Socialist Romania’s first TV spectacle would prove to be its last. The attempted eviction of a Hungarian pastor in the Transylvanian city of Timișoara (he had made a name for himself criticizing urban planning policy on Hungarian TV) prompted local protest, which became a citywide uprising, which became a countrywide revolution. The only one of the revolutions of ’89 to involve extensive violence, the uprising left more than a thousand dead and thousands more injured. Within ten days, twenty-year dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by firing squad following a televised drumhead trial. Television broadcasts contributed to the rapid collapse of state power as the revolution went on, helping key players — the generals and politicians who, turning on Ceaușescu, would hastily assemble the postrevolutionary government — assess the correct moment to jump ship.
If the events playing out on domestic television sets possessed a vividness previously unmatched in Romanian screen culture, it wasn’t just because of the revolutionary spirit. Romanian television and cinema had suffered with the rest of the country’s social and economic life under Ceaușescu’s self-punishingly isolationist regime. By the mid-1980s, Ceaușescu-era austerity had nearly pushed the film industry back to using black-and-white film stock. When they made it abroad, Romanian productions were received with scorn; the Romanian film scholars Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr cite “a Czechoslovak film magazine which, after a ‘Romanian Film Days’ event organized in 1986, found that some of the films were ‘too naïve and schematic even for our humble standards.’” Only in nations even more isolated, like postrevolutionary Iran and pre-reform China, could Romania find an export market for its cinematic kitsch. The country’s film industry was absent from academic and critical surveys, most foreign box offices, and, crucially, festivals. During the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, what was left of Romanian cinema went into free fall, as failing state-owned studios were privatized only to fail again. The hacks pivoted to postsocialist lowbrow produced on shoestring budgets, and talented directors and cinematographers went into advertising, the only game in town that paid.
And yet by the late 2000s, Romanian cinema was, per A. O. Scott, “the most exciting development in a European national cinema since Spain in the 1980s,” with the milieu of directors now known as New Romanian Cinema — or, if you like, the Romanian New Wave1 — sweeping Cannes, the Berlinale, and the academy. A loose chronology would date New Romanian Cinema’s arrival to Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and locate its maturation somewhere between Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Beyond the Hills (2012). Formally, these films share a dedication to Bazinian realism, character studies, and the long take, as well as a hostility to visible editing, directorial didacticism, and anything even hinting at expressionism. These qualities are of a piece with the overlapping worldwide trends toward reinvigorated auteur cinema and so-called slow cinema that have emerged in the first decades of this century, though New Romanian Cinema also has its older Romanian precursors, most notably the early work of Lucian Pintilie.2 Many New Romanian feature films have a pseudodocumentary vibe, unfolding in near-real time and shot in long takes light on Steadicam (the camera is typically either static or jankily handheld) and other bells and whistles. On a plot level New Romanian Cinema is concerned primarily with the personal ethical dilemmas of the middle class during the late socialist period and the capitalist transition. A corresponding insistence on what André Bazin termed “the ambiguity of the real” recalls the neorealism of Antonioni; as in his work, a dour postdevelopment mood prevails. In The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a dying pensioner is wheeled from hospital to hospital, turned away again and again for lack of space until he expires. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest centers on a televised commemoration of the revolution in a small town, which devolves into a grievance-airing session that, in the end, only serves to expose the rampant collaboration with the police state that citizens of the new Romania would prefer to forget.
Many of these films are funny, in a dark, unsmiling way. Some critics argue that New Romanian Cinema taps into a vein of quintessentially Romanian humor, not unrelated to the country’s unusually long-lived vaudeville tradition, popularly referred to as either țigăneală or mahalagism — derived from the words for gypsy and slum, respectively. The theatrics of mahalagism rarely erupt outright from the deadpanning that characterizes most New Romanian Cinema, but the absurdism of high culture and the screwball comedy of popular forms are, in Romania as everywhere else, two sides of the same rapidly depreciating coin. Still, beneath New Romanian Cinema’s tentative engagement with this tradition lies an abiding concern for “Romanianness,” less as an orientation than as an ambiguous puzzle.
If Jude’s intervention was to drag Romania’s ugly past into the light, what was to be done about the present?
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The simple explanation for this miraculous flourishing of interesting and daring filmmaking is ecological: the right quantity of talented directors competing for the right quantity of resources, state funded or otherwise, and the right amount of access to and protection from that cruelest of world markets, the festival circuit. But while the Romanian film scene remains vibrant today, critical and trade discussion of New Romanian Cinema has shifted into past tense. By the end of the 2010s the cohesive character of New Romanian Cinema had splintered, its practitioners turning to other concerns. Puiu pivoted to historical drama, adapting the Russian cosmist Vladimir Solovyov’s War and Christianity into 2020’s Malmkrog, a three-plus-hour dinner-table debate among a group of fin de siècle bourgeois. Mungiu broadened his topical scope and dabbled in light magical realism in 2022’s excellent R.M.N., a lean two-hour drama that nevertheless manages to cover infidelity, childhood trauma, class resentment, xenophobia, Covid, and bears. Porumboiu, always at least the second-strangest director in that milieu, made 2019’s The Whistlers, a high-octane (and higher-budget) crime thriller about a Bucharest policeman who travels to the Canary Islands to learn the secret art of communicative whistling in order to close the case on a corrupt Romanian businessman and his Spanish connection. But if the work of any single director periodizes the end of New Romanian Cinema, at least as it was understood by the directors, critics, and audiences of the 2000s, it’s the chimeric filmography of Radu Jude.
A half generation younger than New Romanian Cinema’s original luminaries, Jude is at once their artistic peer and inheritor. He has made films firmly within the tradition and films that transgress nearly every axiom that defines it. His corpus includes two realist slow burns, three formally distinct historical films, a hyperreflexive admixture of Godard and Borat, a multimedia sex comedy, and a road-and-labor movie stitched together from the socialist archive and TikTok — and that’s just the feature films. While Jude hasn’t abandoned the guiding interests of New Romanian Cinema — especially its eye for the prosaic — he has also made a name for himself as one of its only directors willing to write and direct films about the Holocaust in Romania, Roma slavery, and contemporary right-wing nationalism, not to mention the internet, pornography, and the scandalous and lowbrow more generally. His triumphant latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, affirms what Gorzo, Lazăr, and other critics have already argued: that Jude’s oeuvre simultaneously makes a claim on the legacy of one of the great film traditions of the 21st century and points to something radically new, for Romanian and world cinema alike.
Born in 1977, Jude was 12 when the revolution swept Ceaușescu out of power, and he likely experienced the end of socialism primarily as spectacle, not struggle. (Of course, this is true for more older Romanians than would care to admit it.) Jude finished film school in 2003, and his first production credits coincide with New Romanian Cinema’s entry on the world stage. He served as an assistant director for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Radu Muntean’s race-heist thriller The Rage, as well as Costa-Gavras’s Amen., a 2002 French-German-Romanian coproduction about Kurt Gerstein, the devoutly Christian Nazi who in a crisis of conscience secretly (and unsuccessfully) petitioned the Pope to intervene in the Holocaust. (The Vatican refused to let Costa-Gavras film on location, so the Ceaușescu-era Romanian Palace of the Parliament was used instead.) For the greater part of the aughts, however, Jude took the only available path for young Romanian directors on the make — shorts and ads.
Jude’s experience in corporate production is obvious in his first feature, 2009’s The Happiest Girl in the World, a movie about a juice ad. The filmfollows Delia, a provincial Romanian teenager, through a day on set — she has won a car in a sweepstakes, on the condition that she star in a commercial for Bibo Multifruit juice. Unfortunately, her parents have no intention of letting her enjoy her prize, instead planning to sell the car and use the earnings to convert her deceased grandmother’s home into a rental property. Delia’s meaningless commercial labor likewise elicits little empathy from the harried ad director, played by Romanian cinema stalwart Șerban Pavlu. The Happiest Girl mimics the on-set doldrums it depicts, with the camera holding long takes of the cast and crew suffering in the sweltering summer heat as Bucharestians stroll past. Though Jude’s characteristic wit and warmth are already evident, the film is a relatively unambitious character study and pseudodocumentary exercise, distinct from its New Romanian contemporaries only in retrospect.
Three years after The Happiest Girl came Jude’s second feature, Everybody in Our Family. A black comedy/family drama/thriller, Everybody followsMarius (Pavlu again), a depressed divorced dad attempting to take his daughter on vacation. Things go awry, and he ends up taking his ex-wife and her new husband hostage. As in his first film, Jude stays within the broad stylistic parameters of New Romanian Cinema while sharpening its political pointedness, this time with an emphasis on male socialization and gender politics. One year earlier, he’d released the hour-long short A Film for Friends, a Blair Witch–style videotaped suicide note from another depressed divorcé, played by Gabriel Spahiu (also a Jude regular). The hapless protagonist of A Film for Friends somehow fucks up even shooting himself in the head and spends the last twenty minutes writhing on the floor and screaming before he’s saved by his equally bungling neighbors. A strange and not entirely successful experiment, A Film for Friends prefigures Jude’s later incorporation of the internet, social media, and all manner of declassed and decontextualized multiscreen visual chaos. The amateur aesthetics are, as Gorzo and Lazăr point out, best suited to a different viewing format: YouTube.
Jude’s next two features, and breakout successes, went the other direction. 2015’s Aferim!, his first festival-circuit barnstormer, is a revisionist western set in 1830s Wallachia, then under Ottoman suzerainty. Aferim! follows a local constable and his pubescent son in their picaresque pursuit of an escaped Roma slave, accused of sleeping with his boyar owner’s wife. The plot structure recalls classic westerns, as well as a filmic legacy of the Ceaușescu era: the Romanian “historical film.” Sanctioned by Ceaușescu’s poorly named policy of “national communism,” which instrumentalized nationalist myths in its attempt to build an autarkic socialist culture, the “historical film” was the closest thing to big-budget production in 1980s Romania. Ceaușescu may be gone, but these swashbuckling stories of hajduks (Robin Hood– or Che Guevara–like nationalist outlaws) continue to grip the Romanian consciousness. Aferim! is shot in crisp, beautiful black-and-white, a deliberate attempt on Jude’s part at Brechtian estrangement to undermine the otherwise immersive historical realism. The camera moves, but not much — consistent across Jude’s remarkably diverse cinematography, and in kind with New Romanian Cinema more broadly, is a near-total lack of Steadicam.
Watching Bad Luck Banging, a film as pornographic as the society it critiques, it feels as if every line or image is a double entendre, even as the fucking is right there in front of us.
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Jude followed Aferim! with another period piece, Scarred Hearts (2016), a loose adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novels of Max Blecher, a prominent Jewish Romanian surrealist and tuberculosis patient. Blecher’s ultra-expressionistic writing was never well suited to the aesthetic pieties of New Romanian Cinema (“Somewhere inside me my olfactory perception would split and the effluvia of putrefaction would reach different destinations: the gelatinous odor of decomposing husks was separate, quite distinct from — yet concomitant with — its pleasant perfume, the warm and homely scent of toasted hazelnuts” — try filming that in a single long take), but Jude outdoes any heresy that could be expected of him by inserting into his adaptation a political atmosphere almost wholly absent from Blecher’s texts. In Jude’s hands Scarred Hearts becomes a chronicle of a genocide foretold, with the society-as-sanatorium metaphor of The Magic Mountain giving way to sanatorium-as-concentration-camp and, in turn, to society-as-concentration-camp — and then, it’s suggested, to the camps themselves. Scarred Hearts is visually lush, filled with brilliant eggshell blues: the sanatorium walls, the gentle waves of the Black Sea, the patients’ hollowed cheeks and bloodless lips. Though it’s choreographed in the same frantic tempo as Jude’s other films, its shots are both framed and composed in the style of silent cinema, with a square aspect ratio with rounded edges, and staged like pictorial tableaux, with Jude’s eye almost resembling Wes Anderson’s.
The two films are united by gleeful intertextual cannibalization, which would become a defining feature of Jude’s screenwriting. Much of the dialogue in Aferim! is lifted wholesale from Romanian literature, poetry, and folktales (plus Chekhov), doing much to underscore the film’s aphoristic tone and lending even the noncribbed chatter an air of jarringly catchy contemporaneity, not to mention upending the “naturalness” of the brutal political order under which Wallachian peasants and Roma slaves lived. At one point the constable and his son are temporarily joined by a Romanian Orthodox priest. “Gypsies, is they people or Satan’s spawn?” the constable asks. “Some say they ain’t human. Human like us.” The priest erupts into one of the great diatribes of 21st-century cinema:
Each nation has its purpose. The Jews, to cheat; the Turks, to harm; us Romanians, to love, honor, and suffer like good Christians. And each has their habits. Hebrews reads a lot, Greeks talk a lot, Turks has many wives, Arabs has many teeth, Germans smokes a lot, Hungarians eats a lot, Russians drinks a lot, English thinks a lot, French like fashion a lot, Armenians are lazy, Circassians wear many a lace, Italians lies a lot, Serbians cheats a lot, and Gypsies get many a beating.
Aferim! is only the second Romanian film about Roma slavery (the first, a 1920s silent film, has been lost to history), a practice that continued for some three or four hundred years. An anomaly in early modern Europe, the slavery system in Romania almost resembled American chattel slavery more than serfdom proper, with which it coexisted. The core Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia continued to hold Roma as property of individual boyars, the church, or the state through the mid-19th century. Fascist-era Romania persecuted the Roma as viciously as it did Jews, and Ceaușescu’s “national communism” left little room for even the nominal assertion of minority rights seen in other Eastern European socialist states, further entrenching the anti-Roma racism that remains widespread today. The frankness and brutality with which Jude depicts this history led to a somewhat hesitant reaction from Romanian cultural commentators, who mostly praised the film for its aesthetics.
In Scarred Hearts, Jude bursts the period-piece balloon in an even more banal way. The protagonist and Blecher stand-in Emanuel, a poet, writer, and exceptionally horny imp, loves to recite for his friends and lovers; bedridden in his sanatorium, it’s about the only means of self-expression he has. Instead of poetry, however, Emanuel recites ads, sometimes punning, transforming a jingle for Mott (champagne) into Pott (his diagnosis: Pott’s disease, or bone tuberculosis). Jude’s fascination with ads, displaced onto a precorporate era, infects an idealized past with capitalism just as much as with racism and fascism. Toward the end of the filmEmanuel’s condition takes a turn for the worse and he is sent to Bucharest for surgery. After an obscene slapstick sequence in which he is loaded onto a passenger train through the café-car window, horizontal like a corpse due to his full-torso cast, Emanuel is left on the floor for passengers to step around. He looks up at the camera overhead, and he does not look well. The overdetermined meaning of the dying Jewish Romanian loaded onto a train hardly requires elucidation. Jude concludes the film, however, with an unexpected flourish: the narrative simply ends and the camera cuts to the present, framing a dilapidated Jewish cemetery by the side of a busy road. Inside lies Blecher’s tombstone.
WhileAferim!and Scarred Hearts circulated the festivals — racking up Locarno nominations and sweeping the Gopo Awards, Romania’s most prestigious domestic film festival — Jude took to the stage. In 2016 and 2017 he staged adaptations of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, as well as Jean-Claude Carrière’s The Controversy of Valladolid, a theatrical reconstruction of a 16th-century politico-theological debate regarding the humanity (or lack thereof) of King Charles V’s Indigenous subjects in the newly colonized Americas. Intent on foregrounding the enduring fact of racism, Jude updated the setting of his Ali adaptation to present-day Bucharest.
At the same time, he turned to the archive. The Dead Nation, from 2017, an eighty-three-minute photo-essay about the Romanian Holocaust, is constructed entirely from the portfolio of Costică Acsinte, a studio photographer from Slobozia, in southern Romania. These staged photos, dating from the mid-1930s through the overthrow of the fascist regime in 1944, are accompanied by voice-over quotations from the diaries of Emil Dorian, a Romanian Jewish writer and doctor, read by Jude himself. The photographs depict provincial Romanians posing with flowers, motorcycles, slaughtered hogs, and, eventually, in military getups performing “Roman salutes” (i.e., sieg heiling). Shown in varying states of degradation, the pictures form an eerie, semiabstract grotesquerie somewhere between Stan Brakhage and the late films of Aleksei German. Overlaid with Dorian’s harrowing reminiscences they become truly sickening, as the awkwardly staged moments of celebration accompany accounts of the 1941 Iași pogrom and the stripping of citizenship from Romanian Jews.
Like Jude’s later The Exit of the Trains (2020), another photo-essay documentary, the film is genuinely pioneering in its centering of Romania’s own self-motivated role in the Holocaust. Before Jude’s turn to the subject, only one major Romanian feature film — Radu Gabrea’s Gruber’s Journey (2008) — had closely considered the Holocaust; documentary coverage was limited to Florin Iepan’s Odessa (2015). Like its neighboring countries, Romania tends to shy from the Holocaust in public discourse, and the bulk of New Romanian Cinema — with its predilection for intimate narratives and its limited resources for staging realistic historical productions — has very much participated in this avoidance. Within such an ecosystem, Jude’s films have been received uncomfortably. Jude, who despite his last name is not Jewish (it means judge in Old Romanian), recounted in a recent interview how a Romanian newspaper published a picture of him complete with a yellow star after his Golden Bear win at the Berlinale for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — “Radu Jude won the Golden Bear for a pornographic movie.”
It’s hard to read 2018’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians as anything other than a direct response to the willfully ignorant reception of Jude’s prior work. Barbarians follows a theater director named Mariana’s attempt to stage a historical reenactment–cum–guerrilla theater performance in Bucharest’s Revolution Square. Being reenacted is the 1941 Odessa massacre, in which the invading Romanian and German armies killed more than thirty thousand Jews. The catch is that, for many Romanians, the 1941 campaign also endures as the country’s greatest military victory to date, in which the fascist dictator Ion Antonescu reconquered swaths of territory annexed by the Soviet Union a year earlier. That the massacre has been formally acknowledged by the Romanian government means little for the government official Movila, who, having funded Mariana’s performance, brings out his full rhetorical arsenal to persuade her to expurgate the more unsavory parts of the story.
After more than two hours of debate (mostly taking place in a literal arsenal, Bucharest’s National Military Museum), Mariana stages her mock-up massacre over Movila’s objections — and to rapturous applause, especially when the barracks filled with Jews are lit on fire. Jude isn’t advocating artistic surrender, nor is he using his soapbox to simply condemn Romanian critics and audiences both (although that too). Barbarians is a formal intervention, transparently positioning itself somewhere between Godard’s juiced-up Brechtian middle period and the Romanian historical film in its postcommunist neonationalist iteration. The latter is exemplified by Sergiu Nicolaescu’s controversial 1993 feature, The Mirror (subtitled, insanely, The Beginning of Truth), a revisionist hagiography of Antonescu described by its director as “the first and only Romanian political film.”3 Throughout Barbarians,Jude goes out of his way to attack Nicolaescu — a successful Ceaușescu-era historical filmmaker with a good nose for changing political headwinds — via his mouthpiece Mariana. Jude approaches realist tropes like Nicolaescu’s famed attention to detail in settings, costumes, and props for the sake of historically accurate fascist apologia with clear contempt. “Reenactments mean extreme realism!” expectorates one gangly, bug-eyed man in a Stahlhelm and a Popeye T-shirt, chafing at Mariana’s didactically left-wing directorial style. Besides, he adds, “All this is very anti-Romanian.”
The absurdism of high culture and the screwball comedy of popular forms are, in Romania as everywhere else, two sides of the same rapidly depreciating coin.
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This turn to radical agitprop was new for Romanian cinema, which has no tradition of Brechtian–Godardian political modernism. The closest historical analogue might be the exceedingly brief Sixties moment captured by Pintilie’s The Reenactment, but Pintilie’s quietist critique is a far cry from Tout Va Bien. (Romania’s own ’68 never got very far either: like much of the rest of socialism Romanian-style, Ceaușescu’s version of the Sixties’ political and cultural thaw was half-assed and short-lived, a far cry from the heady debates happening in Prague or Belgrade.)
Barbarians doesn’t look like a Godard film. Formally, it adheres to New Romanian Cinema’s neorealist precepts: a documentarian sensibility, long takes, real time. What fourth-wall-breaking flourishes the film does have are restrained. In one of the very first scenes, the actor playing Mariana, Ioana Iacob, introduces herself, clarifying the differences between herself and her character: “Both me and my character are Romanian ethnics, baptized as Christian Orthodox. Unlike me, Mariana is an atheist.” She starts to list the names of her fellow actors, before being interrupted by the plot — “the seniors,” the pensioners who are auditioning for the role of massacred Odessan Jews, have arrived. Only at the very end do we hear someone once again call “Ioana” from off-screen. Still, the combination of political polemic and metatextual reflexivity in Barbarians places it firmly within a lineage of political modernism. In an interview, Jude responded directly to the Godard comparison: “Godard is like a god for me. He’s everywhere. . . . I feel very embarrassed. Come on. The comparison can only be not in my favor. I gladly accept it.” What a dialectical response! Godard himself would be proud.
In 2020,after Jew-this Roma-that, Jude finally gave the people something that would make them happy, turning to villains whose demise everyone could feel good about: the communists. Well, maybe. Jude’s sixth feature, Uppercase Print, is a strange and subversive adaptation of a play by Romanian playwright Gianina Cărbunariu, itself a staging of files from the archives of the Securitate, the Ceaușescu-era secret police. Perhaps the most egregious of the socialist government’s deformities, the Securitate, at its height, had more than ten thousand agents and some half a million informants, for a total population of just over twenty million. By the early ’80s, the budgetary bloat of the secret police force was starkly at odds with the preternaturally harsh austerity regime Ceaușescu had imposed in an ill-fated effort to pay off Romania’s exorbitant foreign debts; a rationing system was implemented for food and home heating and, by 1985, electricity for public radio, TV, and even street lighting.
Uppercase Print retells (or re-retells) the grim story of Mugur Călinescu, a teenager from the provincial city of Botoșani who in 1981 began to graffiti political slogans (in uppercase print, as the characters never tire of noting). Some were long-winded mouthfuls, quoted nearly verbatim from Radio Free Europe:
In our friend-country Poland the workers have gained freedom,
with free unions like Solidarity and Rural Solidarity,
which represent their rights, though they face food shortages too.
Some, however, were as simple as We are sick of waiting in huge queues. The Securitate accumulated hundreds of pages of reports from agents and informers, as well as transcribed interrogations of and secretly recorded conversations between Mugur (whom they quickly caught), his mother, his father, and his classmates. Cărbunariu’s play staged these reports in a black box; Jude, by contrast, sets Uppercase Print in a kind of bizarro TV studio, a circular soundstage divided like a color wheel, each segment housing a comically large prop object vaguely corresponding to the recitations given in front of it: a tape recorder, a TV, apartment windows, a grave. The characters look straight at the camera and read their lines without affect. The story’s tragic end is foreordained, as the Securitate hound and harass Mugur — who’s hardly a radical, just an admirably bullshit-averse young adult — long after he’s stopped graffitiing, then allegedly poison him. He dies of leukemia at age 19.
Despite genre constraints more totalitarian than any secret police, Uppercase Print is not quite typical of the communist repression film. Between reports, testimonies, and tapped phone conversations, Jude squeezes in a grab bag of archival footage from ’80s Romanian TV programming: milquetoast antinuclear comedy sketches, folksy dance numbers, a news report on growing neo-Nazism in the West (!), Ceaușescu handing out Medal of Labor Valor after Medal of Labor Valor. It doesn’t seem, however, that Jude is interested in this socialist kitsch for its prefab, even artificial qualities, so much as its absolute strangeness, which sits oddly alongside the ironclad bureaucratese of the Securitate files. The effect on the viewer is an estrangement from communist history, only to see that history dragged into the present day.
At the end of Uppercase Print, like in Scarred Hearts, the camera suddenly cuts to the streets of contemporary Bucharest, panning around and zooming in on ads, while Mugur’s inquisitors are themselves put on trial. No longer inside the soundstage, they sit off to the side at a comically overstuffed break-room table, posed like The Last Supper, expressing no regret or guilt for their role. After all, they explain, “We made an oath to be faithful to our country.” That far-away communist society, Jude reminds his (Romanian) viewers, was you.
Jude said last year that he’s done making historical films, at least for the time being, because “the exercise of being forced to reflect on history and on how you represent the past in cinema” had sharpened his eye for the contemporary. If Jude’s historical intervention was to drag Romania’s ugly past into the light, what was to be done about the present?
The full title of Jude’s 2021 comedy, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, uses some more or less untranslatable Romanian turns of phrase to recall the cheapest, most vulgar kind of postrevolutionary sexploitation movie (Gorzo and Lazăr offer a 2001 feature titled Sexy Harem Ada-Kaleh as an example). A more literal and less idiomatic translation of the subtitle might be Porno Madhouse — and what a madhouse it is, a slap in the face of public taste for an age with no morals. Postcommunist Romania is manifestly a postcensorship society, a society in which everything is permissible and therefore explicit, lurid, cheap. Watching Bad Luck Banging, a film as pornographic as the society it critiques, it feels as if every line or image is a double entendre, even as the fucking is right there in front of us.4
The film opens without credits straight to the titular porno, an amateurish homemade sex tape of a carnival-masked couple engaging in some pretty conventional sex: oral, missionary, doggy. It’s charming, even sweet, how much the act of filming dials up the eroticism for them. (“Look how hard I get just from turning on the camera!”) As the couple fuck heedlessly, an older woman bangs on the door, shouting over the music that “the little one hasn’t sanitized and she’s touching her toys,” quickly contextualizing the unprepossessing on-screen sex: the couple, like almost everyone else in the world, is living under an early pandemic lockdown and, like almost everyone else in the world, is trapped inside with their children, their parents, and each other. So, naturally: a sex tape to spice things up. After months living life on-screen, why not live life in its most vital form on the screen too?
The problem is that screens beget screens. The entropy of the internet has laid low our protagonist and sex-tape star, Emi, a history teacher at a prestigious Bucharest middle school: the tape has leaked online.
Despite genre constraints more totalitarian than any secret police, Uppercase Print is not quite typical of the communist repression film.
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Each postporno section of Bad Luck Banging is stylistically distinct, and each recalls different periods of Jude’s filmography. The first, titled “One-way street,” follows Emi as she nervously flaneuses through Bucharest, killing time and steeling herself for a meeting demanded by the outraged parents of her students, who have found her dirty movie. The middle section, a montage subtitled “A short dictionary of anecdotes, signs, and wonders,” freewheels between archival footage, TikToks, and brief clips of kitchens, blowjobs, and the like. The final piece of the triptych, “Praxis and innuendos (sitcom),” is self-consciously staged, taking place almost entirely within the courtyard at Emi’s school where the masked and socially distanced meeting — or, more accurately, show trial — is held.
The cinema verité of “One-way street” is Jude at his most sociological: the distractible camera constantly veers away from Emi, zooming in on ads, billboards, campaign flyers. Jude’s semiotic streak keeps his fascination with advertising from feeling too much like Adbusters, instead incorporating logos, slogans, and doctored images like everything else, on par with facial expressions, dialogue, movement. And history, politics, literature. There are Godardian flourishes here and there: when Emi visits the school’s director Mrs. Cănuţă, a girlboss figure attempting to walk a careful line between appeasing the parents and defending her star employee, the dialogue slips into nondiegetic chitchat. Freckles, an oddly named man whose presence in Mrs. Cănuţă’s house is never explained, tells Emi an inexplicable story about a dog who held the rank of major in the Securitate — until he mentions being on set, and it becomes clear that it is the actors who are speaking. Maybe?
Mostly, however, Jude doesn’t foreground the filmed nature of the film itself so much as the filmed nature of everything else — most importantly, sex. The infusion of libidinal questions into Jude’s anticapitalist critique recalls Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev’s 1971 masterpiece, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. WR, which got both itself and its director banned from Yugoslavia for the next decade and a half, is at once a straightforward documentary about psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a satirical story of bad romance between a militant young Yugoslav feminist and a sexist Russian celebrity ice skater, and a paean to the highs, lows, and weirdos of the quasi-revolutionary situation of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Like Jude, Makavejev is as interested in zooming in on ads and slogans as on striking moments of fervent, ecstatic copulation. The links between sexual puritanism and political reaction — and free love and freedom — are self-evident enough so many years after the sexual revolution, but where the feminist protagonist’s struggle in WR is tragic, or at least tragicomic, Emi’s is thoroughly farcical.
In its last, drawn-out scene, Bad Luck Banging parodies the other side of New Romanian Cinema, a sort of mock realist drama in the same way that the first part was mock documentarian. The observational quality of the first section is replaced with a tight, single-location set piece, with an almost theatrical emphasis on dialogue over camerawork. But any expectation of realism is quickly and spectacularly upended by the depiction of the parents at the school. While Emi, like Uppercase Print’s Mugur, plays the role of straight man, the only sane person in an insane world, the parents are not fashioned of representational clay. Each is a fragmentary, incomplete collision of tropes, as though assembled from the crush of images in the film’s preceding section. There’s a priest, collar and all, wearing an I Can’t Breathe mask who takes Emi’s side until the Holocaust comes up and he becomes viciously antisemitic. Emi’s most strident defender (wearing a T-shirt that reads Capitalism in the Coca-Cola font) fumbles the points he makes on her behalf, slipping into muddled mansplaining about “paradigms” of education and authority. One of Jude’s favorite literary figures, Isaac Babel, is trotted out, with Emi’s assignment of his story “Salt” denounced as Bolshevik propaganda.
After almost all the parents have watched Emi’s sex tape on an iPad — making little effort to conceal their titillation — the conversation devolves into accusations that Emi “might as well be Jewish! She’s paid by their Mossad!” to indoctrinate her students. The denunciations lobbed at Emi by this peanut gallery of vulgar, racist despots are more than a little reminiscent of those directed at Jude himself by some of his Romanian critics. But at a certain point the actual content of their critique is almost immaterial. Jokes, wisecracks, and utterances ranging from crude to nonsensical are inserted throughout — the priest’s use of the word “analyze” is corrected to “anal-yze,” while another parent incessantly quips the funny-sounding name of Czech balladeer Karel Gott, sometimes amending it to Karel Butt. Taken as a whole, this reference-dense tapestry of ultracontemporary vitriol sounds like nothing so much as a social media feed, an incoherent audiovisual mess — and a kind of automatic montage. A year earlier, ahead of the release of Uppercase Print, Jude told an interviewer that “the golden age of montage is right now: anyone who sees a meme on the internet actually sees, most times, a variant of Eisensteinian montage.”
Jude wouldtackle the subject of Eisenstein more directly in his tongue-in-cheek 2022 short The Potemkinists, in which a sculptor and a bureaucrat haggle over state funds for the proposed restoration of a strikingly phallic Ceaușescu-era monument, to be dedicated to the revolutionary sailors of the titular battleship. But the following year’s feature, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, marks a true breakthrough in his search for a montage style crazed enough to capture the spirit of the age. Combining the archival skullduggery of Uppercase Print and the web-content cannibalization of Bad Luck Banging into an Eisensteinian Gesamtkunstwerk, Do Not Expect both encompasses and transcends nearly all of Jude’s work to date.The filmfollows a sleep-deprived production assistant named Angela, played by Jude regular Ilinca Manolache, as she crisscrosses Bucharest in her Fiat Doblò, auditioning disabled former lumber workers for a workplace-safety video funded by their Austrian-owned company. While the greater part of the runtime is black-and-white footage of Angela’s travels and travails, there are also extensive selections from a hacky socialist-era movie about a taxi driver also named Angela; stylized clips of a semifictional right-wing Instagram influencer; a few choice full-color documentary-style scenes; a silent, full-color montage of the hundreds of crosses dotting the shoulder of one of Romania’s most dangerous highways, DIY memorials to the victims of traffic accidents; and a raucous and exasperating nearly forty-minute-long single-shot closer, the rough cut of the video Angela is working on, also shot in color. Do Not Expect pulls just as freely from literature, adapting its dialogue from authors like Charles Baudelaire, Eva Wiseman, Thomas Bernhard, and Don DeLillo. More than ever, Jude structures this cacophony dialogically, with characters, ideas, and images slipping in and out of the film’s various component parts.
The loudest of these component parts is Bobiţă, Angela’s Andrew Tate–like internet persona, whose vulgar, reference-dense invectives punctuate the film in Instagram-filtered clips describing soirees with “sluts,” talking shop with King Charles, and even addressing the critics alongside Z-list auteur Uwe Boll. (The Bobiţă persona in fact predates the film: Manolache debuted Bobiţă on TikTok in 2021, citing toxic masculinity, Miranda July, and Covid stir-craziness as her main sources of inspiration.) Bobiţă’s presence in the film ventriloquizes a threatening fusion of überonline toxic masculinity and more classic nationalist revanchism (“A cunt is like four countries: wet like the UK, split in two like Korea, bloody like the Wild West, and glad to be fucked, like Romania!”) and dilates on Jude’s recent interest in incorporating TikTok and other video-based social media. These platforms, he’s said in recent interviews, have outpaced cinema in capturing “expressions of life,” though he has been careful not to idealize this “vernacular cinema.” Instead Jude uses social media with the understanding that it offers something more like communist-era TV — a form adjacent to but distinct from cinema, like advertisements.
As in Barbarians, Jude does plenty of pulling from actual cinema too. The source Do Not Expect returns to most consistently is the 1981 Romanian film Angela Moves On. Its director, Lucian Bratu, made ten films in the decades before the Romanian revolution, crowd-pleasing socialist social dramas with titles like A Film with a Charming Girl and The Bride from the Train. He was, in Jude’s words, “a very intelligent guy, more refined than most Romanian filmmakers, but not a very good one.” (Jude adds: “Better than me, for sure.”) Angela Moves On follows a female cabdriver as she traverses Bucharest for work and love — but hers is an early ’80s Bucharest that’s almost unrecognizable today, predating both Ceaușescu’s most megalomaniacal projects and the capitalist transition. Ground hasn’t even broken on the grotesquely oversize Palace of the Parliament, which is still one of the largest buildings in the world. In fact Angela Moves On includes a wealth of footage of the now-lost, faraway neighborhood, appropriately named Uranus, leveled to build the palace. Jude is most compelled by Bratu’s involuntary moments of background cinema verité — of Uranus, but also of food lines (chronic shortages and rationing were already the norm by 1981), abandoned construction sites, and other expressions of everyday poverty, which Jude highlights with choppy slow motion. Because Angela Moves On is nobody’s idea of a subversive film, its piecemeal glimpses of reality offer an explicit contrast to Jude’s own.
Jude’s contemporary Angela lives in a world simultaneously wealthier and more impoverished, freer and more exploited, more developed and more dilapidated, than Bratu’s socialist Angela could ever have imagined. We know this because they meet. Angela of old — played by one and the same Dorina Lazăr — is the mother of the worker eventually selected for Angela’s video, Ovidiu Bucă. Jude then uses a combination of inventive crosscutting and commentary from the present-day Bucă family to rewrite the story of Angela Moves On. Angela’s husband, Gyuri, an ethnic Hungarian, is not only a slightly imbecilic, poetry-reciting, Orbán-supporting pensioner, but was active in the Transylvanian Hungarian separatist movement after the revolution.5 Gyuri’s return to Romania from an oil project in India was actually, the elder Angela’s new narration tells us, because he was informed on to the Securitate. Jude also dials up the intensity of Angela and Gyuri’s drinking and marital spats. Bratu’s Angela’s story recedes almost entirely by the film’s final hour, not because Jude has lost interest, but because the present day has absorbed it. Jude’s collage of the two Angelas and their respective Bucharests draws the eye to continuity as much as rupture, lending historical depth to the chaotic monotony of traffic that present-day Angela weaves through, soundtracked by Romanian pop or manele (a kind of turbo-folk), sexual harassment flung from neighboring cars, and the incessant sound of her ringtone, a tinny rendition of “Ode to Joy.”
In 2020, after Jew-this Roma-that, Jude finally gave the people something that would make them happy.
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Despite its premise — a commercial shoot — being nearly identical to that of The Happiest Girl, Do Not Expect feels radically distinct from the documentarian impulses that guided both Jude’s debut and New Romanian Cinema more broadly. That isn’t to say that Jude is no longer interested in capturing reality — far from it. For all its density of words and images, Do Not Expect’s primary subject is labor: its inequity, its iniquity, its monotony, its fruitlessness. Jude has told interviewers that the film’s origins lie in his own early-career experiences in the hyperexploitative, underregulated Romanian film industry, and in his long-standing interest in tackling Godard’s provocative assertion that moviegoers don’t want to watch work. Here Jude has made a movie in which almost all we see is work, whether it’s being performed, discussed, or derelicted. Like Godard, however, and contra Bazin, Do Not Expect (and Jude’s later work in general) eschews neorealism and its interest in “the ambiguity of the real,” opting instead for aggressively experimental, fragmentary, or didactic montage. Modernist filmmakers like Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and even Charlie Chaplin saw montage as a means of capturing a higher level of reality than the camera (or human eye) alone was capable of. Jude seems to realize that, for us today, it may be the only way to capture any reality at all.
Angela finally catches some sleep, however brief, on the side of the road before the conference call presenting the auditions to the Austrian company representative, Doris Goethe (scion of the famous writer), played by Nina Hoss with immaculately Germanic woodenness. Jude leans into the innate comedy of the Zoom-call form, as the Romanian production crew anxiously fumble with English-language corporate stock phrases while the Austrians, their video feed projected on the conference-room wall, respond with nonchalant incoherence (the Romanians, speaking into a laptop, are mostly facing the wrong way). After a seconds-long call-in in which the big boss, Hans Frank, relays his one-word message, “EMOTION” (“That means he wants a close-up,” Doris explains), the director, Tibi (played by Pavlu in a reflexive reprise of his role in The Happiest Girl), summarizes his vision:
The way I see this small film is that these people, who were wounded but are alive, they are survivors and they have a story to tell, and a message to tell us, especially to the other workers, their colleagues. “Respect the rules, because if you don’t, you are fucked!”
Doris’s projection, looming behind Tibi as he peers into the laptop camera, leans in, points an approving gigantic finger at her own camera. “This should be the focus!”
InDo Not Expect’s penultimate sequence, Angela, still on the clock after close to sixteen hours on the road, is sent to pick Doris up at the airport and drive her to her hotel. Doris, who has been brushing up on all things Romanian on her flight, asks Angela if it’s true that Romanians are the poorest nationality per capita in Europe. Angela fires off one horrible fact about Romania after another, but concludes that “the Albanians are more poor. More primitive, too.” Jude takes obvious delight in playing with the rhetoric of “Romanianness” and post-communist backwardness, along with a more international language of cheap racism and self-exoticization. But while Doris and Angela trade tropes, the viewer can’t miss the obvious social, political, and above all economic power differential between them, itself a blunt synecdoche for Romania’s semiperipheral place in the European order.
Is this the same Romania as the Romania of Aferim!, or of Scarred Hearts or Uppercase Print? Jude’s films invariably depict societies steeped in injustice, corruption, and venality — or just one society, really, historically linked not by some enduring “Romanianness” but by a long parade of brutal, stupid regimes. Do Not Expect, like Bad Luck Banging and Barbarians, invites the viewer to reconsider the present day through the same lens with which Jude’s earlier films defamiliarized the past. One of Bad Luck Banging’s montage scenes, “History,” echoes the Benjaminian maxim that “that things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”: “The contemplation of history is more likely to inspire, if not contempt for humanity, then a somber vision of the world.”
Do Not Expect doesn’t end with the triumph of the oppressed. It doesn’t even end with the Pyrrhic satisfaction of revenge. Instead it’s of a piece with Jude’s other tales of death, destruction, and compromised art. Delia doesn’t get the car; the Roma slave Carfin is recaptured and brutally castrated; Mugur Călinescu dies of leukemia (probably poisoned by the Securitate); Emanuel dies of bone tuberculosis (and the Holocaust happens); the Holocaust happens; Mariana’s reenactment serves only to prove that Romanians love the fact that the Holocaust happened (when they acknowledge it at all).6Do Not Expect’s tragicomic conclusion finds Ovidiu and his family betrayed and humiliated. Ovidiu refuses to read from the safety-video script, which falsifies the story of his injury and potentially undermines his ongoing lawsuit against the company. As a compromise, following his Austrian bosses’ suggestion, Tibi has Ovidiu “do it like the hippie kike Bob Dylan clip.” As in the music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (or Romanian folk musician Valeriu Sterian’s spirit-of-’89 anthem “Exerciţiu,” which uses the same conceit), Ovidiu is given sheets of A3 green-screen board, which he silently passes to his daughter as he and his family stand in the drizzling rain.
Jude seems to delight in the idea that, one day, what he has done to Angela Moves On might be done to his own films. “Maybe cinema hasn’t even started,” Jude said in a recent interview (given before the release of his two latest found-footage documentaries, cobbled together out of postsocialist ads and the livestream of Andy Warhol’s grave, respectively; in preproduction is the feature Dracula Park, subtitled “Make Dracula Great Again!”). “There is a cinema on screen, but also on the page, in a song, or in a painting, and so on. Eisenstein saw montage everywhere.”
The triumph of Jude’s work is to make us see montage everywhere too — to see everything, even Jude’s own films, as potentially Judefiable material. To rewatch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World I was given a screener link by the film’s US distributor. Viewed through my scratched-up computer screen, the images and text before me were doggedly kept company by the semitransparent logo and text reading MUBI in the lower left-hand corner. Every few minutes, the personal screener’s antipiracy gimmick would appear too: dead center, text reading PROPERTY OF MUBI or, more eerily, ALAN DEAN. When I saw it at the IFC Center, a man in his seventies or eighties got up and barked at his companions, “I’m going to the bathroom!” prompting me to wonder which side of the screen I was on. And the first time I saw Do Not Expect, at the 2023 New York Film Festival (complete with a vertically oriented, goofy glasses–filter video introduction from Jude himself),sometime around the beginning of the protracted final scene, a bearded man in the very first row took out his cell phone and started filming, eliciting furious censure from the small, dedicated, and mostly retired audience. What inspired this late-stage adventure in piracy I’ll probably never know, but something tells me it was just what Jude would have wanted.
Here I follow critics and scholars, Gorzo and Lazăr included, who convincingly argue against Doru Pop’s “new wave” coinage, an anachronism that nakedly strains to link the Romanian 2000s to the French, Japanese, and Czechoslovak 1960s. ↩
Pintilie’s The Reenactment (1968), in which two winos are forced to reenact a drunken fight for a state socialist PSA, was swiftly banned by Ceaușescu’s government and its director blacklisted until the 1990s. The overt politics and anarchic bombast of Pintilie’s foreign-funded late-career masterpieces limit his usefulness to a national genealogy of New Romanian Cinema, however. ↩
Ceaușescu wasn’t the first Romanian head of state whose execution graced the screen—Antonescu’s 1946 execution was filmed too, inspiring Nicolaescu’s apologist biopic and serving as the direct material for Jude’s 2018 short The Marshal’s Two Executions. ↩
Though not all of us: in certain theaters and on certain streaming services, the explicit sex tape and a crucial final scene are in fact censored, not by any modern-day Securitate but proactively by Jude himself. But Jude metabolizes even the MPA’s soft-gloved regime of sexual puritanism with a wink and a nod, covering the still-audible fellatio and penetration with WordArt text reading “CENSORED VERSION FOLKS!!!,” “censorship = money,” and “A huge cock.” As the enduring market for lingerie and stockings would suggest, nothing’s sexier than just a little bit of covering up. ↩
Jude makes a point of correcting the actor credits of Angela Moves On; the actor who plays Gyuri, László Miske, was originally credited as the more Romanian-sounding Vasile Miske. Jude crosses this out with a bright corrective red slash and red-printed LÁSZLÓ. ↩
Bad Luck Banging does offer an element of revenge fantasy, as Emi transforms into a Wonder Woman–esque superheroine and mouthfucks her enemies with a dildo, but it’s just that: a fantasy, explicitly framed as the last and least “real” of the three endings. ↩
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