From Import/Export. Note the retention of dignity.
I saw Ulrich Seidl’s massively miserablist Import/Export at Cannes in 2007, from where I wrote:
“A quite assured work in the ‘I suffered for my art, now it’s your turn’ mode, Ulrich Seidl’s film proceeds from the presumption that no one in its audience has ever worked in a demeaning job, ever had a relative or loved one who was old and infirm and incapable of caring for him or herself, has never [sic] been betrayed by a family member or humiliated by a boss or a peer, and so on. It then artily jabs that audience with art-photo compositions within which scenes depicting the situations above are depicted. And he uses real geriatric hospital patients, too.”
Whereupon I truly hoped to have been done with it. Alas. The film opens for a week-long run at the Anthology Film Archives today, and it’s been warmly embraced not only by two of the smarter young critics on the internet, Vadim Rizov and Aaron Hillis, but by The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who, recalling the film’s largely hostile Cannes reception, notes, “the movie rightly made people uncomfortable.” Despite Dargis’ passionate advocacy for the picture, arguing that “such nominally difficult” works as this one “can expand your aesthetic horizons, test your patience, challenge your assumptions, enrage and inspire you to moral argument,” I’m not entirely convinced. (Although it is interesting to pair this notice with Dargis’ astute takedown of the solipsism behind Funny People, also in today’s Times. Considered together they form a kind of manifesto.) I think Seidl here challenges his audience’s assumptions in the most conventional and predictable way possible, stacking the deck at every turn, engineering each scene for maximum gratuitous nose-rubbing, as in the appalling privileged/depraved complaints of an internet sex-site client, the immediate awfulness of a bourgeois housewife who hires one of the film’s protagonists, and the diaper-changing in the scenes set in a real geriatric hospital populated by real and in some cases demented geriatrics. The thing is, Seidl knows his audience—it’s not the actual downtrodden, or the politically motivated, or any such thing. It’s the thoroughly, erm, bourgeois (in social attitude, not necessarily financial well-being) art-house regular and/or film-festival goer. They are his patrons, and he makes no bones about loathing them.
Seidl shows his hand a bit in his interview with Hillis: “I know that as a director I take and accept responsibility for how I portray people. The question is whether I portray people in a way that allows them to keep their dignity. I think that I have accomplished that and have even given some of it back to them through my portrayal. Or are moribund people not worthy of portrayal? Are they too ugly and/or miserable? Those that think like this apparently have a bad conscience, are aware of the fact that they are responsible for it. What I showed in geriatrics, namely that all these people finally end up perishing alone and very lonely is a responsibility of society and therefore, the responsibility of us all. The fact that we accept this is the real scandal.”
Right on, Ulrich. Oh, and don’t everybody get up and go do volunteer work at an old-age home all at once, now.
Fact is, there is a pretty substantial difference between attempting to document the awful conditions in which the poor, infirm, and mentally ill are held—as Fredrick Wiseman did in Titticutt Follies—and appropriating those conditions for inclusion in what is for all intents and purposes an aesthetic object. Go see Import/Export and tell me if the real people who are dying in it have been allowed to “retain” their dignity, or get any of it back. My bet is that their bliss is in their ignorance of the fact that they’ve got some real-life Dieter aiming a camera at them for his latest “project.” Regardless of what you might think of Pedro Costa’s films, one always gets a sense that he’s pursuing a genuine collaboration with the addicts and other forsaken ones who populate his recent work. Not so much here. There’s a thin line between confrontational and hateful, and Seidl crosses it every time he gets the opportunity, and does so with a thick Austrian smirk.
There’s nothing particularly satisfying about a filmmaker dwelling on ugliness in humanity for a film’s entire duration, if they’re not compelled to explore an emotional spectrum wider than “Look how awful this is…isn’t it awful?” If there’s not some level of visual or narrative wit involved, if can be an awfully oppressive, tedious, and empty experience.
Of course, were an “entertainment” positioned as such, it would be roundly (and justifiably) trashed by most critics, whereas under the guise of an “art” film, reviewers tend to be more wilfully forgiving. Don’t even get me started on some documentaries, which are often given to bland, unimaginative repetition (a long series of talkng heads basically stating “look at this terrible point in history…wasn’t it terrible?”) in both visual and thematic terms…and yet I very rarely see one of those getting roundly trashed by the critics. ‘Cause it’s “real”, y’know?, so it must therefore be meaningful…
I despise the kind of artier-than-thou criticism that posits negative reactions as the yowling of ignorant, snuffling trolls, while the the high-minded swoop in with intellectualized balm: You didn’t get it, dear. You were made uncomfortable.
Seidl urges us to laugh at the grotesquerie of the geriatric patients, get off on the humiliation of the Ukrainian girl failing at internet sex, and revel cathartically, if I remember correctly, in the vicious beat-down of the Austrian kid. You bet I was “uncomfortable.” That by sitting there, I was endorsing this thing, more tedious, really, than vile. But also vile. Plus, there was a merguez sausage sandwich calling my name on the boardwalk. Maybe the movie’s last half hour would have expanded my aesthetic horizons. I’ll never know.
This is largely off-topic, but in FUNNY PEOPLE, does Judd Apatow use Graham Parker’s song “Anything for a Laugh” at any point? I was listening to it today, and I figured the chances were at least 50–50.