What were you doing on your sixteenth birthday? Hopefully something better than Liam. Sweet Sixteen came out three years before MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen and shows a semi-orphaned teenager waiting for his mum to get released from prison. It’s another brilliantly bleak depiction of working class youth in the U.K. from Ken Loach and a perfect reality check to the super rich spoiled kids which took over MTV screens a few years later.
The Sole family have farmed fields in the small municipality of Alcarras in Catalonia for generations. However, the wealthy landowner that owns the property has found more profitable ways to use his land, which doesn’t involve farming or what the Sole family wants. He’s looking to destroy the orchards that provide the Sole family’s livelihood to install more profitable solar panels.
What Alcarras does brilliantly is tell a very specific local story in order to highlight how capitalism is affecting not just the Sole family, but the local community and many other people around the globe. It’s set completely in one small municipality in Spain centered one family, all played by non-actors from similar backgrounds to the family on screen, living on one farm. Through the film’s run-time, we get to intimately know each member of the Sole family to understand their life on the farm as well as how they are each affected by the threatening eviction. We see why they love the freedom and independence of farming their own land as well as how they’re pulled apart by an uncertain future. Whilst a multi-family or multi-country film might fail to generate sympathy for it’s characters because of it’s broad scope, Alcarras, in spending time with one family in one region, gives the audience more time and closeness to sympathize with not just them, but everyone affected by capitalism around the world.
The hidden message in Alcarras is that the Sole family’s experience is not isolated to Alcarras, nor Spain. The few short scenes showing the community’s labor strikes, which Quimet and his son join, show that the Sole family’s experiences are not isolated. The priority of progress and profit over personal and community happiness is destroying families across the world.
Radu Jude is no stranger to controversy or satirizing contemporary society. His previous feature, the Golden Bear winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, took aim at sexism, nationalism, and consumerism with COVID-19 and sex as a backdrop. Before that, he highlighted his country’s hidden involvement in the holocaust in I Do Not Care if we Go Down in History as Barbarians. Both of these films packed a strong punch of humor and cynicism, but Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is his most potent critique of the world today and a movie that will define the 2020s for later generations.
Don’t expect Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to be an easy watch. Unless you’re familiar with Radu Jude’s recent films, you might be confused why this film keeps cutting to an old communist-era Romanian film about a female taxi driver or why we spend the majority of the central narrative literally stuck in traffic. Don’t expect a resolution from the side-narratives either. All of the threads might seem random but they all contribute to the bleak and cynical tapestry of the modern world that Radu Jude creates.
You might be thinking; “why would I want to watch a cynical tapestry of the modern world? The world is bleak enough right now.” To which we say; “fear not, you will have a guide in the madness.” Ilinca Manolache’s Angela is like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. She’ll show us the hellish signs of late-stage capitalism – wealth inequality, corporate indifference, virtue signalling – and fiercely confront them with her dark humor. She’s integral to Jude’s critique of modern life as her humor makes it digestible and more like a bad dream than a shameful reality.
You might also be thinking; “why does Jude keep cutting to an old Community-era Romanian film?” The film in question is Angela merge mai departe, shot during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s authoritarian rule. It follows a female taxi driver as she ferries a range of male passengers around the city. The film highlights the danger of being a woman – she’s caught eyeing a wrench to use as a potential defense against one passenger – and is on the receiving end of leering eyes of men on the street, which Jude intentionally shows in slow motion. But her experiences are not significantly different to that which modern Angela faces. By including this communist-era film within Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude forces us to compare the two eras. Ultimately, and depressingly, life under the dictatorship appears no worse than today. You might even interpret the 80s as better. For one, it’s shot in color vs. the monochrome of modernity so it looks warmer, and secondly 80s Angela is free from corporate exploitation.
Conclusion
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an era defining film. It’s bleak tapestry of the modern world marks a new low-point in Romanian (and modern capitalist) society. Just like Dante’s Inferno, we’re guided with dark humor through the hell of modernity and left to ponder how we got here.
Neruda was asked to write an introduction poem for Araya, but he chose not to, saying ‘you cannot write a poem about a poem.’ He’s not wrong, this Venezuelan epic is a poetic ode to the global working class, from creation to post-industrialized exploitation. Watch Araya to see one of the best films from Venezuela and the anti-capitalist canon.
Araya opens with an epic creation sequence. We’re shown the sea, sky, and earth in sequence, just as God created the world in the book of Genesis. Then we’re introduced to sea life and birds, as a brass orchestra and xylophone start playing in the background. The carefully edited introduction crescendos with a vertical camera pan over the top of a pyramid of salt, revealing a community of salteros (salt workers) mining the salt marshes. Every shot draws us in, setting the scene for an epic tale of humanity, represented by these hidden people in Venezuela.
These forgotten people are all workers. They all make their living from the sea, working constantly to sustain themselves from the salt and fish it provides. The director, Margot Benacerraf, emphasizes the struggle to survive by focusing on their movements. The routine actions of each person living off of the sea appear like a well oiled machine, in tune with nature, and each other. The salteros follow each other up the salt mountain to weigh, sell, and deposit their salt; the fishermen bring back their fish for their families to salt. No time is wasted and each movement reinforces their struggle and their community.
Whilst we see the community working tirelessly together, we never fully identify with them. The director deliberately maintains a distance between the audience and the subjects of the film to keep their lives symbolic and poetic, in a similar way to the Soviet films of the USSR (Man with a Movie Camera) and Cuba (Lucia, Soy Cuba). She does this by using a narrator to emphasize their hardships as opposed to interviewing the workers directly. By telling their story through images instead of through their voices, they become representatives of the global working class, and not just exploited Salteros in Venezuela.
This sets up a final scene in which industrialization arrives, overtaking the manual labor carried out by the workers with a greed for profits. As machines take over, the salteros vanish – turning from hidden workers to hidden unemployed. At the same time, nature is replaced with exploited land. It’s a threatening message for workers and all citizens of the world.
Conclusion
Araya is a poetic epic. Through images, it tells the story of mankind from creation to post-industrial exploitation. It’s a art-house warning for workers and citizens of the world and an incredibly important film to add to your anti-capitalist viewing list alongside Soy Cuba and Salt of the Earth.
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