Anyone familiar with Ulrich Seidl’s work will concur that the Austrian auteur has never minced words, nor imagery, where sexual exploitation is concerned. It is one of the master themes of his films and the sense of tawdriness and humiliation lingers long after the film is over: the three middle-aged white ladies who visit Kenya for sex tourism in Paradise Love; the prostitution industry in Ukraine and Austria in Import/Export; ordinary people who turn out to have highly developed sexual perversions (many examples), and so on. But Sparta, a film whose main character is a complexed pedophile hunting pre-teen boys, includes perhaps the most grotesque and uncomfortable scenes of them all.
Although no abuse is shown on screen, Seidl and his regular actor Georg Friedrich reach far beyond TV’s special crimes units that deal with child abuse from the safety of a police car. Sparta, instead, describes the banality of evil from a pedophile’s perspective — the harrowing atmosphere of an individual’s world gone wrong, which is all the more repugnant for revealing the perfectly ordinary background that spawns the monster. Here the protag seems more keen on regressing to a safe, happy, lost childhood than having sex and his slow game of entrapment seems unplanned, as though he himself was unsure how far it would take him.
The film’s premiere was marked with turmoil and controversy after the German magazine Der Spiegel published an investigation into the circumstances of the film shoot in Romania, in which it alleged that the child actors, who were between the ages of 9 and 16, were exposed to alcoholism, nudity and violence during filming and that their parents were not made aware that the film was about pedophilia. As a consequence of the article, Toronto pulled its world premiere, while San Sebastian confirmed its competition screening. Seidl himself decided not to attend, saying he wanted the film to speak for itself without overshadowing it with his presence.
Set in the desolate hinterlands of Austria and Romania, Sparta is the second part of a diptych about two brothers; the first film was Rimini, which screened in competition in Berlin earlier this year. The character Ewald (a spot-on, deadpan Friedrich) briefly appeared in Rimini, which told the story of his sleazy gigolo brother Richie. The two films are symbolically linked by a very similar scene in a cemetery. Here, Ewald takes their elderly father (Hans-Michael Rehburg), who remains a National Socialist sympathizer even while suffering from dementia, out of his rest home to touch the urn containing his wife’s ashes. The father’s Nazi past appears to carry over to the next generation as a sort of curse or legacy, though neither brother seems politically motivated in the slightest.
The early scenes in Romania stress Ewald’s bland ordinariness and the extreme loneliness and isolation of his life. Indeed, he appears to be the only human being who works at his factory, where he seems to be some kind of engineer. With his brother Richie in Italy and his father in Austria, his only relationship is with his girlfriend (the lively Florentina Elena Pop), who seems much too attractive for him. She wants to get married but even more, wants him to make love to her, a proposition that causes the impotent Ewald visible anguish. He solves the problem by packing a weekend suitcase and driving off to see Dad. But on the way a series of things remind him of his childhood. He is drawn to some boys in a playground, and actually joins in a snowball fight in which he acts like a child. Finally, his discovery of an abandoned country school outside a farming community fills him with delight. He buys it.
If up to this point one could have a smidgeon of sympathy for the weaselly, immature, and obviously unhappy engineer, he enters forbidden territory when, on the pretext of teaching them judo, he entices a bunch of boys to fix up the schoolhouse as a gym and turns it into a kind of fort. Naming the place “Sparta”, he outfits the boys in gladiator costumes in a sick parody of a Greek military camp. One wonders where this is all going. Bare-chested wrestling is followed by water games where the boys are dressed only in clingy underwear. These scenes are hard to watch calmly, not because of what they show, but because Ewald’s adult gaze never leaves the boys. This reaches an intolerable level in a shower scene where Ewald is completely naked in their midst.
The kids are not yet teenagers, particularly the thin, delicate blond Octavian (Octavian-Nicolae Cocis), who Ewald quickly selects as his favorite. While the other boys roughhouse, he sits meekly beside Ewald and watches. It’s clear the man is fighting his desire for the boy, but they end up draped over each other in a bed in a scene open to interpretation but with plenty of sexual innuendo.
It is surprising that it takes so long for the kids’ parents to come on the scene, but that’s partly because Ewald cleverly pre-empts criticism by visiting the farmhouses and chatting. Octavian’s father is hot-tempered and violent, and he urges Ewald to toughen his son up and “make him mean” so he can face life. This rather comic personality is the only voice raised against the stranger who has bewitched the children.
Seidl’s usual film crew creates an alienated atmosphere everywhere one looks, from the disharmony of the interiors to the bleakness of deformed buildings made from geometric concrete, while regular D.P. Wolfgang Thaler, flanked by Serafin Spitzer, use overcast skies to depressing effect. Their frontal pictorial compositions are, however, often extraordinarily descriptive and unsettling. Editor Monika Willi finds just the right pace for this squalid story, which ends on an ironic note.
Director, producer: Ulrich Seidl
Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Frantz
Cast: Georg Friedrich, Florentina Elena Pop, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Marius Ignat, Octavian-Nicolae Cocis
Cinematography: Wolfgang Thaler, Serafin Spitzer
Editing: Monika Willi
Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin
Costume design: Tanja Hausner
Sound: Klaus Kellermann
Production companies: Ulrich Seidl Fillmproduktion (Austria) in association with Essential Films, Parisienne de Produktion
World Sales: Coproduction Office
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival Film Festival (Competition)
In German, Romanian
99 minutes
