We’d previously watched a film by Romanian director Radu Jade that was shocking and felt unique but I didn’t like it too much. This one about a female production assistant who also moonlights as a manosphere influencer at first looks to be similar shock cinema. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a better grasp of EU affairs or because I just understood more of the references, but I soon realized what a brilliantly sarcastic film this is. It says so much about the current state of life in Romania and its complicated relationship with the EU, and as such I’d strongly recommend this.

Angela is an overworked and underpaid production assistant who lives in Bucharest. She drives around all day on assignment for her bosses, with the latest one being making casting videos for work safety project for an Austria-based multinational company. The candidates are all former employees of the company who have been badly injured in the course of their work and the company wants to make a video of them urging others to comply with safety rules. She drives atrociously through the busy streets of the city, often flipping her finger and cursing others on the road. She also stops to make TikTok videos, applying a poorly working filter to appear as a man. In them, she takes on the online persona of an Andrew Tate-adjacent manosphere influencer, using profanity and crude jokes to disparage women. Interspersed throughout are short clips from a time before the fall of Communism. These show the life of a taxi driver also named Angela as she drives through many of the same locations. Coincidentally among the candidates the modern day Angela meets is a wheelchair-bound man who is the older Angela’s son.

The crude black and white imagery that the film opens with is hardly very appealing, and it only gets worse when Angela holds her phone up and starts spouting insane toxic shit that shocks even me. She lies outrageously, about being friends with Prince Charles for example, and her filter fails so often that you wonder how this fake persona could ever be convincing. Yet watch carefully and you can notice that there’s more to her than initial impressions. Every time she visits the home of one the injured workers, and it is inevitably a run-down home in a poorer neighborhood, she is unfailingly courteous. When she stops to grab a kebab for lunch and is approached by a beggar, she gives him and some money and even berates the shop owner when he shoos away the beggar. Then she takes on her online persona and makes a racist tirade about beggars in the streets. She turns out to be well-read and intellectually curious. When she says that her TikTok videos are just a way to relax and stay sane, I believe her and the humor comes from the videos being so deliberately bad that no one should ever take them seriously. The director does a terrific job at making Angela a sympathetic figure after all.

The core of the film is Romania’s relationship with the EU. As the executive from the Austrian head office observes, Romania remains the poorest country in the EU even as it has become immeasurably wealthier since it joined the union. But the dependance on EU wealth naturally generates resentment as the Romanians scramble to please their bosses. The perfect illustration of this the ring tone of Angela’s phone, Ode to Joy, which is of course the EU anthem. Every time we hear it, it is her bosses giving her more work until she just stops answering the phone. Jade contrasts the scenes of the traffic-choked streets of modern Budapest with the ones in which the older Angela leisurely cruises through the same street in her taxi. These scenes are brighter and cheerier. Does the director mean to imply that things were better under Communism? Probably not as the characters are critical of the Ceaușescu regime. A montage shows nothing but a succession of crosses of those who have died on a specific road that is dangerous for lack of investment. But it does show the duality of being part of the EU.

There’s so much more to this film than I can cover here, how everyone around Angela seems to know about her awful online persona and tolerates it, her sexual relationship with an older man in which she behaves exactly like the slut she condemns in her videos, how casually the Austrian company skirts over its own exploitation of Romanian workers and resources, a cameo by Uwe Boll with the implication of how his films were made with EU funds and much more. Yes, it’s deliberately provocative, gratuitously shocking and longer than you might expect. But it’s also intelligently written, highly topical to the current state of the EU and darkly funny. It’s great stuff.