‘Import/Export’ is a snapshot of modern working-class Europe

Of the charges leveled against the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, the most frequent is exploitation. He’s a congenital misanthrope, his detractors claim, who goes to unseemly lengths to prove the depths of human misery and cruelty. His champions, on the other hand, see bravery and even compassion in the unblinking rigor of his movies. Either way, it’s hard to dismiss a filmmaker who’s so committed to confronting us with people, places and actions we would rather not see.

Like most of his other films, Seidl’s latest, “Import / Export” -- which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, got a blip of a release in the U.S. last year and arrives on DVD from Tartan Palisades this week -- means to provoke discomfort.

As the title suggests, it’s a dual story with a neatly symmetrical premise. Olga (Ekateryna Rak), one of the two focal points, is a Ukrainian nurse and single mother, trudging daily through a post-industrial wasteland to a hospital job in which she is underpaid. Struggling to support her family, she endures a brief stint as an Internet-sex operator and then, like so many have done since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, goes west, leaving behind her infant son and her mother. But her new home, Vienna, proves no more hospitable.

Pauli (Paul Hoffmann), Olga’s opposite number, is an Austrian layabout who makes the same journey in reverse. After losing his girlfriend and his job as a security guard, he agrees to accompany his loutish stepfather on a trip to the Ukraine, delivering gum ball machines and sampling the local night life, with gruesome, sleazy results.

Most of Seidl’s films have been documentaries that train a relentless eye on the behavior of obsessives and eccentrics: excessively devoted pet owners in “Animal Love” (1995); bulimic cover girls in “Models” (1999). The uncertain line between reality and fiction accounts for some of the queasiness surrounding his work.

His documentaries include staged scenes; his two fictional films (the other was 2001’s “Dog Days”) use nonprofessional actors, some essentially playing themselves, and real, unvarnished locations. For “Import / Export,” he ventured into a web-porn sweatshop and a real-life geriatric ward. The presence in the latter of real patients -- some on the verge of death -- has raised red flags for certain critics, and these scenes are difficult to watch. But they’re also about as direct and powerful a contemplation of mortality as any movie has ever attempted.

Seidl’s shoots can be grueling. “Dog Days,” a portrait of dysfunction during a Vienna heat wave, was filmed over three summers; “Import / Export,” which unfolds under a long deep freeze, took two winters (and two cinematographers, Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler).

Even more than the tough-minded Michael Haneke, his countryman, Seidl is a confrontational filmmaker; this is evident in almost every frame of his movies, in the head-on precision of his trademark compositions. But beneath the severe facade, there is also a strain of absurdist, tragicomic humor and, especially in “Import / Export,” a stoic tenderness.

Olga and Pauli never meet but their mirrored odysseys are evocatively intercut. As these two ordinary people strive for economic survival and a life with some semblance of dignity, a bleak, lucid picture of the new working-class Europe emerges. This is a land of desperation and exploitation, a gray zone and moral abyss that permits geographic, but not social or economic, mobility.

calendar@latimes.com