European Films

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Documentary maker Michael Glawogger (Megacities, Working man’s death) presented his second fiction film called Slumming today here in Berlin, where it is the first Austrian film in competition since many years. The  Austrian-Swiss co-production tries to tap into the same mad energy that made Die fetten Jahre sind Vorbei (The Edukators, from another Austrian) such a joy to behold. Slumming slam-dunks the playfulness of Die fetten Jahre… but fails to deliver what made that film so great: a sense of politics and emotional involvement.

Viennese rich kid Sebastian (August Diehl from Der neunte Tag/The Ninth Day) lives off inherited money and enjoys himself with his housemate Alex (Michael Ostrowski, who also co-wrote and starred in Glawogger's first fiction film Nacktsnecken)  playing pranks on everyone and everything. They are completely into "slumming" or "slum tourism": visiting places of social gatherings that they (as rich boys) would normally never visit, in order to meet people that they would normally never meet. They go round Turkish cabarets, seedy snackbars, meetings for bachelors and institutions that help the poor. They also have a running gag that involves using their mobile phones to take pictures of the underwear (or lack thereof) of the girls they go out with after having hooked up with them over the internet. Of course their social experiments are only for their own gratification, which makes the joke funnier for them but not necessarily for the others – including the audience.

Glawogger gets some mileage out of this outrageous set-up but fails to realise that this is not the type of gimmick that can carry a whole film. What passes for the set-up of the boys’ comeuppance is a complication that arises after one of the boys’ more outlandish pranks involving a drunken sod who claimes to be a street poet (Paulus Manker, Code inconnu), who is taken over the border and dumped in the Czech Republic. The incident starts to gnaw at the conscience of Sebastian’s accomplice Alex and then worries a woman (Pia Hierzegger, also from Nacktschnecken) he has bedded who finds the poor man’s passport.

Slumming's set-up is a cute idea for a short film told in a needlessly laborious way to hide the fact that there is simply not too much of a story there. Glawogger could have made the film more interesting had he paid more attention to the characters, but in his and Barbara Albert's screenplay they are never really brought to life. A waste of an excellent performance by Diehl, who, with his devilish grin, knows how to retain a certain sympathy despite playing an essentially soulless and nasty character. Camerawork , as always  in a Glawogger film, is very cured, though this is his first collaboration with cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (Luna Papa, Spiele Leben).