Director: Radu Jude

Stars: Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Dorina Lazar, Nina Hoss, Uwe Boll

Romanian writer-director Jude’s follow-up to ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ is a typically anarchic, discursive, sprawling satire on workplace culture and vulture capitalism, dotted with moments of insight and brilliance, and soundtracked to a combination of Romanian Hip Hop and polka-style turbo-folk. The excellent Ilinca Manolache is Angela, a brassily amiable, overworked runner for a production company, driving around Bucharest in search of subjects to appear in a workplace accident video they are producing for an exploitative Austrian corporation. Taking breaks in her sixteen-hour working days, she records TikTok videos using a filter, to play a bald, monobrowed Andrew Tait-style obnoxious misogynist called Bobita. If anyone takes exception, she tells them that Bobita is extreme satire ‘like Charlie Hebdo’. Jude audaciously interrupts the black-and-white rendered action by inserting scenes from Lucian Bratu’s Ceaușescu-era 1981 film, the sunny and colourful ‘Angela Goes On,’ in which a lovelorn taxi driver, also called Angela, encounters a variety of male customers, making fascinating parallels and distinctions between the two eras. That film’s star Dorina Lazar cameos as a grandmother in Radu’s picture, as does pugilistic, but surprisingly avuncular German director Ewe Boll playing himself. The scattershot satire is illuminated by a wealth of asides and references from Godard to Goethe. The two-and-three-quarter-hour running time is demanding but Radu beautifully wraps the picture up with a bravura darkly comic one-shot sequence in which Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan), a wheelchair-user selected for the safety video for the Austrian company, attempts to deliver a heartfelt monologue to camera.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm