A Day in the Life of the Angriest Woman in Europe (and the Best Last Scene of the Year)
I’ve been on a big binge the last couple weeks to check out movies, English-language and otherwise, that are showing up regularly on Year End, Best Of lists. “Do Not Expect Much” (gotta abbreviate this, I mean damn, novel of a title) is one of them, a furious and indicting satire out of Romania, and it’s legit one of the angriest movies I’ve ever seen.
We spend the first two hours (it’s a long one) following Angela, a foul mouthed and merciless production assistant as she drives around Romania interviewing candidates for a safety video her studio is producing. While on her day of errands, conversations to TikTok, she reams into just about everything with absolute profane disgust and rage, from the war in Ukraine to the Romanian government to America in general to toxic masculinity to corporate greed. Angela is so vitriolic and savage that it’s almost too much sometimes, to the point I almost turned the movie off.
But as the movie progresses, you get more used to it. That, and they weave Angela’s story with a movie within the movie, of a taxi driver in 1980s Romania, where life seemed like it was better, but in which the issues Angela rants about seem to be slowly creeping their way into society.
But THE reason for watching this movie is because it has what might be THE BEST scene out of any movie this year. “Scene” is a bit of a cheat word here, in that this scene is a thirty minute, uninterrupted shot of the chosen family from Angela’s auditions getting filmed for the safety video. The patriarch of the family was injured in a factory accident, and was initially invited to share his story to help encourage others to be safer. But what we see is the family, who are borderline held hostage, steadily ground down by the corporation behind the filming, their story censored again and again, until finally it’s completely fabricated. It’s a steady erosion of their free will and speech, and it’s astonishing to watch, as all of the movie’s themes come crashing down in thirty straight minutes big business taking down the innocent. It’s breathtaking to watch, and so is the movie.