Ulrich Seidl has a taste for places, people and their distressing details. He has the talent to film them candidly, slowly, until they become thrilling. The foreground of Rimini, his previous film, showed the landing of a retirement home whose walls and doors were decorated with digital photos supposed to warm the atmosphere. It was in Austria. Leaning on his walker, an old man came out of his room and, step by step, looked for a way out, bumping into the reality of closed doors, “You bastards!” he growled.
His sons came to pick him up to go to his wife’s funeral. In the middle of the ceremony, the old man asks “Who are we burying?”. The film tells the life of the eldest son, a charming singer on the return, more gigolpince than crooner, who, under the stage name of Richie Bravo, between two passes, gives recitals for retired people on vacation, before seeing his 18-year-old daughter whom he had abandoned and who had come to claim her unpaid parental pension arrears.
It is still there, in Sparta, the next movie. But Ulrich Seidl now tells about the life of the little brother. An introverted counterpoint to the eldest, Ewald moved to Romania where he found a job as a power plant inspector, or something like that. Aboard his big German car, he crosses the scenery of a country ravaged by communism and which will only recover with a lot of love. That’s good, he lives with a delicious and loving young woman. But very demanding of something that he cannot give her. He himself does not understand what is happening to him. Or does not want to understand. Until the day when, unable to take it any longer, and finished the commedia, he is packing his suitcase. Then begins the most difficult film to make. As much Rimini, by the zaniness of the character and the banality of the plot, could seem light, like a modern soty, as much Sparta is serious, free from any caricature. There too, the son visits the father, whose mental state has not improved. But for Ewald, it’s not about stripping the old man of his last euros, like that bastard Richie Bravo had done. To get an answer to the mystery that haunts him, Ewald becomes a child again, snuggled up in his crippled dad’s bed.
“To each his tastes, to each his tastes”
Child is the key word. To be one. To love the memory of his childhood to the point of looking for this lost time with the kids. Which have nothing against, a priori. As long as we play big brother, snowball fights, swing contest, everything is fine, everyone gets something out of it, no one sees the harm in it. But in the intoxication of a game, the embrace awakens an emotion that he cannot control, which surprises and terrifies him. You have to run away from it, run away, go even further, deeper into the misery of this country where the city is always in the suburbs, and the countryside always abandoned. Leaving Ewald to flee, the filmmaker returns alone to see the father who, in a fit of euphoria, repeats ad nauseaum: “To each his tastes, to each his tastes.”
To this index, he adds another: “Germany is ours, tomorrow the whole world”, sings the old man in the middle of the other cacochym residents. Nazism and pedophilia invited to the banquet of confusion. Back with Ewald, the filmmaker discovers his hero in full reconstruction. That of a Spartan Eden, baptized Sparta, full of children whom he introduces to judo, gymnastics, water games in the sun and in the showers of this abandoned school. It’s happiness. Except that the fathers of these children, as degenerate as they are, do not want that at home. Cathartic moment, where the wolf becomes a lamb, pursued by the pack. It’s a tightrope walker’s film, we advance with Ulrich Seidl above cesspools, misfortunes, expected violence, impossible loves, on the thread of uncertainty.
* Christophe Donner is a writer