Meet Bobita. Bobita is a foul-mouthed, Andrew Tate-loving misogynist with a bald head and goatee who brags about his Maserati and pretends to roar as the MGM lion saying “Blow me.” He is also the alter ego of Romanian
Actress Ilinca Manolache, and the alter ego of her character in Radu Jude’s new film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World , out now in limited release . In the film Manolache plays Angela, an overworked and exhausted production assistant, who drives around Bucharest trying to recruit victims of on-the-job accidents to appear in a PSA for an exploitative company. Every so often she stops and makes a video as Bobita, standing on the side of the road or in bathrooms to turn the camera on herself as she describes sex acts in wildly profane ways. While most of the film is in black and white, Bobita appears in glorious color. It’s utterly hilarious, and one of the most unique uses of
Social Media aesthetics in a film to date. Manolache, who mostly works in Romanian theater, came up with Bobita in 2021 near the end of COVID-19 lockdown. Frustrated by the largely conservative theater scene, she was itching to make something personal and was inspired by a series of videos that Margaret Qualley made with the writer and director Miranda July. Manolache found the filter for Bobita on Snapchat. Ilinca Manolache Courtesy of MUBI “My idea was to recycle this type of toxic, hideous language that men use in order to dominate us and in order to humiliate us,” she says. “I wanted to recycle that to empower myself somehow.” At first the feedback was not positive from her colleagues in theater, who found it “cringe” and recoiled at the language she was using. Even her mother, also an actress, was not on board. Not everyone was dismissive however. “There were some feminist voices around me,
Friends, artists, who embraced my small project,” she says. They participated in her dialogues on
Instagram. One person who took notice was Jude. Manolache had appeared in the director’s films before, including a small role in his most recent Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn . Jude wanted to center her in his next project and he was a fan of Bobita. Manolache left Jude alone to write what would become Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World , a wild
comedy about the drain of capitalism that incorporates Bobita and clips from a 1981 Romanian film about a woman driving a cab. When Jude gave the script to Manolache upon completion, she was completely smitten. “I was reading page after page and I was so represented by what he wrote,” she says. “It was so complex and so punk.” Bobita was initially purely a creation of Manolache, but for the purposes of the new film he became a collaboration. Jude wrote all of Bobita’s rants for the screen. Manolache focused mainly on toxic masculinity in her take on Bobita, Jude gave him opinions on religion and politics. He also calls the
Queen of
England the c-word and the writer Muriel Spark a “skank.” At one point, Angela encounters the combative German director Uwe Boll and makes a video as Bobita with him as they tell viewers to “fuck off.” Ilinca Manolache Courtesy of MUBI Although Manolache isn’t exactly like Angela—for one, she has more privilege—they both use Bobita as an outlet. “I created Bobita from a rage,” she says. “I felt it was like a duty to put this content out there, because I was very hurt by this social dynamic. And for Angela even though it’s her free time it’s also a way of empowering herself. I think we are almost the same with small differences.” It’s also fun, Manolache explains, to speak in Bobita’s voice, because it is clearly an over-the-top caricature of a certain type of disgusting masculinity. Manolache picked the specific filter she uses to play Bobita specifically because of how ridiculous it made her look, and in Do Not Expect Too Much you can see her slipping in and out of it as she moves her head and her long blond hair sticking out the back of Bobita’s bald head. “I wanted to make it clear that I don’t endorse this type of approach,” she says. “Because this filter was making me in a way funny and ridiculous it also made the text and what I was saying also ridiculous.” Manolache is still making videos as Bobita, in part to promote Do Not Expect Too Much , but they haven’t changed in tone. When the film played at the AFI Film Festival, Bobita even took to the streets of
Los Angeles talking about how he wanted to have sex with Heather Locklear . But it’s not just about the jokes: Manolache feels like she has a duty to continue doing Bobita as an act of satirical resistance. “Now we are related,” she says. “I never expected international impact. I’m really proud of it.”