Ulrich Seidl
Import/Export

Come on! There's not even a single review on Ulrich Seidl!
And to think he is one of the most mind-blowing talents in European cinema, beloved by Werner Herzog and a constant presence at the most important festivals. Someone who has paid his dues and managed to develop his own vision, a very difficult feat now that, after almost one hundred and twenty years of cinema, our gaze has been overwhelmed by stimuli, styles, trends, and images of infinite variety.
Yet Seidl has made it: he has managed to carve out his own, unsettling attitude.

Starting as a documentarian and transitioning to fiction, after many years of work, with the not-so-successful but fascinating "Models" (1998) and gaining international recognition with the shocking "Dog Days" - the only film of his to receive a fleeting Italian distribution -, he has made a name for himself also with the (splendid) recent "Paradies" trilogy ("Paradise: Love", "Paradise: Faith" and the masterpiece "Paradise: Hope"). Seidl has imposed himself with an incurable misanthropy in depicting the wickedness and ugliness of humanity as a whole. 

Ulrich doesn't care about heartthrobs or magnetic screen presences. His actors are shown in all their flaws: their bodies, naked, are thrust in front of the camera. Better if they're fat, flabby, rotting, and empty. Naked men and women, young and old, without substance, without a core, and without personality. Corpses trapped in degrading and alienating static frames, dripping with discomfort, sadness, nostalgia, and even tenderness (on this note, I invite those of you who are more informed to take a look at his terrifying and controversial documentary on zoophilia "Animal Love"). 

But where should one start to understand his poetics? Certainly with "Import/Export", the 2007 feature film which I see as his apex. A double story of loneliness that narrates the vicissitudes of a beautiful Ukrainian girl, a talented nurse with a passion for her job and a desire to help others, seeking her fortune in Austria to provide her little daughter with a better life, and an Austrian boy, an aspiring bodyguard with no hope for the future, landing in Ukraine alongside a perverted father more immature than he is.

Two and a half hours in which these fragile lives are narrated with disturbing degradation. And so the poor protagonist, though an honest person with strong values, finds herself forced to sell her body in squalid and sterile peep shows before finally finding work in an Austrian hospital where, nevertheless, she finds herself once again a victim. This time not of misogyny, but of xenophobia. There is no hope in this world even for the male protagonist: tied to an adulterous father who wishes to turn him into a well-rounded man, but only in the sexual sphere. 
Both continue, fragile, like flesh ghosts in search of a stable place, a protective shell, an unattainable oasis. 

And if the plot gives you an idea of what the film might be like (a story of losers to exploit social critiques?), you're on the wrong track: it's not your typical lecture from a serious auteur: Seidl's cinema is surgical, detached, cold, and without hope.
A cinema where human beings become commercial exchanges, bodies imported and exported, turned into objects...the important thing is that they have a useful purpose, that they work. A cinema where there are no feelings, because they are tied to the past.
What keeps the director from falling into the trap of compassion is his colossal and alienating black humor. A misanthropic cynicism that resides in every frame, building to a climax until the hallucinatory finale.

Psychotic, depressing, and extraordinary, "Import/Export" is a two and a half hour concentrate that flows like a breath, but weighs like a boulder. Unmissable.