“It’s my cozy room,” the man says, proudly touring his neatly-arranged basement. This is where he comes to relax and be himself, surrounded by the things that make him happy: his brass musical instruments, his well-stocked bar, his Hitler paraphernalia.
Wait, what? Down here in this Austrian man-cave, forbidden portraits of the Führer share space with uniforms and other Nazi bric-a-brac. You know — cozy.
This is one of the many sanctuaries explored in “In the Basement,” Ulrich Seidl’s unsavory documentary. The baleful Austrian filmmaker (of the grueling “Paradise” trilogy) turns his gaze downstairs, where all the the strange and dark impulses that lie beneath the civilized veneer are blossoming in full weirdness.
Inclined toward dire observations about mankind as he is, Seidl doesn’t spend much time on the more benign examples of rec-room oddity. A couple whose electric dart board plays “The Entertainer” get about 30 seconds of screen time.
But the guy who once dreamed of an opera career and now runs a shooting range below ground, with the friends who talk about how terrible Muslims are — he gets some serious screen time.
Seidl’s symmetrically-composed camera stares at these cranks, in the fashion of Errol Morris’s “Gates of Heaven.” And like that film, we’re never quite sure how much the director is ridiculing his subjects, or simply allowing them to be. Either way feels plenty creepy.
There’s some fascination down there, to be sure; Seidl’s fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud might have approved of the basement-as-metaphor for repressed desires. But Seidl’s film self-destructs by focusing its second half on non-traditional sexual practices.
We spend a lot of time on the detailed existence of a dumpy dominatrix and her sex slave, a hairy fellow who cleans the house naked and really gets put through the wringer (not a figure of speech here) when his mistress unlocks her torture devices in the basement. We have plenty of time to ponder life’s infinite variety as time stands still during these pain-filled scenes.
The one Austrian basement Seidl does not explicitly mention is the horrifying case of Josef Fritzl, the psychopath who kept a daughter locked up in his underground bunker for 24 years — during which time neither the other members of the Fritzl family nor a series of boarders ever noticed anything wrong. That hidden depravity, and that blind eye, looms behind Seidl’s erratic peek into the subterranean.
“In the Basement” (2½ stars)
Documentary look at what various Austrians have in their cellars — an interesting idea from baleful filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (the guy with the Hitler shrine is especially absorbing), but the movie’s second half gets derailed by a focus on offbeat S&M sex. In German, with English subtitles.
Rating: Not rated; probably NC-17 for nudity, violence, subject matter
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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