Back to Back 41 - Sucks to Be Me
Comparing stories of girls doing crappy media jobs in crappy meaningless media
To the Ends of the Earth (2019) - writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) - writer/director Radu Jude
Genre: Satirical slice-of-life comedy-dramas set in the world of ultra-low-quality media
I'm sure many people noticed that around 2019, just before the end of ‘normal life’, in those quaint times when it was possible to have ‘issues’ that didn’t involve terminal existential crises, there was a small wave of movies about young women in crappy marginal jobs in media companies and the drudgery and danger of their day to day lives. Many people asked themselves: why all this concern about exploited women in the media industry? Me too.
2019 saw two prominent examples, and though their ambience was very different, their flavour of near-horror was undeniable. There was The Assistant, directed by Kitty Green, in which nearly all the action happens within the confines of a single office over a single day. Its claustrophobic dread builds up to a non-climax, as the protagonist, who has been subjected to considerable verbal bullying but no sexual harrassment by her predator boss, a successful movie producer, is brusquely informed that she's not his type.
That was a devastating piece of near-horror where all circumstantial objects and sounds seemed like accomplices to a dreadful crime, where the photocopier was in league with the coffee-maker to silence and intimidate the central character. No horror, no actual physical threat, ever materializes in her space, though she catches plenty of glimpses of things happening in her office. It’s a film we have to pair with other psych-out chillers of indoor low-key menace, and will come up soon enough.
But the contrast with the one we will consider, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, is clear enough: though there is a sense of menace at times, in fact this is unmerited, a fear in the protagonist’s mind caused by her isolation and fear of the Other. She is disrespected and treated like shit by her boss, but never placed in physical or sexual jeopardy. Her imaginings of danger lurking in the glances of all these strange men are revealed as false.
Often the real danger to a vulnerable young woman is not the scary-looking foreigner way out in a desert land whose words and gestures are difficult to follow, but the familiar dad-like form in that homey office with its rest spaces and fresh-brewed coffee. Terror seen in the familiar is almost the dictionary definition of uncanny (unheimlich) given by Freud, and it corresponds closely to the discomfort generated by The Assistant.
Kurosawa isn’t going to go for that kind of horror at all, but rather parody a childish variation of the slasher genre in a few select sequences. The real business of his film will be to show a character in effect self-isolating (the phrase hadn’t become a thing in the pre-terminal times when the film was made. The film abounds with images of its protagonist alone and disconnected in her world.
Early Kiyoshi Kurosawa films are clearly about something - about terror, alienation, solitude, displacement, all wrapped in a genre coating of horror or noir and presented as a unitary thing. Later Kurosawa films are also about something, but what that something actually is becomes a lot harder to put your finger on. At times, like in the case of this film, it's so diffuse that it's practically not there. I would say that like so many of his films it also gets its teeth into alienation and solitude, but from that particular perspective of a very young person in our time, so the feelings are almost unaware of themselves.
The protagonist, Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), is a very young woman working as a TV presenter for some terminally crappy travelogue show which is making a report about the Central Asian 'double-landlocked' country of Uzbekistan (double-landlocked means that not only that country is landlocked, all the other countries around it are landlocked too, a distinction it shares only with tiny Lichtenstein). One of the hilarious understated elements of humour in this piece is that the TV crew is completely uninterested in the culture of the country, instead looking for wacky curiosities like monstrous fish or extreme fairground rides, that 'make good TV'.
So in Samarkand they drive right past the breathtaking Registan Square in search of a bowl of undercooked rice. How a visit to a crappy no-star restaurant makes better TV than an exploration of some of the most beautiful buildings in the world is just one of the many misjudgements made by the director, a nonentity called Yoshioka (Shota Sometani), who seems to be on the way to creating the worst video travelogue in history. Other opportunities to actually make something interesting come and go, most notably the story of how Japanese POWs created a wonderful theatre in Tashkent. Yoshioka, probably correctly sensing that any story about Japanese POWs in World War II is career death for a director in Japanese TV, passes on this unique opportunity.
Because Yoshioka the talentless director is in a sense the most important character in this story, moreso even than protagonist Yoko whose experiences we follow, despite being on the periphery most of the time. Yoshioka as the project's director is the one with agency, a clear stand-in or alter ego for Kurosawa. He is also astonishingly young, (in fact the actor is two years younger than the very girlish Maeda) and has absolutely no feeling for the history or culture of the place which he is nominally exploring.
His only interaction with the local people is to thrust money at them so they do what he wants, a perfect embodiment of the neocolonial bossman, indifferent to the people he is exploiting for his own ends. There's a suspicion that the locations he visits are so tacky and low-rent because he's scamming the expense accounts, claiming to visit a wonderful restaurant, for example, while going to a cheap eatery without enough firewood to cook the rice.
Yoshioka, this anti-Kurosawa, also leads a film crew with the most casually toxic and careless attitude to their ostensible star that you could imagine. Even though they really can't shoot any footage without her, they often forget Yoko when they go out, forcing her to try to catch up on local buses or rides on mopeds begged from the locals. She has to change outfits in the crew bus in full view of gawping passers-by. When a surly fisherman refuses to take her on a fishing trip because she's a woman, loser Yoshioka says nothing.
This constant negligent callousness towards her - because she's young, because she's a woman - is both a source of dark comedy and of awkward near-horror, as Yoko's abandonment puts the naïve and vulnerable youngster in some potentially very threatening situtations. It comes to a head when she is forced to ride repeatedly on a nasty-looking fairground attraction that she clearly hates and is nauseated by. The fairground owner pleads with director Yoshioka to let her step out and rest, but the arsehole ignores him and forces her to go on.
The most significant strand in the story is about miscommunication. Obviously Yoko is unable to communicate much with the local people, attempts to express something in broken English not getting very far. Her fear and alienation as a lone woman, apparently vulnerable in a foreign land, builds and builds. But is it really justified, or is it a product of her unwillingness to communicate? When Uzbek interpreter Temur (Adiz Rajabov) engages her in friendly conversation, she stonewalls, unable to believe anything good will come of this connection. So she remains just as isolated in the country as the stupid director Yoshioka, she by insecurity, he by arrogance.
A final plot element or theme is the need for communication in the contemporary way, by smartphone and text. Uzbekistan apparently has patchy wifi, and so Yoko resorts to doing that most twentieth-century of things, sending a postcard, to communicate with her boyfriend back in Tokyo. The moment when she writes a postcard, buys a stamp, posts it in the box, is in fact the most alien moment for her, a jarring trip into the past.
For the most part the film follows a realist, documentary approach. But there are two moments when Yoko's sense of joy is such that it breaks through that realist drama genre and we are in the musical. I've seen reviews that complain of this 'taking us out of the story' strategy of erupting into a whole new genre unexpectedly, so we find ourselves in a low-budget but sincere pastiche of The Sound of Music (1965). It clearly indicates that not everything in this apparently straightforward 'reality' drama is as straightforward as all that.
But did those same people complaining about musicals notice that we've also had a detour into the horror-slasher movie genre with even less justification? Or maybe their willingness to accept the pulse-racing excitement of the slasher film without anything to motivate it says something about their readiness to accept foreigners who don't speak their language as scary monsters, given the right amount of musical and filmic prodding? Are the viewers in fact just as naive and alienated from reality as the 'final girl' Yoko?1
— INTERMISSION —
The film is… mercurially paradoxical: crass and sublime, trashy and sophisticated, headbanging and highbrow. This is a raucously entertaining and provocative piece, its sociopolitical antennas acutely tuned to our present moment and twitching with comic fury.
Jonathan Romney, Financial Times, 7 March 2024
The resemblances between the previous film and this one are really quite striking, but much moreso in circumstances than in tone. For if Kurosawa’s film is gently sardonic, a sophisticated kind of satire that doesn’t get anyone very upset, and isn’t even recognised as satire by those being satirized, this one goes all out to offend delicate sensibilities, while being perhaps even more sophisticated than Kurosawa’s. Its apparent crudity is gross and repulsive and very funny indeed.
When one of the side characters, witnessing protagonist Angela filming her foul-mouthed rants in favour of strongman Putin, asks “aren’t you afraid they’ll label you a Putinist”, she replies “I hope there are still some intelligent people around.” So the target audience is defined: those who have enough intelligence to recognize satire for what it is, and those who aren’t offended by some rather uncouth manners. But The End of the World does not require good manners.
Angela II (Ilinca Manolache) knows that. She's a young PA, beyond overworked, getting up at 5.50 to drive around Bucharest all day doing crappy errands for a boss who doesn't always pay her. A couple of days in her life serves as subject-matter for a punkish look at Romania and beyond, at the whole dystopian neoliberal mess we're in, a bit like Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You (2019) but swapping out the solemn melodrama and bringing in a cynical black humour that maybe serves just as well to protest at what we've become in this endstate phase of capitalism.
To let off steam she makes Insta and TikTok vids where a filter lets her become an Andrew Tate pastiche, a foul-mouthed vulgarian who describes how he likes to double team gas station sluts with King Charles of England. Naturally the aged monarch has to lick arseholes because the old Windsor todger isn't up to the job of coital pentration any longer. A bit disrespectful, but it's the end of the world, and you can't expect too much reverence at this time.
As she goes about her job, driving around and nearly falling asleep every other minute, the film intercuts with a Communist-era film showing the life of Angela I, a taxi driver who also drives around all day. The contemporary life of Angela II is shot in grainy black-and-white video, while the far-off Cold War life of Angela I is shot in nice 1982 colour film stock, a neat reversal from the usual flashback-in-monochrome convention. If it's to suggest that modern life in neoliberal Romania is actually worse, more tacky and more alienating, than in Ceaușescu-era Romania, it does a good job.
During her travels she will actually meet Angela I, a kindly old lady who tells her tragicomic life story before presenting her son, yet another accident victim auditioning for the role of cautionary tale in the industrial safety video. Angela I is shocked that though her taxi driving job was badly paid, it at least had insurance and a pension, while Angela II's second job, an Uber driving gig, gets nothing like that. Neither does her main job, come to think of it.
At one point she gets to visit a set where schlock-meister Eurotrash director Uwe Boll is shooting some space-crap on green screen. It's a meeting of minds since both Angela II and Mr Boll are great believers in the power of the "fuck you" to maintain morale in the face of adversity. Angela I makes a video with her monobrowed Andy Tate alter-ego to that effect. After all, since Romania traded its steady poverty under dictatorship for the freedom to starve, you might as well make full use of that freedom before the world ends.
It's a haphazard-looking episodic tale, a picaresque piece with many encounters scattered throughout Angela II's exhausting working day. Apart from the Communist-era film protagonist and the Eurotrash filmmaker, she meets a clutch of impoverished families, her Mum, a property developer just back from mindfulness class, gravediggers, roadraging drivers, beggars, an indifferent German executive descended from Goethe, and some absolute raging bellends from the media industry. She will pull into a driveway and try to grab a nap, watched over by a flag of the fascist Romanian Iron Guard. Her Tate-a-like character will make a pro-Putin vid. It's all a bit of a mishmash, but hey, it's the end of history, so don't expect too much.
It's a hilarious and scathing portrait of the absolute grinding stupidity of now, done with great attention to the nowness of it all. Covid, the Ukraine war, the merciless price-gouging by companies using the war as an excuse to boost profits, the death of Godard - the master guiding spirit of this project - all that wonderful 2022-2023 stuff makes the final cut.
It ends with an extended sequence of them shooting the video the day after Angela II's runaround. Meanwhile their Austrian overlords are sending in text instructions on how to make the video and which bits of script to cut because they're too embarassing to the company. In the end the worker safety video becomes a pathetic pastiche of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video as the dispirited family of the accident victim become more frustrated and bored. Finally everybody drops the act and just wanders off, not worrying about what the paymasters think any more: "fuck those bastards"
That was the state of the idiocy in as 2022 came to an end and 2023 got started. Obviously, as we all know, things just got better and better since then. I'm expecting a lot of good things going forward. I’m expecting a lot.
SPOILER/FAN THEORY DISCUSSION: This whole question of what the intromission of the musical genre at the very ending really means might lead us to question whether in fact the whole final part of the film, following her return to the hotel after the police station, is in fact her fantasy. Let’s recap: In very short order she gets a phone call from her partner saying he’s OK (in a room that previously had patchy WiFi), so that’s all solved, then she sees the asshole director Yoshioka leave for Tokyo and gets to direct her own documentary (even the surly fisherman is somehow amenable now). Then as a finale to all that, she enters a clean fertile land, leaving the harsh desert behind, and witnesses ‘her’ goat living happily in the greenery. At this point her joy is such that she breaks into song - just as she did in the theatre, a clear fantasy sequence which she herself described as “being in a dream”.
I'm finding the latter film damn intriguing!
I quite enjoyed To the Ends of the Earth. If we're asking what it's about, I think that, in addition to what you said, it's also about how travel -- even the most contrived, commercialized travel specifically to make a tv documentary -- can involve at least a few moments of real encounter with another place, another culture, how something authentic can leak through.