Import Export
Austria, 2007
Starring: Paul Hofmann, Ekateryna Rak, Maria Hofstätter
Director: Ulrich Seidl
THE second dramatic feature from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, Import Export superficially belongs to the sub-genre “cinema of migration” characterised by such films as the Oscar-nominated Journey of Hope and more recently Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World. These films show the exploitation of immigrants at the hands of western Europeans who cannot morally justify their position. (The United Kingdom measure for applying its immigration rules is the “balance of probabilities”.)
Seidl is not interested in immigration law per se, rather the relationship of immigrants with their new environment. His protagonists, Ukrainian Olga (Ekateryna Rak) and Austrian Paul (Paul Hofmann), never meet but travel to each other’s country) out of economic necessity. While their experiences are far from happy, Seidl’s film – all 135 mostly-gloomy minutes of it – is ambivalent.
Paul is an archetypal unskilled western European, who we first see being bullied while training to be a security guard. After a run in with some youths in an underground car park, he loses his job. His humiliation is more acute because it is not explicitly violent. Indebted to everyone foolish enough to lend him money, he goes to work with his stepfather delivering fruit machines and the like in eastern Europe. He has a desperate need to connect and a cavalier attitude towards money, but is quietly appalled by his stepfather’s behaviour on the road, as the older man flirts with women and humiliates a prostitute.
Olga, by contrast, has a good job as a nurse but does not receive all her wages. She is a single parent who leaves her child with her mother to find work in Austria, first as an au pair, where she is treated with suspicion, and then as a cleaning woman in a hospital where she bonds with an elderly male patient. Olga’s precarious immigration position is held against her, as is her youth, and she threatens to become a cliché: the east European who marries for a passport.
Seidl links the immigrant experience to a form of violation. Before she leaves Ukraine, Olga becomes a sex worker, obeying the commandments of a porn site customer barking at her in English over the internet. As an “import” she is resented by her co-workers and has a memorable scrap with a nurse (Maria Hofstätter) after a Christmas party.
In the final scene, Seidl achieves the profound, as he shows us a ward full of elderly patients, one crying for her mother. It is a well-crafted conceit, linking patients to immigrants (both struggle for wellbeing.) If unhappiness is the inability to live in one’s own room, then happiness is the ability to live in someone else’s room, to understand that we own nothing. This is a message and a film entirely for the (credit-crunching) moment.
Patrick Mulcahy
