Radu Jude Is Seeking Justice for Production Assistants Everywhere
Production assistants have it rough. They’ve gotta deal with overnight shoots, crack-of-dawn call times, 14-hour days, running little errands for egomaniac producers like babysitting their rodent-looking dogs that haven’t been housebroken, or suffering through a lunch order for a dozen indecisive adults who call to change their mind the moment you leave the restaurant with the food. In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, out March 22, Romanian director Radu Jude trains his lens on Angela (Ilinca Monolache), a PA for a film company who must frantically drive around the whole of Bucharest to obtain testimonials from people injured on the job for a workplace-safety video. Ironically, the production is forcing our sleep-deprived heroine to rise at the ungodly hour of 5:50 a.m. in the trailer, leading to a potential accident. “I’m dead tired,” she yells into her phone while running around town, nearly falling asleep behind the wheel. “They make thousands of euros and I need to beg them for my fucking salary!”
The doom and gloom of her sad monochrome reality is softened by her hilariously bizarre Cindy Sherman–esque TikToks she produces on the clock. Those video selfies where she spoofs the MGM lion’s roar or mimes cunnilingus appear or burps loudly appear onscreen in color. The humor also comes from her language-barrier gaffes. Angela tells Doris Goethe (Tár’s Nina Hoss), the client commissioning the video, that one of the victims “was going out from her whorehouse — warehouse.” This labor deserves a higher day rate.
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