Import Export

This is a dark movie with a lot of sub plots. surprisingly it's an ok movie. if you're looking for something a little outside of the mainstream norm

I was not prepared for this film. I feel I have little to add that other reviewers have not already written. Just a few observations. Two young people needing money leave their countries: one, a woman from the former Soviet Union, the second a man from the West. Their two journeys melt into one although they never meet. Through their eyes we see the full horror of life around them. Pivotal scenes are the young man's experience of a wasted concrete landscape unfit for habitation, but is full of those enduring dire deprivation, and for the young woman her employment in a rich country which utterly degrades the poor. East and West is portrayed as being a hell on earth with death as the final escape. There is no music on the soundtrack except for what is used by those in their specific scenes. No manipulation used at all. The vision of the world we all live in ( the rich of course artificially protecting themselves ) is worthy of Samuel Beckett. Endgame totally. I believe the film to be a masterpiece - again that overused word, but I unreservedly use it. It is expertly filmed and directed with a fierce force seldom seen in film. The one thing that I object to is the poster image which seems to me a deliberate come on for the prurient. Sex and violence is in the pitiful lives portrayed but it pales before the real content of the film. which is the sadistic way humanity drains all hope out of the poor and vulnerable. Many people watching this should feel utter horror and perhaps some will examine their own consciences. Be prepared. For many years I was put off by the poster. 2007 is a while back. Life has not changed, but utterly changed by Covid-19. Hell on earth has taken a further step down. It is the most terrible thought of all!!!

By no means a happy film, it is nevertheless, so overwhelmingly well intentioned that it deserves some attention. Fortunately this fairly long (and some say slow) film is very much well worth sticking with. Frighteningly frank and 'in your face' at times, not least in the desperate sequences with the naked Ukrainian girls struggling to put their fingers where their Austrian paymasters are yelling for them to do. It no surprise that people with money will exploit those without but it seems an awful situation that the EU should allow a situation where it is more profitable for a Ukrainian nurse to travel to Austria and act as some house slave. There is not really any formal narrative flow here but we follow the aforementioned nurse going one way and a pair of Barely sane Austrians going the other way to try and sell bubble gum and gaming machines to a people that can obviously not need either. A mix of professional and no-professional actors ensure that this is gritty reality and I have managed to not even mention the incontinence pants in the Austrian geriatric ward. Illuminating, wretched and desperate but also somewhat heart-warming and vile. Good old Germans eh?

No matter what you think about a film like Import/Export, you have to have some kind of reaction to it. It is an unsettling, bleak look at a couple of lives that the viewer will rarely think about unless confronted with in a film like this. The story takes place in both Ukraine and in Austria and focuses on 2 lives of very different people who share a similar circumstance of being at the end of the line in the place that they live in. Both seek change and their circumstances take very different shapes and fates but share a similar intention, to find a better life.

The director and writer give us little hope in their depiction of these 2 lives and how their environments constantly conspire to either keep them down or challenge their will to survive and change. It is a story at once about Eastern Europe and a story about the world's 'lower classes' and their monumental struggle against inertia and their past. It is a movie filled with images, humor, highs and lows, and, graphic scenes of sexual play that all add to the base quality of the human experience that exists not only in Eastern Europe, but, many place in the world today. Human beings have created incredible technology and yet there is still so much ignorance, cruelty, and, general meanness in the world. A rough film told with a keen eye toward a subtle message.

Many film's about sad, boring lives are themselves boring (and not truly sad). Not so Ulrich Siedl's remarkable 'Import/Export', which tells a simple, and fundamentally depressing, story at great length, but with compelling naturalism. Not only that, but Siedl shows an uncanny ability to find interesting shots: the film has a haunting quality, and in every scene there's something that draws the viewer's attention and makes one think. The plot, such as it is, tells the story of two people, a Ukranian woman to emigrates to Austria in search of a better life, and an Austrian man who ends up in Ukraine; in Hollywood, their stories would inevitably be drawn together, but Siedl keeps them in parallel throughout. One link is that both are involved (at different ends) in the Ukranian sex industry, and Siedl's uncompromising depiction of this attracted some notoriety for this movie; but it's a long way from a titillating film.

The acting is excellent, and the way the characters evolve is fascinating. Ekatarina Rak's Olga is allowed to inch slowly towards a better life in Austria, albeit at a high price. Paul Hofmann's Pauli is even more interesting, a loner and misfit denied the chance by his environment to become a good person; disaffected from his present life, he can find no route map to another one. Not only do the two stories not converge, but one ends with a lengthy series of hospital scenes in which the origin of the central character is of decreasing importance; this could be a film about lonely people anywhere. Indeed, for all the film's "naturalism", it's depiction of social reality might perhaps be questioned, I would have guessed this movie was set in 1997 rather than 10 years later (although my own estimate of reality is based on the newspapers, so it may well be this that is wrong). Certainly the film is not an explicit political indictment. But it is a sympathetic and original insight into existential loneliness and the harshness of life in the modern world.