Models

sleep with everyone and everywhere at any time and perhaps you will see your photo on the cover of a f***ed up magazine. and if not you are one of them. lonely, insecure, anorexic and unhappy. it's a story about a young model who struggles her way through the big bad world of business. the film is kind of a docu/drama with some scenes in it that everyone knows and everyone has it in his own life. i really enjoyed watching the film and i recommend it to everyone

so go and watch it :)

Let's be frank: these times are going to be seen as more decadent in-scope than Weimar Germany (1919-1933). I have only recently come to find Ulrich Seidl's documentaries, but this is how it should be done when portraying a society, and her inhabitants. While this documentary is ostensibly about a subculture of models in Austria, it could be about the same kind of people anywhere in the Westernized world. This is a common-theme of Seidl's documentaries, and I believe it isn't always his intention. Like the director, we are seeing these people and their lives for the first-time.

The same social-trends and phenomena going-on nearly everywhere in our era, and Seidl is simply capturing them as they are. Of course, all cinema is artifice, but somehow, even in his set-ups, the director is able to capture those amazing moments-of-truth that even escape the participants. What is singularly-depressing and distressing is how much all of this resembles America. Why travel, when everything is a hellish urban-sprawl underlining the meaningless existence of our current human-world? Seidl has an answer: People, and how they deal with this yawning-abyss of modernity offers some hope. Somehow, they survive and continue-on. People are what-matters to Ulrich Seidl.

Some reviewers have stated they felt Seidl "hates his subjects," which I find to be patently-false. He shows them unadulterated, and for what they are. His camera's-gaze is--as in all of his films--non-judgmental and authoritative. There has been some controversy over the director's documentaries being "staged," which is unlikely given the obvious sincerity of the models. Somehow, Seidl managed to get his subjects to relax, and to be themselves with no filtering. It's sad that young-women enter this life--if you want to call it that. They mutilate-themselves, starve-themselves, and hate-themselves. Maybe they already did.

The final-tableau is an incredible-moment that is undeniable in its truth: the main-model and her boyfriend are having a post-coital conversation (while drinking-in-bed in a Hotel). An ambulance is heard outside, and she says, "They're taking someone like you away," and she laughs. She continues: "You know, I know a good psychoanalyst." The boyfriend responds, "I didn't think people like you could survive without a psychoanalyst." The extended laughing-fit he falls-into is both hilarious, and chilling, as the model seems to slowly sink-into-herself...a powerful-truth has been revealed in the birthplace of analysis. This is the time we live-in. Models is a documentary that delivers on all-fronts, and exposes the Nietzschean-abyss.

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.

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!

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.