Romanian director Radu Jude is well-known for mixing high- and low-brow material. He doesn’t hold back from repurposing found footage either, as he did in Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Lucky Porn, 2021), when, in the surprising middle section of that three-part film, he edited together a sequence of YouTube videos meant to expose the ethno-nationalism and undergirding fascism of a Romanian society bordering collapse. Going further, in Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World, 2023), partially motivated by nostalgia, Jude revisits the socialist past in order to contrast it to the disappointing capitalist present, thus reevaluating how capitalism has fared in terms of social equality when compared to the previous accomplishments of the Communist regime. He does this by reusing and manipulating footage of Angela merge mai departe (Angela Goes On, dir. Lucian Bratu, 1981), a film in which an overworked taxi driver living in a patriarchal society falls for a womanizing engineer. Similar to her socialist-era counterpart, the female protagonist in Jude’s Don’t Expect… (also called Angela, and also a driver) is exploited by an Austrian video company in Bucharest while suffering the abuses of other drivers and, sometimes, her own co-workers. 

Capitalism’s hypothetical successes become even more doubtful when one considers Jude’s Opt illustrate din lumea ideală (Eight Postcards from Utopia, 2024), which premiered this year at the Locarno International Film Festival. Joined at the helm by film theorist Cristian Ferencz Flatz, Jude’s Eight Postcards… could well be read as a series of tongue-in-cheek stories appearing on the walls of Facebook groups like “Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits,” which use street photography to ridicule Eastern European cultural stereotypes. The fast-paced collage of 1990s and early 2000s TV commercials featured in Eight Postcards… exposes the confused postsocialist psyche of a nation living through the consequences of both its hilarious and frightening recent capitalist past. While Don’t Expect… illustrates the controversial outcomes of Romania’s thirty-odd years of democracy, Eight Postcards… reveals the deep-rooted causes that swerved that nation away from the egalitarian goals of early Communism and into the open arms of capitalist violence.

In that sense, Jude’s latest effort mounts a virulent criticism of capitalism, representing nothing less than an index of fetishes and fixations which, divided into eight segments, capture the core of Romania’s pathology in postsocialism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, leading these fixations is the country’s obsession with consumption. In addition to tech gadgets such as pagers and phones, which were the rage in the nineties, the Romanians in Jude’s commercials appear primarily interested in consuming interminable amounts of food. While this may not make them any different from their Western neighbors, whose commercials commonly feature snacks and drinks, the chief interest of Romanian advertisers is… meat.

Meat products in the film—whether roasted, fried, or grilled—inundate the screen. At one point, an astronaut is shown floating in a space capsule surrounded by sausages. Another commercial of questionable quality shows various diners in medieval garb ogling in disbelief at copious amounts of cooked meat displayed on a dining table in what appears to be a medieval castle. The implication is that Romanian audiences, deprived during socialism of basic foodstuffs, regard the availability of meat in capitalism as a God-sent gift. For Jude, during the disastrous reforms the country underwent in the 1990s, food was medicine for bad politics, economic depression, and governmental mismanagement. Moreover, possessing meat referenced a particular social status: he who affords meat (most of the protagonists are males, women usually being relegated to the role of sexual objects) rises quickly through the social ranks and becomes the equivalent of a local baron. Aside from criticizing consumerism, Jude and Flatz undoubtedly see the ad as a comparison between medieval warlords and the robber barons of the transition to capitalism.

From the hundreds of hours of archive materials at their disposal, the directors focus on a recurrent household item featured in 1990s commercials: the refrigerator. Sometimes shown stacked to the brim with various food items, other times shot in extreme low angles that make it appear threatening, the refrigerator exposes the Romanian obsession with and hunger for Western living standards. Coupled with primitive production qualities and ridiculous special effects, the commercials idealize Western consumer products to the point of absurdity, testifying to the Romanians’ disproportionate picture of the West. Imagined as a literal land of milk and honey at a time when Romania still had little access to consumer products, the West becomes an exoticised paradise replete with inaccuracies and misconstructions, which played a fateful part in the misguided transition to capitalism in the early 1990s. The country is still experiencing the effects of that transition, which is visible today in the media’s continuing obsession with German-made brands, for example.

Somewhere in the section focusing on food, Jude and Flatz show a clip of a news story, in which a female newscaster is accidentally shown eating a sandwich on camera. Realizing that she is on the air, she quickly apologizes and smilingly announces that shrimp is now available for purchase across the country. The directors’ tongue-in-cheek commentary on the nationwide fixation with food can also be seen in the commercial that gives the movie its poster image, in which a large group of children dressed as angels are seated at a long table in what appears to be heaven. The white sets and costumes stand out against the blue background. While the video is in fact an advertisement for a dish detergent, Jude and Flatz focus on the way the children at the table stuff their faces with chicken legs and other meat products while women wash and carry their dishes to and from the dining table.

Jude was obsessed with foodstuffs and sexism long before he made Eight Postcards from Utopia. In 2009, he directed Cea mai fericită fată din lume (The Happiest Girl in the World) about the daughter of a provincial family who goes to the capital to claim the prize of a contest she won by scraping lucky numbers off soda bottle caps. As a reward, she is invited to act in a commercial that advertises her lucky drink, which gives the viewer a taste of the exploitative nature of the advertising industry. Jude had experience in this industry, having directed himself some of the commercials he now features in Eight Postcards… In that sense, his docu acts as an expiative act of sorts for the director’s own “sins.” Ironically, the same cannot be said of the Romanians at large because, considering the disregard for social norms that characters in Bad Luck Banging… show, the same lessons seem to have been lost on much of the Romanian public.

This is the situation with the Romanians’ ongoing infatuation with wealth, for example. Oftentimes featured in tacky and kitsch depictions, money appears to be the second most important Romanian fixation. One commercial shows a stiff elderly couple receiving two heavy bundles of soiled bills from a pretty show hostess. “What will you do with it?” the hostess asks. “I will invest it in the National Investment Fund,” the elderly woman replies as if programmed by a computer, revealing the dangerous state of indoctrination which crony capitalism wrought on innocent subjects. Furthermore, various commercials show banknotes literally falling from the sky on top of automobiles, or gushing out of uncorked Champagne bottles. Seen in the company of either expensive alcohol or car brands, money becomes a fetish in the Marxian sense. This is because money is never satisfactory in itself, especially in impoverished postsocialist cultures such as this one, requiring the company of illusory wish-fulfilling assisting devices such as cars and foodstuffs. Jude and Flatz’s revisiting of these commercials illustrates the Zizekian concept that a fetish attempts to satisfy a deep-seated drive for fulfillment that in actuality, can never be fulfilled.

Like the pretty show hostess in the previous commercial, women are portrayed in absurdly sexist hypostases, while men attempt to live up to ridiculous standards of machismo. In a confectionery commercial, a woman slides onto a couch next to the aging symbol of Romanian virility, Florin Piersic, while sporting only a two-piece swimsuit and concealing her head inside a large cake. After referring to the woman as “my sweet,” Piersic takes a creamy bite from the delicious culinary product in a way resembling both kissing and cunnilingus. In other commercials, men lustfully look at female posteriors and engage in denigrating talk about women’s culturally perceived inability to drive a car. This type of portrayal feeds on a culture that ties the objectification of women to a specific sense of macho humor. Although this humor is prevalent in traditionalist postsocialist cultures, revisiting such paradoxical imagery almost thirty-five years after the revolution exposes the harmful effects of engaging with these stereotypes. Furthermore, it betrays the ingrained aggression towards women, and violence at large, which have been characterizing Romanian society since 1989, and explains the reasons for the staying power of such detrimental cultural stereotypes.

Although the documentary attempts to coat its bigotry in oftentimes ingenious humor, the result is “cringey” at best. Appearing ridiculous and embarrassing in hindsight, these commercials cast doubt on the liberalism of the 1990s, a time synonymous with hope that proved to be bitterly disappointing thereafter, particularly for the generation which pinned their hopes on capitalism. Revisiting the early postsocialist decades makes the experience even more bitter for audiences who grew up in those times, and who realize now the powerful impact these ads had and continue to have on the molding of the country’s social character. A comparison between 1990s commercials and the Romanian mediascape of today shows that the collective psyche of the nation is still in need of healing and that the perpetuation of the 1990s’ practices spells tragedy for a nation headed toward increased despair after its dolorous encounter with capitalism three decades ago.

Radu Jude is, fortunately, one of the few living Romanian directors who tackles the violent consequences of socio-economic collapse by placing them in historical context. Starting with his 19th century drama Aferim! (2015), which offers a sobering perspective on the ongoing discrimination against Roma people, Jude provided a largely apathetic Romanian public, who seems unable to wake up from capitalist slumber, with images of unmotivated violence perpetrated by citizens onto their own peers such as they appear in Bad Luck Banging… or those of the dramatized burning of the Odessa Jews in the finale of Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari (I Don’t Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, 2019). Each of these earlier Jude films, recently complemented by Don’t Expect… and Eight Postcards… represents a chronicle showing the ongoing progression of interpersonal violence and approaching disaster that ominously haunts a Romanian society on the brink of capitalist collapse.

Unlike Western cultures which developed their advertising industries over a long period of time—their own sexist stereotypes notwithstanding—the Romanian media is still clearly impacted by the erstwhile promotion of sexist, violent, and abusive behavior. Jude and Flatz imply that such practices denature humanity, particularly in a young democracy which clearly learned about capitalism from peeking over the fences of its richer and more established neighbors to the West. The directors convincingly demonstrate that Romanian media—but also socio-political—practices backtracked on their half-mouthed commitments to social equality, justice for all, and the promotion of a wholesome education that Communism achieved until 1990. Furthermore, the directors successfully show that these practices ultimately created a society that went far and beyond just copying Western capitalism: they advanced a questionable form of democracy that confused capitalism’s most decadent behaviors for progressive values. 

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Film Reviews   political cinema   radu jude   romanian cinema