164 min | NR | March 22, 2024 | Mubi
A Bucharest production assistant grinds through an 18-hour workday, filming testimonials for a corporate safety video while the city chews her up. To survive the boredom, she posts vulgar TikToks as a misogynist alter ego. The end of the world looks a lot like overtime.
Angela Raducanu drives across Bucharest from before dawn until after dark, casting injured workers for a multinational’s workplace safety video. The job is degrading and the pay is bad and the traffic never stops. Between appointments she films crude TikTok videos as Bobita, a bald, unibrowed troll who spews Andrew Tate misogyny straight into the phone. Radu Jude builds the film around the gap between the labor that exhausts Angela and the persona that lets her vent the rage that labor produces. This is a film about how capitalism extracts everything from a worker and then asks her to smile about it on camera.
Ilinca Manolache plays Angela with a deadpan fury that never tips into self-pity. She delivers obscene jokes in a flat voice that makes them funnier and bleaker at once. As Bobita, she disappears behind a digital filter and lets the alter ego say what Angela cannot. Nina Hoss plays Doris Goethe, the Austrian executive overseeing the shoot, with a polished detachment that treats the injured man’s testimony as raw material to be edited for liability. Dorina Lazar plays an older Angela, the protagonist of a 1981 Romanian film Jude intercuts throughout, and the two women rhyme across forty years of the same exhausting commute.
Jude shoots Angela’s day in harsh black and white, the contemporary footage stripped of glamour and lit like surveillance. He cuts that material against the faded color of the 1981 film “Angela Moves On,” forcing the past and present into direct conversation. The interruptions accumulate into an argument about how little has changed for the Romanian worker between the Communist era and the gig economy. The Bobita videos arrive in vertical phone format, the score drops out, and the form keeps mutating to match the fractured attention it depicts. Jude writes and directs as a collagist, and the seams are the point.
The final act collapses into a single long take of the safety video shoot itself, the camera locked off as the production grinds a wounded man through take after take. The structure is demanding and the digressions are many. The accumulation pays off because the film earns its scope through specificity rather than scale. Jude has made a furious, formally restless portrait of work in the twenty-first century, and it refuses every comfort it could have offered.