2023-05-17 14:55:44
Dhe Austrian director Ulrich Seidl has a habit of accumulating so much material for a single film that he later decides he’d rather make multiple installments out of it. In 2013 he turned “Paradise” into a whole trilogy, held together by the life plans of three women: two sisters, one the mother of a daughter. “Rimini” and “Sparta”, the poisoned odes to the land of warriors and the city of drinkers, both empty projection screens, became two individual films only in post-production. This time in the centre: two brothers.
With “Rimini”, which premiered in Cannes in 2022, one wondered whether Seidl had misjudged this time. The drama about the aging ex-pop singer and heartthrob Richi Bravo became too repetitive at some point; half the sex scenes would have done as well. But now you see “Sparta”, the story about Richi’s brother Ewald (Georg Friedrich), and you know that everything is correct. It had to be two films so that “Sparta” could develop in all its elegance and restraint as it is doing now.
The typical Seidl aesthetic of desolation, his symmetry of sadness, which creates artificially arranged front camera stills on playgrounds and in old people’s homes that come across as a bleached-out Wes Anderson, alternates with the post-documentary improvisational dialogues of a cinéma vérite.
For a Seidl film, there are surprisingly few parallel narratives that distract from the core of the plot, everything seems to be of one piece. In the Romanian solitude, Ewald, in his mid-40s, opens a sports and fun camp called “Sparta” for boys aged around 8 to 14, whom he baptizes Fides, Apollo, Odysseus, Spartacus, Neptunus and Genius. The children, who are torn from their often violent, brutal homes for a few hours, are allowed to flourish here.
At the sports camp, the boys pose for Ewald’s camera
Source: © Ulrich Seidl film production
But because beauty is always close to horror, harmony is dangerously on the brink right from the start. Ewald is driven; he carries a weight that no one can take from him. It never becomes explicit, but his longing for childlike closeness, his lonely crying after playfully hugging a boy, his late-night slide viewings zooming in on the photos he took of his shirtless flexing their muscles protégés refer to his repressed inclination.
In this true story-inspired tale, pedophilia is the diagnosis even more clearly than in Seidl’s last part of the “Paradise” trilogy “Paradise: Hoffnung”, in which the 50-year-old coach does not seem to be troubled by a general fondness for children, but by the specific love for a 13-year-old schoolgirl who, as far as this is at all possible, seems to return it.
unsettling questions
Although Edward’s special attention falls on the blond Octavian, his vague attraction to children is already clear. In this general fixation, which teaches the narrative of allegedly accidental love that transcends age limits, which still prevails in “Lolita” or “Death in Venice”, a modernization of the material manifests itself.
It is nonetheless Seidl’s most careful, most sensitive film. The scandal director, who in the past did not shy away from showing sodomy, masturbation with the Christ Cross and sex tourism in Kenya, now relies entirely on the power of his characters and the subtle discomfort that comes with them. The tightrope act of approaching a pedophile protagonist succeeds without trivializing, repressing or pornographicizing his forbidden desires. “Sparta” is just as far from a romanticized normalization as it is from a clumsy scandalization of pedophilic tendencies.
Ewald (left) with his protégés
Source: © Ulrich Seidl film production
Questions like these unsettle productively: Can a pedophile who successfully suppresses his inclinations be a good teacher? How are caregiving and abuse related? Is the violence experienced at home worse or less bad than the caresses experienced at the teacher’s? And – here the film (involuntarily) reflects its own debate about the process of its creation – to what extent is the mistrust of parents towards men who want to spend time with their children justified and to what extent does it stigmatize male educators?
The accusation of voyeurism, which has overtaken the director since the beginning of his career and has been associated with exploitative trash TV formats, was substantiated in the case of “Sparta”. Because the fact that this is about underage amateur actors who the director, according to a “Spiegel” research is said to have exploited for art makes things even more tricky. Seidl did not inform the parents about the film’s pedophile storylines. He also filmed a shower scene in which the half-dressed children had to be in the same room with the naked main actor.
Ulrich Seidl’s aesthetics of desolation
Source: © Ulrich Seidl film production
He had a boy film a scene with an intoxicated actor, knowing that this would trigger the boy’s own experiences with his alcoholic father. The parents were denied access to the set – and here too there is a remarkable parallel to the content of the film. The allegations are weighty, but were denied by Seidl. As a result of the research, “Sparta” was unloaded from the Toronto Film Festival, but premiered a week later in San Sebastián, and is now coming to cinemas in Germany.
“Sparta’s” framing appears efficiently recycled, just as in “Rimini” Hans-Michael Rehberg sings at the end as a demented father with a Nazi past, sobbing, looking out the window and calling for his mum, while Schubert’s “Gute Nacht” sounds. Rehberg died during the shooting and they want every Seidl film to end with his last scene from now on, oh well, every German language film. What better way to understand that the past cannot be shaken off, just like the future?
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