The Non-Binary Vectors of Import/Export
Import/Export, Ulrich Seidl (2005)
While the title of Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export appears to signify a simple parallel story working in opposite directions, the film renders notions of direction compelled by free will and choice as laughable trivialities. The backslash in the title forms an axis that hinges upon either the constantly laboring body or the body in wait for labor. Olga, the former, is a Ukrainian immigrant and single mother who monetizes various gendered emotional, sexual, and domestic labors—she is initially a nurse and a nude webcam model in eastern Ukraine, and then domestic help for a rich family in Vienna. Upon being fired by her boss, she takes up a menial cleaning job at a geriatric hospital in a desperate attempt to stay in Austria. Her Eastern European colleagues have elderly Austrian 'paper' husbands whom they refuse to sleep with, and they urge her to secure the same. Pauli, on the other hand, loses his job as security guard in Vienna and travels to Ukraine with his stereotypically gross stepfather, Michael, to work, but mostly spends his time grimly watching Michael trying to pick up women with whom he cannot communicate. At least linguistically, that is.
Seidl concocts a barely-intertwined narrative using the invisible vectors of inter-European migrations, albeit with the typical sexual sadism and faux uber-realism that are hallmarks of his style. Yet Import/Export is among Seidl's more compelling films, in terms of its crafting and the interrogations it creates. It's easier to convey trauma when we see struggling black and brown bodies in the Global North on screen; discrimination, exploitation, alienation are presumed— even if liminal—ontologies that usually circumscribe them as characters for the average viewer. But what of more literally invisible and incomprehensible otherness-es? What of desperately laboring white bodies and tongues that are out of joint with the language that holds power?
Globalized flows and late-stage capitalism have made the monolithic subaltern trope more antiquated than ever. In Import/Export, men weaponize German against Eastern European women—the language is used by online customers to bark orders at the webcam women, by Michael to humiliate a young sex worker. He tries to pick up a young woman in a shitty bar in Ukraine, wielding his nationality as sexual currency—"I am Austrian" he says, not particularly caring whether she knows his name. She barely understands anything else he says beside that. German is rendered a linguistic marker of entitlement in sexual-economic transactions which are never carried out on an even political playing field.
Import/Export, Ulrich Seidl (2005)