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Import/Export
Trinity Home Entertainment // Unrated // October 5, 2009 // Region 0
List Price: £19.99 [Buy now and save at Co]
In the
Ukraine, Olga (Ekateryna Rak) worked as a nurse. It wasn't nearly enough to make ends meet, though, and in the dead of night, she abandoned her baby and headed westward in search of a job that could support her family. Now in Austria, Olga has once found work at a hospital, but here she's prohibited from so much as touching any of the patients in this geriatric ward. She's a janitor, really, and the life she'd dreamt of remains far out of reach.
Pauli (Paul Hofmann), meanwhile, isn't seeking out a better life so much as trying to escape his old one in Vienna. Unemployed and dangerously deep in debt to every loan shark in town, Pauli heads out to Slovakia with his stepfather, lugging around gumball machines and a vintage arcade game in a rickety van. It's not overwhelmingly glamorous, no, but at least no one's trying to maul him in the subway. Still, Pauli's not managing to make his own way, dismissed as little more than a pet by his stepfather. He's also forced to look on as the man who's supposed to love his mother tries to screw every hooker and barfly in the Eastern bloc.
Director Ulrich Seidl discards most every cinematic convention in Import/Export. It's devoid of any sort of score; the audience hears no music that the characters themselves can't hear. Seidl chooses not to resolve Pauli and Olga's conflicts. His characters change and grow throughout the course of the film, yes, but Import/Export is a slice of life rather than a story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. There are no weepy monologues, and the screenplay that Seidl cowrote never once has its characters expressly spelling out what's churning in their hearts and minds. Import/Export draws its strength instead from a profound sense of realism. I didn't find myself so hopelessly enthralled by Seidl's film because of any sort of shameless manipulation; Import/Export wholly earns that emotional investment through a keen visual eye, a series of spectacular, if understated, performances, and the unwavering sense that I'm watching the struggles of actual, doggedly determined people rather than stock cariactures nudged through an overly familiar premise. If not for its striking cinematography, Import/Export could easily be mistaken for a documentary.
Despite the fact that essentially nothing goes well for Olga or Pauli throughout the course of Import/Export, the film is ultimately about determination rather than bleak despair. The two of them soldier on no matter what, not striving for some sort of impossibly outlandish fantasy but simply enough to get by. Seidl's exploration of them is intriguingly voyeuristic. Neither of these characters speak about their troubles, but then, they're fundamentally alone; they don't have much of anyone to talk to in the first place. They don't succumb to their lots in life as that ultimately doesn't accomplish anything either. They continue moving forward because that's the only direction there is.
Import/Export is ultimately a downbeat film, yes, but much like its characters, the movie doesn't revel in its sorrows. Despite Olga and Pauli's hopes remaining so far out of reach, we still catch occasional glimpses of happiness. That infuses a palpable spark of life into both of these characters, and the two of them are realized through outstandingly rich, layered performances. Much of what's revealed about Pauli and Olga is unveiled through facial expressions and physical gestures. The delivery of what dialogue they're given is wholly convincing throughout, but these characters are predominately brought to life visually. At the same time, Hofmann and Rak aren't playing to the
rafters. Their performances are understated, and as is the case with most strangers in a strange land, their characters are really just trying to get by without drawing undue attention to themselves. To draw characters with such dimensionality and to accomplish this with such subtlety and nuance...it's an approach that demands an enormous amount of skill and confidence. Seidl's thirst for realism clearly is drawing the best from his actors, and it immersed me to the point that I hardly felt as if I were watching a movie at all.
With the film's 141 minute runtime, Seidl has quite a large canvas on which to paint, and he takes care to balance the bleak with the beautiful. For one, the cinematography can be achingly gorgeous, even as Import/Export is photographing a gypsy slum or a frozen wasteland pockmarked with factories billowing smoke into the winter air. The sprawling runtime offers ample room for the film to further flesh out its sense of verisimilitude, and it deftly balances lighter moments with the dark. Olga is shown debasing herself on an Internet sex video to try to scrouge together a little extra money, but the language barrier leaves her struggling with what her customers are demanding, exactly. At one point, she fumbles with a cheat sheet of German dirty talk to try to bring herself up to speed...to know what it means when she's barked at to insert her finger into someplace unpleasant. Olga is dismissed as little more as an interchangeable, disposable commodity as a cleaner in Austria, even chided when she can't properly clean the teeth of a mounted fox with a wirebrush to her mistress' exacting specifications. Those sorts of intriguingly odd moments are balanced by the horrors of death, abandonment, and betrayal.
Pauli doesn't have it all that much better. He's introduced as a stubborn kid with his eye only on immediate gratification...teasing a girlfriend terrified of dogs with a pit bull he'd spent the better part of the day wrestling with, for instance, despite the fact that he doesn't have the money to actually buy the beast. There's something cartoonish about the sight of a shirtless Pauli shadowboxing in his room as well. Pauli clearly has an image of himself he wants to force on the world at large, but no one seems to pay much notice. A gang of barely-twentysomething punks strip off the security guard uniform he's wearing in a mall parking garage and drench him in beer, leaving him half-naked, handcuffed, and sopping wet next to a concrete pillar. His stepfather tortures and torments him with the same sort of gleeful fascination as the children poking at the scorpions at the outset of The Wild Bunch; he's seen as just a diversion to pass the time.
Import/Export is an extraordinary achievement, fully realizing Ulrich Seidl's quest for authenticity and emotional realism. Its nearly two and a half hour runtime may sound daunting, but the length of the film feels as if it's just a fraction of that. There's a wealth of themes and concepts to explore, such as the social and physical boundaries that separate us, the perception of immigrants as homogenous and disposable, and exploitation both financial and sexual by the impotent. Import/Export's brilliant choice of locations, that Neorealistic blend of actors and non-actors working alongside one another, its eagerness to shatter expected boundaries of taste and cinema, nuanced writing and performances, and its accomplished cinematography make for an unconventional and astonishingly powerful film. This is the sort of work that would traditionally be an exceptionally rewarding discovery on Blu-ray, but disappointingly, Import/Export looks to be a DVD masquerading as high definition. The film is currently only available on Blu-ray in the UK, and although this region-free disc is readily imported from across the pond, I'm disappointed to say that this lackluster release isn't worth the effort.
Video
Even accounting for Import/Export's low budget and gritty 16mm photography, at no point throughout the nearly two-and-a-half hour film is this Blu-ray disc ever recognizable as high definition. The 1080p24 video is exceptionally soft and devoid of any fine detail whatsoever, more in keeping with an upconverted DVD than a newly-pressed BD-25. Its grain structure is smudged and indistinct, and even the text of its opening and closing credits is poorly defined.
Import/Export is ravaged further by excessive edge enhancement. For whatever reason, the 1.78:1 image is lightly windowboxed, and the digital oversharpening is so clumsily fielded that the frame's edges are saddled with a scalloped appearance throughout the entire length of the film. Its electronic edge haloes are thick, hard, and impossible to overlook, and a couple of disappointing examples have been provided below.
Contrast remains consistently flat throughout, although this would seem to be a deliberate part of Import/Export's visual aesthetic. Its gloomy, undersaturated palette complements the tone of the film effectively as well. Still, even for that sort of approach, colors still strike me as unusually dull, as if this Blu-ray disc didn't have at its fingertips the full colorspace that high definition has to offer. On the upside, Import/Export is largely free of any speckling or wear, and despite the low bitrate of its AVC encode -- a 141 minute film with lossless audio compressed to just over 16 gigs -- I was unable to spot any glaring missteps with the compression.
Audio
Import/Export features dialogue in several different languages and, by the sound of it, is predominately delivered in Austrian German. Its 16-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack follows the naturalistic approach of the film. Director Ulrich Seidl prefers to let the performances and imagery convey all of the film's emotions, and only diegetic music is featured anywhere throughout. The sound design is teeming with atmospheric color, immersing the audience that much more into the struggles of these two people. There's a strong sense of directionality as well; along with more traditional effects like cars tearing from one channel to the next on the highway, even the sound of music on the stereo changes as Seidl cuts between different camera angles. The overall fidelity is nothing extraordinary but is generally rendered well enough. Some of the earlier dialogue in the film has a clipped quality to it, but this isn't a persistent problem. Also, the film has such little reason to lean on the LFE channel that the limited bass is understandable. Though I wouldn't imagine that Import/Export's lossless audio is worlds removed from the track on the DVD release, its sound design is a strong effort just the same, and I feel confident that it's representative of the way the film sounded as it made the rounds in theaters and throughout the festival circuit.
This Blu-ray disc doesn't feature any alternate soundtracks or downmixes, but optional English subtitles have been provided.
Extras
The Final Word
I'm a great admirer of this wonderfully well-realized character study by Ulrich Seidl, but Import/Export as it's presented on Blu-ray is frustratingly difficult to recommend. Though I don't have the British DVD release in hand to do a direct comparison, I suspect that any differences between the two would be minimal, if that. The only advantages of picking up Import/Export on Blu-ray would be ease of play -- no PAL conversion necessary -- and the physical durability of the disc itself. As currently priced at Amazon's UK site, those meager upsides come at twice the cost. I really do wish that I were writing the sort of glowing, wildly enthusiastic review that Import/Export so richly deserves, but its release on Blu-ray is far too tremendous a disappointment for that.
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
Pauli (Paul Hofmann), meanwhile, isn't seeking out a better life so much as trying to escape his old one in Vienna. Unemployed and dangerously deep in debt to every loan shark in town, Pauli heads out to Slovakia with his stepfather, lugging around gumball machines and a vintage arcade game in a rickety van. It's not overwhelmingly glamorous, no, but at least no one's trying to maul him in the subway. Still, Pauli's not managing to make his own way, dismissed as little more than a pet by his stepfather. He's also forced to look on as the man who's supposed to love his mother tries to screw every hooker and barfly in the Eastern bloc.
Director Ulrich Seidl discards most every cinematic convention in Import/Export. It's devoid of any sort of score; the audience hears no music that the characters themselves can't hear. Seidl chooses not to resolve Pauli and Olga's conflicts. His characters change and grow throughout the course of the film, yes, but Import/Export is a slice of life rather than a story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. There are no weepy monologues, and the screenplay that Seidl cowrote never once has its characters expressly spelling out what's churning in their hearts and minds. Import/Export draws its strength instead from a profound sense of realism. I didn't find myself so hopelessly enthralled by Seidl's film because of any sort of shameless manipulation; Import/Export wholly earns that emotional investment through a keen visual eye, a series of spectacular, if understated, performances, and the unwavering sense that I'm watching the struggles of actual, doggedly determined people rather than stock cariactures nudged through an overly familiar premise. If not for its striking cinematography, Import/Export could easily be mistaken for a documentary.
Despite the fact that essentially nothing goes well for Olga or Pauli throughout the course of Import/Export, the film is ultimately about determination rather than bleak despair. The two of them soldier on no matter what, not striving for some sort of impossibly outlandish fantasy but simply enough to get by. Seidl's exploration of them is intriguingly voyeuristic. Neither of these characters speak about their troubles, but then, they're fundamentally alone; they don't have much of anyone to talk to in the first place. They don't succumb to their lots in life as that ultimately doesn't accomplish anything either. They continue moving forward because that's the only direction there is.
Import/Export is ultimately a downbeat film, yes, but much like its characters, the movie doesn't revel in its sorrows. Despite Olga and Pauli's hopes remaining so far out of reach, we still catch occasional glimpses of happiness. That infuses a palpable spark of life into both of these characters, and the two of them are realized through outstandingly rich, layered performances. Much of what's revealed about Pauli and Olga is unveiled through facial expressions and physical gestures. The delivery of what dialogue they're given is wholly convincing throughout, but these characters are predominately brought to life visually. At the same time, Hofmann and Rak aren't playing to the
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
With the film's 141 minute runtime, Seidl has quite a large canvas on which to paint, and he takes care to balance the bleak with the beautiful. For one, the cinematography can be achingly gorgeous, even as Import/Export is photographing a gypsy slum or a frozen wasteland pockmarked with factories billowing smoke into the winter air. The sprawling runtime offers ample room for the film to further flesh out its sense of verisimilitude, and it deftly balances lighter moments with the dark. Olga is shown debasing herself on an Internet sex video to try to scrouge together a little extra money, but the language barrier leaves her struggling with what her customers are demanding, exactly. At one point, she fumbles with a cheat sheet of German dirty talk to try to bring herself up to speed...to know what it means when she's barked at to insert her finger into someplace unpleasant. Olga is dismissed as little more as an interchangeable, disposable commodity as a cleaner in Austria, even chided when she can't properly clean the teeth of a mounted fox with a wirebrush to her mistress' exacting specifications. Those sorts of intriguingly odd moments are balanced by the horrors of death, abandonment, and betrayal.
Pauli doesn't have it all that much better. He's introduced as a stubborn kid with his eye only on immediate gratification...teasing a girlfriend terrified of dogs with a pit bull he'd spent the better part of the day wrestling with, for instance, despite the fact that he doesn't have the money to actually buy the beast. There's something cartoonish about the sight of a shirtless Pauli shadowboxing in his room as well. Pauli clearly has an image of himself he wants to force on the world at large, but no one seems to pay much notice. A gang of barely-twentysomething punks strip off the security guard uniform he's wearing in a mall parking garage and drench him in beer, leaving him half-naked, handcuffed, and sopping wet next to a concrete pillar. His stepfather tortures and torments him with the same sort of gleeful fascination as the children poking at the scorpions at the outset of The Wild Bunch; he's seen as just a diversion to pass the time.
Import/Export is an extraordinary achievement, fully realizing Ulrich Seidl's quest for authenticity and emotional realism. Its nearly two and a half hour runtime may sound daunting, but the length of the film feels as if it's just a fraction of that. There's a wealth of themes and concepts to explore, such as the social and physical boundaries that separate us, the perception of immigrants as homogenous and disposable, and exploitation both financial and sexual by the impotent. Import/Export's brilliant choice of locations, that Neorealistic blend of actors and non-actors working alongside one another, its eagerness to shatter expected boundaries of taste and cinema, nuanced writing and performances, and its accomplished cinematography make for an unconventional and astonishingly powerful film. This is the sort of work that would traditionally be an exceptionally rewarding discovery on Blu-ray, but disappointingly, Import/Export looks to be a DVD masquerading as high definition. The film is currently only available on Blu-ray in the UK, and although this region-free disc is readily imported from across the pond, I'm disappointed to say that this lackluster release isn't worth the effort.
Video
Even accounting for Import/Export's low budget and gritty 16mm photography, at no point throughout the nearly two-and-a-half hour film is this Blu-ray disc ever recognizable as high definition. The 1080p24 video is exceptionally soft and devoid of any fine detail whatsoever, more in keeping with an upconverted DVD than a newly-pressed BD-25. Its grain structure is smudged and indistinct, and even the text of its opening and closing credits is poorly defined.
) | ) |
| [click on the thumbnails to enlarge] | |
Import/Export is ravaged further by excessive edge enhancement. For whatever reason, the 1.78:1 image is lightly windowboxed, and the digital oversharpening is so clumsily fielded that the frame's edges are saddled with a scalloped appearance throughout the entire length of the film. Its electronic edge haloes are thick, hard, and impossible to overlook, and a couple of disappointing examples have been provided below.
) | ) |
| [click on the thumbnails to enlarge] | |
Contrast remains consistently flat throughout, although this would seem to be a deliberate part of Import/Export's visual aesthetic. Its gloomy, undersaturated palette complements the tone of the film effectively as well. Still, even for that sort of approach, colors still strike me as unusually dull, as if this Blu-ray disc didn't have at its fingertips the full colorspace that high definition has to offer. On the upside, Import/Export is largely free of any speckling or wear, and despite the low bitrate of its AVC encode -- a 141 minute film with lossless audio compressed to just over 16 gigs -- I was unable to spot any glaring missteps with the compression.
Audio
Import/Export features dialogue in several different languages and, by the sound of it, is predominately delivered in Austrian German. Its 16-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack follows the naturalistic approach of the film. Director Ulrich Seidl prefers to let the performances and imagery convey all of the film's emotions, and only diegetic music is featured anywhere throughout. The sound design is teeming with atmospheric color, immersing the audience that much more into the struggles of these two people. There's a strong sense of directionality as well; along with more traditional effects like cars tearing from one channel to the next on the highway, even the sound of music on the stereo changes as Seidl cuts between different camera angles. The overall fidelity is nothing extraordinary but is generally rendered well enough. Some of the earlier dialogue in the film has a clipped quality to it, but this isn't a persistent problem. Also, the film has such little reason to lean on the LFE channel that the limited bass is understandable. Though I wouldn't imagine that Import/Export's lossless audio is worlds removed from the track on the DVD release, its sound design is a strong effort just the same, and I feel confident that it's representative of the way the film sounded as it made the rounds in theaters and throughout the festival circuit.
This Blu-ray disc doesn't feature any alternate soundtracks or downmixes, but optional English subtitles have been provided.
Extras
- Interview (24 min.; SD): Director/co-writer Ulrich Seidl offers a great deal of insight into the construction of this film, including his interest in exploring social borders rather than geopolitical ones, such a drive for authenticity that significant portions of Import/Export were shot in a working geriatric ward complete with actual staff and patients, resisting the temptation to embellish or overdramaticize, his unconventional methods of directing his actors, and the glimmers of hope still beaming in something so downbeat.
- Trailer (2 min.; SD): The only other extra is Import/Export's terrifically inventive British theatrical trailer.
The Final Word
I'm a great admirer of this wonderfully well-realized character study by Ulrich Seidl, but Import/Export as it's presented on Blu-ray is frustratingly difficult to recommend. Though I don't have the British DVD release in hand to do a direct comparison, I suspect that any differences between the two would be minimal, if that. The only advantages of picking up Import/Export on Blu-ray would be ease of play -- no PAL conversion necessary -- and the physical durability of the disc itself. As currently priced at Amazon's UK site, those meager upsides come at twice the cost. I really do wish that I were writing the sort of glowing, wildly enthusiastic review that Import/Export so richly deserves, but its release on Blu-ray is far too tremendous a disappointment for that.
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