Import / Export

Once again I got sent a film that somehow got put on my LoveFilm list without me remembering. As with all of these things they generally come from me listening to Mark Kermode on the radio and deciding to check out whatever strange arthouse weirdness he has decided is the best film of the week. By the time these films actually get sent to me I have no idea what they are about again, so looking it up on imdb revealed to me that this was a tale of two people, one going east and one going west, and their lives. Hmmm.

With this extraordinarily worthy-sounding synopsis lodged in my brain I sat down to Import/Export's slightly-more-than 2 hours. Whenever I watch an arty film I'm always slightly aware that I'm going to get something different to the norm, but I wasn't quite expecting what this film offered up. Within 20 minutes of the start there are some pretty explicit sex scenes. I don't just mean explicit, I mean explicit. The lead 'going west' character - a Ukrainian girl - goes and works in an online sex parlour and has to interact with some seriously nasty sounding characters over the internet. Later in the film the 'going east' character - an Austrian who is a jobless arsehole - hires a prostitute when he arrives in Ukraine; she looks well underage. The scene where his father gets her to curse herself in German is very disturbing and - once again - explicit.

So was there any point to all this? Well I recon it's all about the different ways that people act and react towards people from different social strata and different places in the world. Reading around a little on the imdb of other people's reactions to the film, there is a feeling that it's trying to highlight the way the people from Eastern Europe might sometimes be treated as second class citizens in the western world. I have sympathy for that point of view, since the two main characters are an Austrian man and a Ukrainian woman. He is a layabout who mistreats his girlfriend, she is a trained nurse. He travels east and with his little money can get what he wants; she travels west and can only get work as a cleaner in an old-people's home.

I am pleased I saw the film, as the major point it's making is a valid one, and one that I should probably give more time to thinking about. I'm not necessarily going to recommend it to everyone though, as it's very heavy and depressing (every scene in the old people's home is heart-wrenching). Also, if you're easily offended by really explicit sex scenes you'll probably want to give it a miss.