interspersed by some foul-mouthed and sexually charged rants from her alter-ego video blogger "Bobita" and the odd deferential reference to the recent death of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Meantime - and these scenes are in a nicely photographed-to-look-dated colour, we flit back to the Romania of Ceausescu where "Angela Moves On" - a fictitious film from 1981 depicts the life of a taxi driver who finds her daily grind not dissimilar to the modern day story. Misogamy and sexism thriving unfettered! Unfortunately, after about an hour I was really struggling to stay interested. It all went from being entertainingly plausible to overly and rather unpleasantly contrived and at just shy of 2¾ hours long, it really does lose it's way just once too often. To be fair to the writers, the pace of the dialogue is thick and fast and it does take a few swipes at the modern day opt-in culture, but we spend far too much time in her car - she changes gear a lot - and I'm afraid I really rather gave up. It could easily have lost an hour, tightened up what's quite a fun and politic premiss and been much better. As it is, it's all just a bit disappointing.