Import/Export (2007)

This is a statement which may apply to the two central characters in this movie, but it also fits audiences. This film here runs for almost 2.5 hours and is another work from director/writer Ulrich Seidl together with his wife. Back when this came out 8 years ago, he was among Austria's most known filmmakers and today he probably is even more, also thanks to his Paradise trilogy. One interesting thing about "Import/Export" is that most of the actors were absolutely new to the acting industry and same goes for the two central actors. Hofmann had a couple more performances afterward, but not a whole lot and for Rak this is still the only credit to this day. Maybe this is also why many of the characters and their dialogs seem so authentic as this is the only role they have ever prepared themselves for. Pretty good writing here and also excellent line delivery for the most part. I am not surprised this film got a nomination at Cannes.The story centers around an Austrian security employee who travels East and a Ukrainian nurse / cleaning lady who travels the exact different direction. At one point they meet and the story is connected. We watch their struggles, mostly professional, but also occasionally involving their privates lives. There is some Austrian dialect in this film, but you can understand it if you are a native German speaker. It is not that heavy. This film is basically about life going on. Most of the time it is very slow, but occasionally significant events happen. Seidl uses static camera frequently, so we feel as if we are in the room with the main characters watching them. There's some obscenity and nudity and, in one scene, a woman gets mistreated and pulled on her hair, just like a dog, so it's not always easy to watch and probably not a movie for feminists. But it's very raw and realistic and I do not have any major criticisms. A minor one would be that I do not like the main poster that much. It's a bit attention seeking with the top half and as the bottom half belongs to the female plot as well, I believe they should have split it into one for the guy, one for the girl. But this does not have to do directly with the film either, so I certainly recommend watching this.

I'm not sure if Austrian film maker Ulrich Seidl makes the best use of the extended study of duality between two seemingly random; seemingly disconnected European people plodding on through their lives as he might'v done, in this, his 2008 film Import/Export. As characters, his two leads are motivated and ultimately somewhat decent folk, particularly when placed up against those they spend the majority of their time with, but folk we feel are stuck in an inescapable world of sleaze; violence and discomfort. They travel their continent looking for incident and such in order to advance their existences, but are mostly always greeted with pain; frustration; antagonism and failure – happenings and the like which, whilst often carrying with them degrees of smut which we rightfully find uncomfortable, stick it in a break it off for good measure. The film is good value for its early part; Seidl's piece probably about thirty or so minutes too long, and where the equal balance between either strand felt in place for the first hour, such a parity vanishes by the time his heroine has reached that of a hospital and the whole things beds down into a near infuriating drama peppered with content we begin to question the need of.The film follows that of two people, one male and one female; one of whom is Paul (Hofmann), an athletic young Austrian living in an apartment whose spare room is rife with items such as boxing gloves; gym equipment and military webbing, and whose interest in such things extends to the fact he maintains a job in security at a local shopping mall demanding constant athleticism through its rigorous training regime. Olga (Rak), a young Ukrainian woman, works in her drab in-appearance; colourless; snowy homeland as a nurse in a hospital, but grows frustrated at her low wages which causes her to head west. This is in sync with around about the same time Paul decides to go in the opposite direction, specifically towards Slovakia, for various reasons linked to his failed relationship with a girlfriend and problems in owing money to some unscrupulous people.Principally, the film is about the apparent duality prominent between these two people; how, in spite of gender, nationality and differing backgrounds of living in the nations of Austria and Ukraine respectively, two people can wade through similar, if not identical, mires purely so as to reach similar denouements. Perhaps if they'd somehow bumped into each other in this wacky, mixed up world, they'd have been able to solve some of one another's problems and got along better in life. Their quests in either direction both begin with that of frank, sexualised encounters; encounters of which are humiliating and rely heavily on that of a distinct element of power instigated certain people within. Olga, with her low-pay frustrations, happens across an Internet peep-show job operating out of a lonely disused building, whose offices and such have been converted into small dens in which the girls in-front of the web cameras do whatever it is customers logged on at the other end tell them to. During a night shift at his mall job, Paul prowls the underground car park area and is apprehended by a group of youths; youths whom consequently strip him and instigate a demeaning session of mock-sadomasochism involving the man's security equipment that he had with him in the form of belt and handcuffs.In owing money to various people, Paul hulks out to the bleak-looking East of the continent with his stepfather on a job delivering beaten-up video arcade games and sweet machines. Olga's situation, again infused with that of money, sees her continue to earn very little when the peep-show job falls through out of an inability to understand the required languages online. We find ourselves leaning towards Paul's strand as things develop; Olga's bedding down into a hospital ward-set groove in which elderly men living their last weeks begin to find our Olga rather attractive seeing the whole thing descend into a series of sequences shot on static, tripod mounted cameras bringing more attention to the craft of the thing than is required, whilst more often than not reminding us of Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó's rather unpleasant 2005 film Johanna. Paul's begins to become imbued with a sense of antagonism, as he falls foul of some gypsies en route and then with his stepfather when attitudes in regards to women have them clash; the dragging of Paul into his stepfather's attitudes and lifestyle in regards to women eventually leading to awkward and ill-fated altercations forcing Paul into redistributing his priorities.There is a sense of frankness about proceedings, and I've little doubt Seidl makes the films he wants to make in spite of the cross-cultural settings and international teams behind the project; a sense of frankness evident in the film's title, a cold and inherently cutoff name balancing two opposites with little more than a cut-and-thrust 'slash' carving the two words and forcing them apart from one another. But we find it difficult to get as excited about the film as we would perhaps like; certainly, the film's sexualised content is disgraceful and constructed in an uneroitc fashion – a character's departure from proceedings as things step up a gear later on in a motel room echoes that of our own mind having already exited the scene. Additionally, cries of sexism on Seidl's behalf ought to fall on deaf ears as Paul is unwillingly dragged through a plethora of flimsy Eastern European girls; the man falling foul of his stepfather's hormonal urges around the same time as Olga herself gets caught off-guard by some of those leering aforementioned elderly men doing very little for the masculine cause in this respect. Therein lies the issue, the sense that these people are precisely the same, and yet light-years apart hammering us on the head again; the film is not without merit, but it is without an awful lot of much else.

I saw this movie in London on a Friday night in October at a point when the world's finances were in meltdown and the FTSE had lost 9% of its value in one day. So what? So everything... This film couldn't have been more apposite; Import Export is all about capitalism - and cash. Having it. Not having it. And the humiliations most people must undergo just to stay afloat.And, as it turns out in this movie, the real heroes of the piece are the 'losers' West and East, but particularly the latter; losers who may have few chips to bet in capitalism's little crap game, but ones who haven't yet forgotten their humanity.In particular Olga, the Ukrainian nurse who travels to the West only to absorb one humiliation after another. In a series of beautiful scenes in the Geriatric hospital in Vienna where she now works as a cleaner - we see her variously comb the hair of a demented inmate before a nurse tell her it's against the rules, plug in a phone and sing a lullaby to her baby a thousand miles to the East, dance tenderly with a dying patient in a basement storeroom and later go to the 'Exitus' to make a last vigil over his body, a moment of almost religious intensity...Interwoven with her story, is that of Pauli who makes the journey in the opposite direction, ending up in the Ukraine with his debased and alcoholic step-father, a pathetic and impotent racist whose behaviour reminded me strongly of the SS invaders in the climactic scene of Elim Klimov's Come and See. A man whose debasement is a cypher for the moral emptiness of the West. For money, he gets a prostitute, naked from the waist down, to crawl round on her hands and knees while telling her to repeat, in German, a language she doesn't understand, that she's a 'stupid f**king c**t'.The power of money. The only thing he understands...Pauli finally tries to 'defect' to the East. But even there the system is now dog eat dog so he leaves his step-father and begins to hitch-hike back. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the cleaners, ladies from the East all, sit in their overalls around a dinner table and share a joke. And laugh and laugh and laugh.Their spirit is not dead. It's the real power of the downtrodden. Everywhere.

Import/Export is not a film one recommends easily. It is a great film but it is not one to look at casually. The director Ulrich Seidl already has a reputation for drastic dialog and acting in his films. He started with documentaries and this is always apparent in his consequent films. The atmosphere is often unbearably realistic, many of his actors deliver so convincing performances that one thinks they must have been brought in from the street. They are not though. This, combined with simple framing leads to the strong documentary impression. In this film the focus is on two story lines which move in opposite directions. On starts in the Ukrainia and moves to Vienna, Austria and the other starts in Vienna and ends in Ukrainia. Both show a harsh life with violence and humiliation and sexual exploitation. While viewing this film I often wanted to look away or close my eyes as to protect my soul from the terrible experiences, the two protagonists are facing in very different ways. The moments of violence, humiliation and sexuality, although shorter then in his earlier films, are shown in a very graphic way, and stay in your mind long after the picture is over. Maybe you will never forget them. In this, the film has some parallels to Lukas Moodysons "Lilja 4-ever" which also makes you forget that it is a work of fiction you are watching. Moodyson concentrates himself completely on the tragic story of the main character's exploitation through the economic system and the resulting criminality in eastern Europe, plus the demand for sex without love in the western world and it"s tragic consequences for your unprotected girls. Seidl, on the other hand, chooses a young but grown up woman and mother in Ukrainia, a trained nurse, who can't make a living by working in a hospital and is forced to work as a porn model in from of an internet camera. Then she leaves for Vienna to work there in various unpleasant jobs. In the second storyline Seidl shows a young man from Vienna, trying unsuccessful to hold a job and always on the run from people he borrowed money from. He joins his stepfather on his trip through eastern Europe, delivering game automates and the like. They are both frustrated by their poor outlook of their future, and although they don't like each other, they both concur in spending their money easily on booze and women which they like to intimidate and humiliate.The film has some rare comic moments, but often scenes open on a funny note but then change fast into something that makes you choke on your own laughter. All in all a great, disturbing film!