A grim and disturbing vision from Ulrich Seidl, makes for an uncomfortable and uncompromising picture of life, that is anything but comfy and pedestrian.
A grim and disturbing vision from Ulrich Seidl, makes for an uncomfortable and uncompromising picture of life, that is anything but comfy and pedestrian.
Director Ulrich Seidl's despairing, relentlessly downbeat social drama Import/Export unfolds against the backdrop of contemporary Europe. Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a single mother struggling to raise her child with a very meager income from her nursing job in a Ukrainian hospital. In desperation, she takes a job as a nude webcam model for an adult entertainment outfit that caters to German men, then quickly decides that life in her town is unbearable, and ultimately leaves her child with her
mother, heading west to search for a better life. Meanwhile, in Austria, ne'er-do-well loser Pauli (Paul Hofmann) lives with his mother and his greasy-haired stepfather, Michael (Michael Thomas), to whom he's increasingly indebted. Pauli is training to be a security guard, but gets stripped, then relentlessly beaten and assaulted by a gang of youths. Eventually, Pauli and Michael hit the road together, delivering poker and gumball machines to locations across Eastern Europe, and Michael reveals a truly degenerate side, using his time on the road for a string of sexual encounters with different women. At the same time, Olga makes her way to Austria, enduring a series of occupations including those of au pair, maid, and eventually, charwoman in a geriatric hospital plagued by mistreatment of the elderly. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
A tawdry little film ostensibly about the cultural clashes resulting from the proximity of former Soviet states, such as the Ukraine, to western nations such as Austria. There is a film to be made on the topic, but this isn't it.
Technically, the sedate yet stunning 35mm camera is there for the ride and somehow never imposes or dominates the content. And the result is a true triumph.
The titular backslash of Import/Export turns out to be a vast geographical schism, crossed only intermittently by thin strands of mutual emotional anguish.
Seidl is a special talent, reared on documentary and determined to get near the truth with a placidly baleful eye. You are at liberty to hate or admire his work - but you can scarcely ignore it.
At times it feels like a continuation of Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever in its catalogue of injustices and humiliations, yet, against the odds, it rewards your endurance.
The Austrian miserablist who gave us Dog Days - sharper and more mischievous in its portrait of exurbia's human excreta - delivers an essay in symmetrical despondence that seems both tidy and empty, like a trash can after street-cleaning.
Import Export is a work of the utmost political importance. It is also, in its rigour and fearlessness, its sorrow and pitilessness, an outstanding artistic achievement.
The story takes place in both Ukraine and Austria and focuses on 2 lives of very different people who share a similar circumstance of being at the end of the line in the place that they live in. Both seek change and their circumstances take very different shapes and fates but share a similar intention, to find a better
life.
The director and writer give us little hope in their depiction of 2 lives and how their environments constantly conspire to either keep them down or challenge their will to survive and change. It is a story at once about Eastern Europe and a story about the world's 'lower classes' and their monumental struggle against inertia and their past. It is a movie filled with images, humor, highs and lows, and, graphic scenes of sexual play that all add to the base quality of the human experience that exists not only in Eastern Europe, but, many place in the world.
April 9, 2009
Dean McKenna
Super Reviewer
Brutally vivid analysis of East/West relations today with an unsparingly honest portrayal of the bleak situations the two main protagonists find themselves in. Easier to admire and learn from than enjoy, however.
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