Peter Bradshaw 

In the Basement: an affectless parade of grotesques – Venice film festival review

Peter Bradshaw: Ulrich Seidl dances around the Joseph Fritzl case with his study of the underground habitats of bourgeois Austria, but his capacity to shock is on the wane
  
  

Secrets from the underground ... Ulrich Seidl, director of In the Basement
Secrets from the underground ... Ulrich Seidl, director of In the Basement Photograph: Claudio Onorati/EPA

There’s a sort of ridding obviousness to the title of Ulrich Seidl’s explicit and gruesome new film: the ghost of one man hovers around it, everywhere and nowhere. When the horrendous crimes of Josef Fritzl were discovered in 2008 - he had imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter in a secret cellar in the Austrian family home for 24 years - many looked to Austria’s artists for ways of understanding the horror as a possible symptom of national malaise, especially as another Austrian kidnap/imprisonment victim, Natascha Kampusch, had been in the news two years before. Was the Fritzl case uniquely Austrian, indicative of hypocrisy and brutality under the gemütlich surface, incubated in a spiritually stagnant country which has never cared to examine its past? Or was it perhaps a bizarre, aberrant event which could have happened anywhere, any time, and which tells us nothing? The works of film-maker Michael Haneke and Nobel laureate Elfiriede Jelinek were examined afresh and the case appeared to inspire new works by director Markus Schleinzer and Irish author Emma Donoghue.

Yet Ulrich Seidl would seem to be the most obvious candidate to address this issue: his documentaries and docu-realist fiction features have examined the bizarre and the grotesque side of bourgeois Austria, finding non-professional actors to inhabit his strange worlds - some of truly Diane-Arbus-type weirdness. In fact, Fritzl himself seemed very like the kind of sinister, garrulous eccentric Seidl would find for his films.

But In The Cellar doesn’t really take the Fritzl case head-on and any implied comment is unsatisfactory. It is just another parade of unsettling, shocking and absurd tableaux, of the sort that he has always created, and in many ways tamer than his earlier films.

Seidl has persuaded another range of Austrian hobbyists and weirdos to show us what they get up to in their cellars, and he often uses the technique of getting them to stand uncomfortably stock-still, as if for a photo.

Some are innocuous: a teen plays drums, a guy has a model railway, another has a tiny swimming pool. But then there’s the S&M
mistress with the love slave, the masochist, the fetishist. A deeply odd woman cooes over a lifesize latex model baby. And, inevitably, Seidl’s star turn is a brass-player in an oom-pah band who has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia in the cellar where he likes to relax.

But so what? Is the Nazi memorabilia enthusiast an unpleasant but harmless oddball or is he part of something much darker, and if so, what does this say about other interviewees who appear to be presented far more leniently?

It’s difficult to say - but it seems disconcertingly likely that Seidl’s grotesquerie is a mannerism which is becoming an artistic cul-de-sac. There are intriguing moments, certainly. The manager of a shooting range in a cellar reveals his secret - he longs to be an opera singer. Is that ambition absurd or redemptive?

The most purely shocking moment comes near the very beginning. A man who keeps a gigantic snake in a tank is seen watching it closely as it inches towards a shivering guinea pig whose imminent fate is only too plain. When the horrible moment came, the audience jumped and yelped - me included. That was a very Fritzl moment, if you like, but possibly just exploitation and deadpan provocation.

Seidl has form as an icily brilliant film-maker whose last movie in his “Paradise” trilogy, Paradise: Hope, appeared to offer precisely that - hope, or at rate something other than the affectless parade of grotesques. With In The Basement, he seems to falling back on the same old shocks. The freakiness is losing its capacity to disturb.

 

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