Ulterior Structuralist Motives — With Zombies

The surreal Canadian talk show zombie movie "Pontypool" arrives on DVD.

Austrian miserabilist Ulrich Seidl’s “Import/Export” also comes with an ulterior structuralist motive, but its nihilism is much more down-to-earth, and far more thorough-going.

One of the pioneers of the full-frontal, semi-comic three-walled-tableaux-of-Euro-depression that the Romanians have inherited and made their own, Seidl is also a hardcore gutter dog, and so when matters of sex work are explored, as they have to be by characters at the end of their economic tether in Eastern Europe, what happens is what we see, no ratings apply. If you’ve seen Seidl’s other movies (“Dog Days,” “Animal Love”), you’re hyper-aware of how any space — nightclub, apartment, bedroom, parking garage — can explode into violence, sexual or otherwise.

But the new film is more contemplative. The two narratives intercut here, as the title plainly states, are journeys of immigration: Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian nurse who, after her paycheck is withheld and her attempt at webcam sex fails, decides to leave her baby behind and find work in Austria. Simultaneously, Pauli (Paul Hofmann), a frustrated and rather brainless exercise freak and jobless punk in Vienna, allows his lousy employment opportunities to propel him eastward, eventually landing in Kiev.

They never cross paths, but their complementing odysseys form a scathing statement about the New Globalism, where one downturned landscape after another radiates echoes of the Communism’s failure and the hodgepodge exploitation that followed. (It doesn’t get much worse than the moment during a masturbatory webcam session when an off-screen “client” irritably hollers at Olga’s bare-assed sex worker pal, “Put your fingers in your asshole!”) But however dismal Pauli’s prospects are, delivering vending machines to Slovakian ghettoes and tolerating his stepfather’s ham-handed pickup routines, they’re nothing compared to Olga’s eventual situation, as a hospital maid on an Austrian geriatric ward where virtually no infirmity or indignity is spared for us or her, and where, of course, the desiccated, diapered patients are all real people, not actors.

In Seidl’s hands, this banal ring of Hell, filled with painfully real dying people, is a movie onto itself, a cruel and mocking distillation of humankind to its dire and helpless end moments, even as the exultant entirety of life backed up behind each bed-ridden coot becomes palpable, too, lending the scenes a strange, lovely sense of invigoration.

As protagonists, Olga and Pauli are unexceptional people, and the slow drip of time spent with them (running time: 2:25 hours) both reemphasizes that fact, and makes it irrelevant. Rak has a paradigmatically Traci Lords-esque smudginess to her bleach-blond good looks, but we never get close enough to even regard her as a character — she and Pauli are just people, reacting. We only get hints about her, as when she impulsively escorts an old Ukrainian man to a laundry room and waltzes with him to an old record, and Pauli reveals a non-indulgent, almost Puritanical streak when he finally dumps his profligate stepdad (a robust comic performance from Herbert Fritsch) and heads off into the ex-Soviet badlands looking for work. We might not notice them on the street, which is surely Seidl’s point.

“Import/Export” is, in the end, a movie about economics and its nomadic discontents, which bunches it together with “Lorna’s Silence,” “Three Monkeys,” “24 City,” “Treeless Mountain,” “Wendy & Lucy,” “The Wrestler,” “Frozen River,” “Julia,” et al., an entire school of contemporary culture focused on the not-so-secret “secret economy” that involves more and more global citizens everyday. Things being what they are, it might just be the hallmark genre for the international Naughts.

“Pontypool” (MPI Home Video) and “Import/Export” (Palisades Tartan Video) are now available on DVD.

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