Sparta [2022]

 Seidl had conceived Rimini and Sparta – his diptych centred around two emotionally and geographically dislocated brothers with broken moral compasses, and with a dementia-afflicted father having past Nazi affiliations – as a single film titled Wicked Games, but split them during post-production, which, ironically, turned out to be a fortuitous choice. While the sardonic and melancholic former film has had a successful run in the festival circuit, the latter has faced allegations of breaching the boundaries of ethical filmmaking and, consequently, cancellations. In some of his prior works – Import/Export, Paradise: Love, Safari – privileged Austrians have been shown traveling to African and East European countries in order to partake in activities that’d be considered either illegal or morally reprehensible back home. Sparta is a murky, grubby and intensely discomfiting addition to that list. Ewald (Georg Friedrich) is a taciturn, mild-natured 40-something man who’s relocated to a grungy Transylvanian town where he’s found work as an industrial engineer and has moved in with a beautiful Romanian woman. He’s, however, experiencing inability to consummate their relationship due to a dark, closeted impulse that he harbours – viz. attraction to young boys and guilt on account of that. Unable to suppress his urges any further, he moves to an impoverished village where he converts an abandoned school into a judo training centre for kids from broken families, to enable carefree proximity to pre-pubescent boys in an intimate and secluded setting. Seidl’s sparse, non-judgemental portrayal of a troubled and conflicted non-offensive paedophile, whose perverse desires are juxtaposed with the physical abuse and toxicity that the kids endure at the hands of their parents, posited disturbing dialectical questions and therefore made for an extremely uncomfortable viewing experience.

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German/Romanian/English

Country: Austria

Rimini [2022]

 The hulking, hustling, hard-drinking, debonair, has-been Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) – a middle-aged lothario perennially recalling his past glory, and attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher) – might lead one to draw comparisons with Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The resemblances, however, end right there, as it was helmed by the Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl, whose politics and aesthetics stand diametrically apart. Rimini – one half of his diptych, which also comprised of the unapologetically scandalous Sparta – is a dreary and desolate film packed with gaping existential, familial and societal voids. Furthermore, its bone-dry cynicism, sexual grotesquerie, and cutting political commentary were captured in his customary style – spare visual framing, formal exactitude, and deadpan malice – which coalesced the grimy and sordid with radical melancholy. It began with Bravo briefly reuniting with his brother Ewald (Georg Friedrich) – the rotten centrepiece of the other half of the diptych – and their aged dad (Hans-Michael Rehberg) – afflicted with dementia and residing at an old-age home in Austria – upon his mother’s death. Once a popular crooner, he is now a lounge singer who charms a diminishing crowd of old-timers with his silky voice and retro garments at a chintzy hotel in the titular Italian resort town, while earning additional bucks by seducing his geriatric women fans to bed. The unanticipated appearance of his daughter, who lives amidst impoverished squatters, inspires him to rise beyond his shallow artifice and also leads him to touch new depths of depravity. Three odiously funny moments stood out – Bravo’s father spontaneously breaking into a former Nazi Youth anthem; a tipsy Bravo inadvertently trying to work his charms on Tessa; Bravo, with his pompous racism, playing host to impoverished illegal migrants.

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: German/English/Italian

Country: Austria

Safari [2016]

 Leave it to Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl to make a straight-faced, matter-of-fact and low-key documentary that’s more nightmarish and viscerally upsetting than most horror movies. Stark, brutal, relentlessly unflinching and pungently satirical, Safari was both damning and riveting in its portrayal of big-game hunting – European tourists glibly killing majestic and exotic wildlife animals for fun, sports and trophies, on expensive trips to a hunting lodge in Namibia – and in turn, as in Paradise: Love, on the recurrent and underlying themes of neo-colonialism, white entitlement and racial exploitation. Though not exactly linear, the docu was structured in the form of three inter-related acts, with the stunning simplicity of this darkly deadpan approach counterpointing the disturbing subject – and therein perhaps lay Seidl at his most radical. It started off with talking head interviews filmed with his typically static shots – a middle-aged couple casually discussing the prices of wild beasts (one can only wonder what tempted them to feature in another Seidl work after the grotesque preceding docu In the Basement), a well-off family of four gleefully boasting of their love for hunting and the guns they prefer, the proprietors of the lodge sanctifying the utility of their facility, etc. The middle sections showed the actual hunting acts, including the devastating felling of a zebra and a giraffe. And, in the gruesome and queasiness inducing final act – which especially wasn’t for the weak-hearted – the focus shifted to the natives as they’re shown clinically skinning, disemboweling and dismembering the two magnificent animals, so that the different parts can serve their respective purposes in the form of hides, meat and memorabilia; unsurprisingly, the tourists were conspicuous by their absence from the slimy abattoirs.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Documentary/Social Satire

Language: German

Country: Austria

In the Basement [2014]

 In his biting, subversive, unsettling and wryly outlandish documentary In the Basement – imbued with his distinctive formal rigour and cutting tonal palette, and at times even blurring the lines with fiction filmmaking – Seidl took his hapless viewers, both literally and metaphorically, on a rather macabre journey into Vienna’s sordid underbelly and warped entrails. By focusing on the basements of a few handpicked middle-aged, white, suburbia residents, therefore, he provided discomfiting peeks into some of their darkest secrets, murky and haunting Freudian obsessions and repressions, sexual addictions venturing into BDSM, and the disturbing prevalence of neo-Nazi pride and xenophobic tendencies. And, while the brutal candidness of the various tableaux and the gallows humour therein are bound to make this a visceral viewing experience, the fact that it was at times difficult to guesstimate the degree of enactment within these portrayals also made this an interesting testament to the role of a documentarian and the possible realms of documentary filmmaking. The vignettes have been captured usually using static, muted, medium-long shots: a middle-aged man and amateur tenor who uses his massive basement space as a firing range for a group of men who spew vitriol against Muslim immigrants when they’re not target practicing; a raging Hitler aficionado who’s filled his den with Nazi memorabilia; a woman who loves cradling authentic looking baby dolls stored inside shoeboxes in her cellar; a man who lives as a naked sex slave to his dominatrix mistress; a woman who’d faced sexual abuse and helps others, being ironically addicted to masochism; a hunting maniac who loves boasting of his string of animal head trophies (Seidl would expand this theme in his brilliant next docu Safari); etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Documentary/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: German

Country: Austria

Paradise: Hope [2013]

 Paradise: Hope, the final installment in Seidl’s cinematically bold and stunningly confrontational ‘Paradise Trilogy’, continued the deeply ironic and oftentimes jaundiced interpretations of the pleasant sounding titles; while “love” was commoditized and exploitative in Paradise: Love and “faith” was oppressive and self-destructive in Paradise: Faith, “hope” was marked by emotional despair and hopeless unattainability here. The formal and visual palettes, too, were immediately distinguishable by Seidl’s rigorous precision, meticulous shot compositions, bleak austerity and deadpan tone. However, these thematic and stylistic continuities aside, this was a surprisingly wistful, tender and melancholic coda to this otherwise lacerating trilogy, and that significantly set this apart vis-à-vis the previous two films. The focus here is Melanie (Melanie Lenz), an overweight 13-year old girl who’s been sent to a summer diet and fitness camp while her mother – possibly unbeknownst to her – is holidaying in Kenya. Despite the strictness imposed by the stern-faced trainers there and physical activities that the adolescents are subjected to, the environs and atmosphere are marked by fun, playfulness, mischief, bonhomie and tranquility, especially thanks to the abundance of youngsters and her friendship in particular with a rebellious and slightly older girl who’s upfront about her sexual experiences. She encounters both frothy hope and intense grief upon getting attracted to the rakish and much older resident doctor (Joseph Lorenz) who pampers her overt gestures of teenage love with cheeky ambiguity even if he desists crossing the no-return threshold in contravention to viewer expectations. Seidl’s teasing flirtation with the moral implications of their supposedly brewing relationship, along with Melanie’s painful coming-of-age upon the rejection and her ensuing heartbreak, formed at once subversive as well as quietly affecting facets.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: German

Country: Austria

Paradise: Faith [2012]

 Paradise: Faith, the abrasive and provocative middle chapter in Seidl’s unforgiving, unsparing and thematically-linked ‘Paradise Trilogy’, and arguably also the most powerful of this triptych – it’s bookended on either side by Paradise:Love and Paradise: Hope – is centered on faith at its most violent, virulent, sadomasochistic and political too. And, in an interesting counterpoint to the previous film where the protagonist travels to a lesser developed country in an exploitative search for love, the one here travels within Vienna to exploitatively propagate religion to those who’ve come from lesser developed countries – and these parallel but opposing journeys, in a way, may remind one of Ulrich’s best known work, viz. the darkly brilliant Import / Export. The focus here is Teresa’s sister Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter), a middle-aged, humourless, guilt-ridden, self-flagellating zealot whose obsessive love for Christ often borders on the grotesque. She takes a holiday from her day job to dedicate time to individual and group prayers – the leader of that right-wing group always ends her missives with the battle-cry to make Austria Catholic again; conduct harsh self-penance for libidinous thoughts – the sexualized form of those punishments may leave ardent believers shaken; and to perform door-to-door evangelism to browbeat vulnerable immigrants into hardline Catholicism – her visit to a paunchy, eccentric man in his underwear was darkly funny in particular. The bare bones nature of her rigorous existence, however, gets upended upon the sudden return of her former husband – a paraplegic Muslim man (Nabil Saleh) who deplores her staunchness and underhanded xenophobia, while having emotional complexities and orthodoxy of his own, and with whom she might’ve shared a tumultuous past – which takes them on a lurid collision course.

 

 

 

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Genre: Drama/Religious Drama/Psychological Drama/Marital Drama

Language: German

Country: Austria