“Do Not Count on…” culminates in a masterfully executed sequence that distills the movie’s themes right into a single, unbroken shot—ostensibly the uncooked footage from the PSA—the place a poor household is manipulated into undermining their very own pursuits in bleakly humorous style. The street there is stuffed with small indignities and absurd ironies, peppered with pop-culture references (together with a surreal cameo from one Dr. Uwe Boll) and fueled by the power drinks Angela gulps to remain awake. These scenes are woven in with footage from the 1981 Romanian movie “Angela Drives On,” during which a earlier era’s Angela (Dorina Lazar) lives a much less hectic, if not essentially higher, life as a taxi driver in Ceaușescu’s Bucharest.
The place Jude’s earlier characteristic, “Unhealthy Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” may very well be didactic at occasions, “Do Not Count on…” slips its knife between the viewers’s ribs with such talent that the severity of the harm isn’t apparent at first. All through the movie, Angela listens to the radio at an ear-splitting quantity as she drives round. Within the first half, the content material of the lyrics—get cash, fuck bitches, social gathering—performs like a touch upon the coarseness of our period. Then, afterward, a passenger asks Angela to show the music down. She apologizes and says that she would, however she’s afraid she’ll go to sleep on the wheel if she does. What seems to be shallow indulgence is definitely a survival mechanism.
Nihilistic hedonism additionally appears to be the driving issue behind the movie’s most cryptic component: Angela’s on-line alter ego, Bobita. A shit-talking misogynist who namedrops Andrew Tate and worships Vladimir Putin, bald, male Bobita is the crudest and most obnoxious component of a world outlined by its crudity—a signature of Jude’s movies that additionally appeared in “Unhealthy Luck Banging.” A few of Angela’s pals and colleagues discover Bobita amusing. Others don’t. When pressed about what she’s going for with all of this, Angela fumes: “I’m like Charlie Hebdo, sucker!”
Does she imply that? Does it matter? Certain, she’s happening TikTok and calling all girls whores. However the larger evil is going on behind the scenes, by good individuals who have all types of good rationalizations about how the employees they’re exploiting are actually at fault, as a result of they let themselves be exploited. In such soil, how might something however a vulgar flower develop?
