QCinema 2023 | Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Fallen Leaves, Evil Does Not Exist

 

Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a production assistant for a company that makes corporate videos.  She's been tasked to get interviews from former employees of a multinational company in an attempt to find a suitable subject for a planned work safety video. She's underpaid and overworked and the drivers in the streets all but want to run her off the road. Still, in her own brash way, she rides, curses and fucks her way through the streets of Bucharest and beyond to get by what seems like an endless day.

A scathing satire of modern-day Romania, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is a lot to unpack, but a good place to start is its obvious inspiration: the film is at once a spiritual sequel, reimagining and reevaluation of Lucian Bratu's 1981 film Angela Moves On, from which various clips and scenes are interspersed throughout this film. In that older film, the titular Angela (Dorina Lazar) is a taxi driver who also roams around the city of Bucharest in search of people to ferry, preceding films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997). Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World feels like a mirror to that film; in the first act, scenes from both films run in parallel, as if Bratu's and Jude's films existed as parallel retellings of the same scene. At the same time, Dorina Lazar and László Miske reprise their roles from Angela Moves On in this film, as the parents of one of the paralyzed workers Angela interviews.

Jude also becomes self-reflective, interrogating his use of satire and probing its limits. Angela often makes Tiktok videos taking on the persona of Bobita, a trash talking dude whose offensiveness is made to such an extreme it crosses back into parody. There's also a sequence where Angela (as Bobita) meets famed director of shlock Uwe Boll (playing himself), who famously boxed - and defeated - five film critics in the early 2000s. Angela says that portraying Bobita as such, transgressing boundaries of good taste is what enables her to make her point. But at the end, where Bobita goes on an unhinged Putinist rant, is there a point where the ironic edge of satire is lost?

It all culminates in the last third of the film where the work safety video is actually made. The parallels between the films of both Angelas - one made under Ceaușescu's regime and one made after it - only enforces the point that deep down, they are fundamentally the same. At one point Angela tells her passenger about a very dangerous road that has been a source of many casualties, followed by a minutes-long montage of memorial crosses along that same road, deaths spanning decades. Instead of moving towards change, Romanians find themselves repeating old mistakes. "We're idiots," Angela tells her Austrian boss at one point. Then and now, working-class folk still endure the same exploitation - where one Angela (or her son) has their voice gradually taken away, until all that is left is a template for capitalists to exploit, while the other Angela is complicit in that degradation. The title is, thus, a sort of exhortation: even as decades pass and dictators fall, as we hurtle towards an apocalypse that feels all but inevitable, do not expect too much from that end, as there will be no dramatic conclusion - it will all probably be as it is like now, with all of us trapped in our own circles.

At one point in Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) turns on the radio to set the mood for a date she is having with Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). But all she's getting are grim reports from a distant war, where dozens or even hundreds of people are reported dead, reports that we've been hearing since the beginning of the film. She turns off the radio in frustration.

For people like Ansa and Holappa, two working class people who live a meager existence in Helsinki, love is probably the farthest thing from their minds. Flitting from job to job, taking on any job that would take them, to be honest, having a roof over their heads is far more important. Ansa is fired from a supermarket job after keeping expired food; Holappa is trapped in a cycle of drinking and depression and regularly gets fired for drinking on the job. But after a chance encounter in a karaoke bar, Ansa and Holappa find love, and they begin to set aside parts of their lives for each other. Ansa buys extra cutlery and plates for a prospective date. Holappa starts to kick the habit after Ansa tells him of her bad experiences with drunks.

It's a story that Kaurismaki has been telling since his earliest films - indeed, his 1986 film Shadows in Paradise has a very similar premise (and also involves a supermarket clerk), and the other films of his Proletariat series sees the working class man fighting against their loneliness, sometimes successfully (as in Ariel (1988)) or in vain (as in Kaurismaki's masterpiece The Match Factory Girl (1990)).

Fallen Leaves is a prayer of sorts, for hope in an increasingly bleak world, where the remedy (though not necessarily the cure) for such a life is to live it with someone you love.

Note: mild spoilers.

I find it fascinating that the title for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's latest film, Evil Does Not Exist, is a declarative sentence that also feels like a question that gets asked throughout the film. It is a question that is not definitively answered, but we can at least try to do so.

The film begins with a shot of treetops and a man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) walking through the forest. The treetops exhibit crown shyness, which is to say that the forest follows their own order; they have their own set of rules. Takumi knows the land intimately - he knows all of the trees and is able to discern movements of animals through their tracks - so much so that he is sort of a steward of the forest, or to put it to extremes, he is the forest. He's been living an uneventful life with his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), and the town relies on him for many odd jobs as an everyman.

His quiet life is perturbed at the news that a company in Tokyo plans to build a glamping site higher up in the mountain overlooking his town. Its obvious that the company has no experience with this sort of thing, they're only doing it for the money, and their initial plan would negatively impact the lives of the people living downstream. A simple consultative meeting is made compellingly tense, and although well-meaning employees Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) try to answer their questions and sympathize with their concerns, it's unlikely any of their bosses would stop the project because the potential monetary gains are too big, townsfolk be damned.

Many have read the film as a commentary on the quiet but ever-present violence of urbanizing rural spaces. Evil in this context is banal, seemingly unfelt but guiding every decision based on greed. The CEO of the glamping company couldn't care less about the concerns of the townsfolk: he proposes a compromise that might superficially placate them, but would still cause harm. The waste of five people shouldn't be much of a problem, wouldn't it? He asks, expecting the answer to be yes when it would almost always be no. Ordinary evil does exist, evil that is tolerated and left to fester, and that interpretation serves as one answer to the film's title.

There is, of course, another way of answering the film's title: in an interview, Hamaguchi said that he conceptualized the title from Hana's point of view, in that - and I paraphrase here - upon seeing the forest and its tranquil beauty, she remarks that "(in such a beautiful place, surely) evil does not exist here." The last part of the film is marked by a sudden turn that at first feels out of left field, but has roots in past conversations - Takumi tells his two guests that the deer in his area, unaccustomed to humans, will never attack them, unless they are protecting their injured offspring. Nature is what it is, amoral and untethered to human notions of morality, neither good nor evil. When its own rules are broken, it has its ways of fighting back. Evil does not exist in this context, but 'evil' actions are done when action demands an equal reaction. That is not evil per se, only nature taking its course.