Models

Near to me. Near to you. Near to everybody. Near to life.

I mean masterful performance by a leading actress/actor... cool story. Well filmed. You get some good music as well.

All the political agendas celebrating films today... I mean right way we've got here. Films like this. Real stuff...

I had seen several works of this director. Berlinale 2024 have seen his film as a producer. The director plays in, premier league. Nothing more to say.

Germanic school of acting elite as always. Camera work subtle, nothing very expressive, but still very hight end. The overall mood and how the film looks... very well assembled film.

If you are here watch it, do not think twice.

A cinema friend of mine and I were chatting after seeing this film - we'd previously seen ANIMAL LOVE, DOG DAYS and LOSSES TO BE EXPECTED. My friend commented that he got the feeling Seidl didn't like his subjects very much.

I guess that MODELS (1999) makes that point better than DOG DAYS (2001) - some of the people in the latter are likeable, and in the earlier 1992 film LOSSES TO BE EXPECTED, quite a few of the people were rather amiable. I don't know what might have happened to Ulrich Seidl from 1992 to 1995 when ANIMAL LOVE came out, but although the characters in MODELS might be complex and perhaps even interesting, they aren't very likeable at all - not that that need to be, and maybe that's part of Seidl's point(s). If the film is "written & directed", it's not really a documentary, is it? It's a little more difficult to tell in MODELS how much of it is real and how much is being torqued up from whatever "reality" there is - and reality is never quite the same for two different people. Is that a point? Dunno. But if Philip K. Dick was still around these two could certainly whip up some interesting dsytopias.

I saw this film at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival. Models is a thoroughly unpleasant tale, shot in a documentary style, about coked-up and unhappy models in Vienna. The excruciatingly long scenes alternated between existential longings for love and meaning, whining about physical imperfections, real or imagined, and hedonistic pursuits. It made its points in the first ten minutes, then kept making them over and over and over for the next hundred and ten. Maybe that was the point.

More revealing about the human condition than any documentary (including Ulrich Seidl's own, which in comparison seem like they are only scratching on the surface of what it means to get through everyday life as a human being) while being just as real, honest and immediate as a great documentary.

Although the film is about female models it's really about average human beings with a lot of spare time to preserve their bodies to be beautiful for the camera and to poison and futch up their bodies again to get their mind into a different state or simply out of laziness on a rotating basis. Average people with a lot of spare time to be alone and lonely and to flee into the beds of lovers and fornicate with strangers while the boyfriend (who usually ISN'T waiting at home) isn't any less guilty of caring only about himself. Average people going through short highs, longer lows and a lot more void times that are somewhere in between (the film focuses more on the highs and lows of its main characters, though).

"You don't really know what's going on around you until you look at it from the outside" was never truer than in the case of Ulrich Seidl's films. Through his completely objective camera we have a more insightful look at the characters than the characters themselves. It might seem paradox but although this film again shows that men and women are very different creatures who inherently aren't compatible the female characters in 'Models' are as understandable for men as they are for women. And again it made me think that women are the superior creatures of the two, at least in direct comparison when one man and one women encounter, cope and talk with each other (which describes basically every scene in the film in which a man plays a role) the woman always seems like the more intelligent gender. Maybe it reflects how everything a man really wants is procreation and women have a bit more complex goals like conceiving and raising this offspring. Or maybe it just reflects how little men expect to get from women compared to how much women hope to get from men.

Enough with the rambling. I can't help but wonder how Ulrich Seidl writes his films and especially how he works with his non-actors to create such real films. Just as good as 'Hundstage', 1999 won another brilliant movie.

Models is a realistic film. The genuine feeling of its characters is mesmerizing. It looks like an every day life film yet it never stops to make routine/cliché situations get a unique and mystical touch... like moments which stretch to become classic. It's scary to see our everyday life portrayed in there, the conflicts, the arguments, the power game, vanity, success, the hedonistic pursuit... etc. Models is about models but all in all everybody, male or female can identify with each and every one of the characters portrayed in the film. Ulrich Seidl once again succeeds in capturing the depth of every moment of every day life, similarly to Erich Roemer for example but in a more crude, less poetic yet highly artistic way. Seidl's art digs through our multiple layers of pretense to reveal the true human and through a self-assessment self knowledge process to lead to a dialectic procedure to evolve the human being a little bit higher than the dirt that we are made of and as primates step on. "Do I deserve to live" the song that plays as the credits go on screen summarizes the point of this film. Brilliant!