"Import Export"

A quite assured work in the "I suffered for my art, now it's your turn" mode, Ulrich Seidl's film proceeds from the presumption that no one in its audience has ever worked in a demeaning job, ever had a relative or loved one who was old and infirm and incapable of caring for him or herself, has never been betrayed by a family member or humiliated by a boss or a peer, and so on. It then artily jabs that audience with art-photo compositions within which scenes depicting the situations above are depicted. And he uses real geriatric hospital patients, too. The title is a description of the structure—see, in the "Import" story, a young Ukrainian woman, after unsuccessful stints as a nurse and internet porn performer, winds up in Austria working as a cleaning lady, first in the home of a loathesome (what else?) bourgeois, then in a geriatric hospital; in the "Export" story a Viennese knucklehead winds up in the Ukraine on an ill-fated gumball-toting journey with his horny stepdad. And no, the two never meet. I rarely flash on lines from old Saturday Night Live sketches myself, but about halfway through this I thought of that McLaughlin Group parody with Joe Piscopo as Sinatra, when he says, "Contempt for the audience! That's what killed Dennis Day!"