Review by Beatrice On 02-Dec-2023
Like God, capitalism has the best opinion of itself and does not doubt its own eternity.
Chapter A- Angela:a dialogue, a conversation with a 1981 film.
Opened by the following maxim: Old blanket, what shall I cover my head or my feet? ( Yosa Busan)
Scenes from the contemporary film and the 1981 film proceed in this first chapter.
Chapter B- Ovidiu: raw material
Opened by the following aphorism: Now that your head has broken through the wall, what will you do in the new cell? ( Stanislaw Jerzt Lec)
The story of contemporary Angela Raducanu proceeds parallel to that of Angela merge mai departe ( Angela goes ahead) film by Lucian Bratu, where the latter 42 years earlier was working as a cab driver in Ceausescu's Romania, with few cars, little traffic, and a fair amount of professional autonomy.
The contemporary Angela struggles like a sequin-clad Erinni in a city crowded with cars, vulgar and aggressive men, running and working 16/17 hours a day even 20, as a collaborator, freelancing.
The only catharsis that accompanies her are trivial videos she makes to herself, disguised as a man on Tik Tok, where she unleashes all the frustration, alienation, and exploitation that the referent she works for is capable of, declaring herself the Romanian Charlie Hebdo.
The language is unbearable, a metaphor for the daily sodomization and fellatio experienced by workers in the now unbridled technical/capitalist system.
Angela is always in the car, with rap or techno music playing loudly, where she eats, talks on the phone, makes videos, and follows Google Maps to reach the homes of people who have suffered work-related injuries as a result of which their health has been severely compromised with obvious disabilities.
The job involves filming, with a cell phone, the unfortunate, now disabled citizens in describing the incident that occurred, recommending that they appeal to the use of all safety equipment such as safety clothing.
Casting and selection then proceed for an Austrian multinational furniture manufacturer.
The Angela of today is often shot in b/w while the Angela of the 1980s/90s is in color.
After winning the Golden Bear at the Berlinale 2021 with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn Radu Jude returns with an epic film, an essay, a dramatic and grotesque reflection on the condition of the world system.
Taking place all in Bucharest as in the previous film, Jude confirms the need to portray the confrontation between the culture of Ceausescu's Communist Romania and that of capitalist Romania now part of the European Union.
Both Angela's lead their lives in their cars but surprisingly everything is completely transformed for the good but especially for the bad.
Raducanu wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and never knows when her workday will end so much so that even her meetings with her partner take place in the car between appointments, all at an unsustainable and hectic pace.
Even the meeting with the marketing manager of the multinational company, whom she is going to pick up at the airport, Mrs. Goethe, a descendant of the great writer and poet, is not coincidental; Radu Jude does not hesitate to trace the character. When Angela asks her if it is true that the company would recklessly cut down Romanian forests for raw material, Mrs. Doris Goethe, an Austrian, does not hesitate to answer that she is not informed and that the best thing is to each take care of their own work, reiterating that if it were, it is because the Romanian citizens would allow it
Nothing is left to chance by the director, and here the ethics, the responsibility set aside seems to emphasize how close a relationship there is between the questions that were asked of the Nazis on trial and their essential response which was to simply carry out orders with the banality of evil always at hand.
Such as the long sequence of the road where 600 crosses of those killed in car accidents were deposited by family members over a 250-kilometer stretch, where posters of future housing units such as those who bought the cemetery plot from which the bodies are to be moved, see that of Raducanu's father, are evident.
The second part of the film, after about two hours, titled Ovidiu the raw material is its evident epilogue.
By now the raw material is the human.
30/40 minutes dedicated to organizing the filming of the commercial for which Angela organized the casting.
Ovidiu EPURATE was chosen from the surname because it means hole, stuck in a wheelchair and surrounded by family, whose parents are surprisingly the protagonists of Angela merge mai departe.
After the first clapperboard, Ovidiu's speech is still EPURATED because he talks about overtime; at the second and following clapperboards, the story is still EPURATED until the suggestion to follow the script of the
video of Bob Dylan's Subterraneam Homesick Blues, where he passed the lyrics through sheets of paper.
Here Ovidiu EPURATED again, not only of his dignity through the forged and then muted narration, but also of his identity, as the green signs without any writing will make a small pause in front of his face. In fact, only in post-production and only at the suggestion of the company's CEO will the "polically correct" texts be written, mystifying reality and harming the protagonist involved in the case against his company.
He should also give up a thousand euros that his family absolutely needs.
The communist regime forced workers to take responsibility for accidents, and now what does the world of profit, where technology is the absolute master?
A scathing satire on his country, on the capitalist system by which it has been devoured, with no discount to neighboring countries and globalization.
Was it better when it was worse?
"Films are all corporate films": declared by a work radically outside the mainstream production, it confounds the endless ramification of digressions, to which Jude resorts to make the concept and title of the feature film describing the system comprehensible: a kind of manifesto of why one should not expect anything from the end of the world.
The first aphorism to describe a blanket too short, the second to represent the breaking through the wall, carefully chosen quotes that do not hesitate to portray the condition of the established order..
And since the improbable is likely to happen, a quote from Aristotle to which the director resorts, it is clear that it is happening..
Why then should we not expect much?
Because we are already in it, mired in the quicksand of the end of the world....Hail Radu Jude!
A Lectio Magistralis on cinema; the concluding essay on the demise of the West.
History has shown that capitalists go loaded with optimism even at their own funeral.
02-Dec-2023 by Beatrice
