DIRECTED BY Ulrich Seidl, 2007
Olga and her 'western' counterpart, Pauli, suffer contrasting humiliations: Olga has to put up with the barked instructions of a viewer she doesn't understand ('Nearer, finger, ass!' some of his single-word demands); Pauli is stripped near-naked by a gang in the basement car park of the shopping mall where he works (it is implied that his assaulters are not native Austrians). Later, a prostitute is led like a dog and forced to bark by Pauli's step-father with less ceremony than she's asked to have sex with both men.
STARRING Ekateryna Rak (Olga), Paul Hoffman (Pauli), Michael Thomas (Michi)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex and very strong language
RUN TIME 135 mins approx, Trinity
LANGUAGE German, Russian & Slovakian
COVER QUOTE 'Jaw-dropping… This extraordinary film makes everything else around look comfy and pedestrian' - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT An unsentimental drama contrasting economic prospects for central Europeans a generation after the end of the Cold War.
THE PLOT Olga, an underpaid children's nurse in the Ukraine, tries to supplement her wage in the online porn industry. Pauli, a Viennese security guard, loses his job after he's assaulted by a group of young men and has to turn to his step-father, Michi, for help finding work. Olga moves to Austria, where she goes through a series of jobs, including an unpleasant period as a nanny; when she finds work as a hospital cleaner, Olga is tormented by one of the nurses after she starts to befriend and care for some of the patients. Pauli ends up distributing gaming machines in the former Yugoslavia with Michi; Michi chats up women in front of his step-son and tries to have sex with a prostitute with Pauli watching. Pauli leaves in disgust; at first he tries to find a job at the local market, then he starts hitchhiking.
THE FILM There is no sex in Import Export, despite the blandishments of the certification, but other forms of sexual activity reduced to the status of financial transaction. The female protagonists of Import Export are made to display themselves for male clients, while responding to their every command.
Austrian Ulrich Seidl can afford to be unsentimental in Import Export; Olga gets the giggles when her friend Tatjana gives her a crib sheet of useful German phrases when working on the web. The framing of the scenes is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's You, the Living, which features some very funny sex scenes with a skinny, older man and a large woman, but there's none of that humour here.
In Austria, a woman undergoes a humiliating mock job interview, though she emerges triumphant, to the viewer's pleasure; Olga has to learn how to brush the teeth of stuffed dead animals for another job. She is afforded no personal space, as her compatriots are forced to expose their every orifice. Despite being bullied at the hospital where she finally finds cleaning work, she achieves some camaraderie with her colleagues; Pauli finds he is best off alone.
KEY SCENES Chapter 5, 18:30; 22:58 Olga visits her friend Tatjana, an internet sex worker. Olga watches women playing with themselves on camera at the beck of German-language subscribers.
Chapter 24, 1:49:20 Pauli walks into Michi's hotel room in Slovakia to find a semi-naked prostitute crouched on all fours on the floor. Michi is still fully dressed, including wearing his winter sports jacket. Pauli wants to borrow money from his step-father but Michi insists that they both have sex with the woman; finding no other way out of the situation, Pauli encourages Michi to have sex with her, which his step-father fails to do.
FURTHER VIEWING At around the same time as Import Export, Belgium's wonderful Dardenne brothers tackled the brutal trade of human trafficking from eastern Europe in The Silence of Lorna (2008) but both they and Ulrich Seidl were preempted by Lucas Moodysson. The Swede's Lilya 4-Ever (2002) is a pure-black depiction of the trade starring Oksana Akinsjina as Lilja, who says she is 16.
Lilja is deserted in an unnamed former Soviet Union country when her mother leaves for the United States with a new boyfriend. Lilja leaves school and is thrown out of her flat by an aunt, who relocates her to a dirty, decrepit apartment that's recently been vacated when its occupant, an old man, died. The flat is in the state he left it, she's told; her only friend is a boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), who plays basketball with any rubbish he can find and sniffs glue. 'I must get out of here,' Lilja says. 'Anything but this.'
When the electricity is cut off, and with her money running out, Lilja begins to dabble in prostitution, picking up clients at a club she was introduced to by a friend who wanted to make extra pocket money (Lilja's aunt tells her: 'Do what your mother did: go into town and spread your legs'). Lilja is shown some kindness by a young man, Andrei, who promises to take her to Sweden; she goes ahead, alone, is raped by Andrei's contact, and forced into prostitution.
Moodysson is circumspect in showing the sexual crimes inflicted on her (a series of men's faces at the same party shot from her point of view, for instance). Left behind, Volodya, kills himself; when Lilja intends to commit suicide, Volodya's spirit comes (wearing angels' wings) and beseeches Lilja not to do the same ('This life is the only one you've got,' he pleads) but she does so anyway.
At every point, when you think things can't get worse, Lilja's life plumbs further depths (her mother writes to social services from the United States, trying to revoke her guardianship, adding that her daughter was never wanted). The film is a tour de force, notable for stand-out performances from its two, young, leads.
KEY QUOTE 'I can hire you and fire you, that's how it is in this country' - One of Olga's Austrian employers
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