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Import Export (2007)

Director: Ulrich Seidl

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3 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

With its explicit webcam sex scenes, gang-roamed Vienna shopping malls and desolate Ukrainian communist-era housing estates, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s latest provocation turns his unblinking ex-documentarist’s eye on the emotional wastelands of central Europe.

Offering a snowy Winterreise to balance his summer-scorched earlier fiction on modern alienation, debasement and youth rebellion (‘Dog Days’), Seidl broadens his geographical horizons in a cross-cutting tale of two troubled, indebted youngsters who never meet, but pass like ships in the night. At her wits’ end, Ukrainian nurse and single mum Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is on her way west; equally desperate failed guard Pauli (Paul Hofmann) has to take a job with his father-in-law, delivering gambling machines to the poorest reaches of Moldova and Ukraine.

Seidl’s confrontational cinema doesn’t make for easy viewing (it’s not intended to) and there are discomfiting sequences including some that many viewers may feel are gratuitous – not least in the depictions of violence and sex acts. His cinema can seem like a visually compelling and damning case for the prosecution – in the dock various political and social systems and the everyday fascism of the powerful – but here his critique is leavened by a more explicit and welcome direct expression of compassion and the intimacy of ritual, both sacred and profane.

Moreover, his complex, distanced sense of irony is enhanced with comedy: a cleaning company lecture on flattery and deference contrives to be touching, funny and distasteful all at the same time. Likewise cinematographer Ed Lachman’s images resonate with a bleak beauty while Seidl’s canny mix of professional and non-professional actors delivers a series of performances, major and minor, of genuinely heart-tugging truth and heartening humanity.

Author: Wally Hammond 2008-09-30 11:35:09

Time Out London Issue 1989: October 2 - 8

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User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on Feb 15 2009 13:27 The title says it all : people as commodities in the new European landscape of invisible borders It could have been called East, West as the flow of labour in the
film is both from the Ukraine to Vienna and from Vienna to the Ukraine.Seidl's directing is bleak semi-documentary. He uses a mix of amateur actorsand real people in real locations some shooting of which may have been ethically dubious: showing a site of real internet porn and the actors performing in a way that is intrusive; secondly, shooting most of the last part of the film is shot in a real alzeimer's ward in Vienna.. A real housing estate in Slovakia is shown in gory close up.
There are two parallel stories: Olga (Rak) who leaves behind her mother and young child in the Ukraine
to seek out a better life in Vienna; and a headstrong
young security guard Pauli (Hoffman) who is unemployed and on the run from loan sharks leaves Vienna to accompany his step-father on a trip delivering gumball machines in Eastern Europe.
However his lascivious step-father has other things
like the humiliation of young Ukrainian prostitutes (again real) on his mind much to his step-son’s disgust. His escape from this relationship is a sign of
hope and independence though he is still unemployed. Olga too has to demean herself-
she is abused by internet porn customers, a young boy at the home in Vienna where she is an au pair
and has to take the inferior job of a cleaner on
a geriatric ward when she is a qualified nurse. Although the scenes on the ward possibly
gruesomely voyeuristic and breach confidentiality there is dignity and warmth and redemption in her dance with the dying man. Into the real environment of post-Soviet Europe Seidl inserts fictional beings and with
the spontaneity of dialogue in his method of shooting the scenes there is a randomness which makes the viewer want to carry on watching. This is
uncomfortable viewing done in beautiful tableau-like framed scenes which draw you in. The two leads are non actors whose lives were not far from the
roles they played. There is a very real fight between Olga and the nurse which is totally spectacular
that illustrates her fighting spirit. In the last frame in
the geriatric Alzheimer’s ward there are words uttered by the dying patients like 'stink' and 'death'
(repeatedly) which are worthy of Beckett.

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Mario said...

Posted on Oct 04 2008 23:35 Aki Kaurismaki is doing it far better!

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A said...

Posted on Oct 01 2008 15:11 vgood

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