“Sparta” by Ulrich Seidl, roller taboo – Liberation

2023-05-30 23:34:00

After “Rimini” last year, the Austrian filmmaker, accused of child exploitation, continues his diptych with the story of Ewald, an emigrant in Romania with pedophile inclinations, in a soft film from the knee to the incomprehensible editing.

Sparta is the most depressing new film from the Austrian of his generation. After his sardonically titled triptych Paradis, which led us from Charybdis to Scylla on the creepy scale (morbid obesity, religious abuse, sex tourism), here he is back with a delightful true story, the second part of a diptych dedicated to two brothers inaugurated last year by Rimini : Ewald, a frustrated forty-year-old emigrates to Romania where he opens a judo club for penniless little boys – of course, it’s less for the love of sport than to satisfy a pedophile inclination that he curbs (we see him crying or bite his fist regularly) while making it flourish with the meticulousness of a pro (the finale leaves us in no doubt as to what will end up happening). Sparing the goat and the cabbage, a compassionate look on his hero who turns out to be “less worse” than many adults in charge of the children and a dirty complacent look whose alleged neutrality fizzles, Seidl is in truth less caustic than ‘usual, almost a little soft in the knee. No doubt this is the reason that pushes him to spice up the sauce with an incomprehensible parallel montage of the stay in the Ehpad of Ewald’s father, who finds the strength to mumble his allegiance to Hitler between two turns of the walker. When it was learned last year that the director was accused of exploiting children on Sparta, the worst was perhaps not being surprised, deep down, that an Ulrich Seidl shoot looks like an Ulrich Seidl film in every way.

Sparta d’Ulrich Seidl, with Georg Friedrich, Hans-Michael Rehberg… 1 h 41.