Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s an Austrian film, Import/Export,a grim portrait of life in Europe for the poor and powerless. It also contains explicit sexual situations. You’ve been warned.
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Next week’s film: Stalker
Reviews of Import/Export:
Letterboxd says:
With every Seidl film I see—this being my fourth—I’m becoming a bigger fan. I instantly responded to his unique mix of minimalism and eccentricity, bleakness and humor. He stages his scenes with such clarity of vision, everything in the frame tells a story, everything has a history, and there’s always a perfect balance of objects and emptiness. There is always so much space left. It feels like a space reserved for us, for the audience to reflect in, to come up with our own interpretations, to blend our own stories into his. He never tells you what to see or feel, and I appreciate that. The way he can express a complicated emotion or the absurdities of our existence with just an image is truly masterful. Many moments reminded me of classical paintings, religious paintings even. The old Catholicism just comes through, which I know is another reason why I relate to the director, and to Austrian film in general. They’ve got their faith in their bones and let it wreck them or lift them up. Sometimes both.
and
After the screening director Ulrich Seidl told the audience that he is convinced that the Latin phrase “Homo homini lupus est” rings true for all human interaction: man is a wolf to his fellow man.
The film was shot in sequence and on location in Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Ukraine. It is full of memorable scenes that have stuck with me even though it’s more than three years ago that I have last seen it.
One sequence takes place in an abandoned, dilapidated socialist housing project that has been taken over by Roma. The building does not have plumbing anymore and the garbage does not get collected, so all waste goes out the windows. This “set-piece”, a place that exists in reality, imbues the scene with a sense of dread that I have rarely experienced in a film.
In spite of Seidl’s bleak worldview his masterpiece Import/Export is a cloud with a silver lining. Even though our protagonists have to endure hardships there is still hope for betterment or a new beginning. Even though there are scenes that are very hard to watch it is all worth it in the end.
Eye for Film says:
Seidl’s Import/Export, for all its slender storyline, exposes uncomfortable boundaries between fiction and fly-on-the-wall documentary – and it’s no half-hearted experiment. Shocking yet beautiful, the film seamlessly blends real people’s lives with those of the story’s protagonists, as Seidl sincerely questions our understanding of what might be acceptable. And then kicks it home with a vengeance. As you wince at the relentless coldness, graphic sexuality, or the bodily functions of an Alzheimer’s patient, the film twists the screw. Yes, this is not only realistic, it is real. Maybe too real. It is happening. And much as you might struggle in the early stages, it is undeniably Art.
Yet rather than voicing a triumph of style over substance, Seidl succeeds in gripping the audience from moment to moment, through more than two and a half hours of unpredictably fascinating events. I admit I half expected a punctuated boredom from what is an inconsequential plot. But I experienced one of the more captivatingly fresh films of the year.
My take: A dark and disturbing film. First of all are the class issues. Both of the protagonists are working low paying dead end jobs at the start of the film. They both leave their respective countries looking for a better life. They both endure burdensome power differentials, humiliation, and precarity.
The film’s visuals tell a similar story. Snowy, bleak vistas dominate the scenery alongside visions of poverty blasted housing complexes and ratty bars. Garbage plays a role as well. One particularly powerful and depressing scene involves gumballs and and a horde of feral children. This stuck with me long after finishing the film, perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a film.
In general, themes of debt, ethnic bigotries, and family issues are woven through the sparse storyline. Some have criticized this sparseness but I think it adds another dimension to the film. The protagonists lives are sparse, devoid of hope or substance. A final note is the comparison of a wealthy country versus a poor one. How do both of them manage to produce such similarly bitter conditions for their citizens?
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Notable Actors: Ekateryna Rak, Paul Hoffman
Plot (Spoilers!):
Olga is from Eastern Ukraine. She lives with her mother and her child, working as a nurse for scant pay. In an effort to make ends meet she takes a job doing internet porn.
She knows this is a dead end situation. So she packs up a suitcase and leaves for Austria where a friend can help her get on her feet. Her first job is as a live-in nanny but that goes awry when her suspicious and domineering boss accuses her of theft. She then lands a job as a hospital cleaner where she endures humiliation and dashed hopes.
In a kind of mirror image, Pauli is a young Austrian who is down on his luck. He has lost his job as a security guard, his girlfriend has dumped him, and he owes everyone money. His stepfather gets him a crappy job as a gambling machine installer and the pair make their way to Ukraine to install the machines. Along the way they encounter a hellish Romani neighborhood where poverty and prostitution abound. After a drunken night at a seedy Ukrainian bar, Pauli becomes disgusted with his stepfather and strikes out on his own looking for pick-up work.
