TIFF Report: SLUMMING Review
Michael Glawogger’s Slumming is a fascinating character study, specifically looking at how people function outside their closed little worlds they form around themselves. The film delves into not only class strata within Austria but also across the border into the Czech Republic and as far stretching as Indonesia. The film opens with an angry internal monologue from a serious alcoholic, Kallman (a fierce Paulus Manker), who earns his drinking money by selling his poetry in between shouting at the folks on the streets or just plain stealing. He is a man who has truly struck rock-bottom, mocked or feared by those who look at him. He only takes a small amount of pleasure from hearing dirty jokes from his fellow alcoholic barfly/girlfriend.
Kallmann is not unintelligent and perhaps enjoys at some level his life of angst on the very fringe of society, even as he loathes himself at the same time. While I was immediately reminded of Mike Leigh’s Naked in the opening minutes, however the film then shifts focus to two bored wealthy characters who use internet dating services to toy with the women they meet there (going so far as to make a collection of camera-phone pictures of these women’s crotches. They call this past time, which includes going to the clubs and bars they find the most tacky (or depressing), Slumming, and pass their non-dating time making up stories about the backgrounds of individuals in these places.
Sebastian (german actor August Diehl, who walks the line between creepy and charming) even describes his job as ‘doing nothing’ which is reminiscent of Hugh Grants character in About a Boy. These two worlds come together when Sebastian decides to step up their games (in shades of Hitchcock’s Rope). He sees Kallmann sleeping on a bench in front of a Vienna train station and decides it would be funny to throw this man into the trunk of their car and drive them across the Czech border and deposit him in front of a very different train station. This goes too far for his friend and Sebastians would-be girlfriend not only threatens to call the police on them, but also goes across the border to look for the homeless man across the help of the joke-telling barfly.
The movie takes place at the crossroads of Sartre's existentialism and law of karma. The entire collection of characters in the film are almost completly unlikable, neither Sebastian nor Kallmann are anywhere near saints, and this applies in a lesser degree to the supporting characters. It is fascinating to watch them deal with life outside of their safe-zones and what fate throws at them. The trials and tribulations of the somewhat free-form plot are more blackly comic than dramatically straight.
Where the film really shines however, is in the sound design. A subtle techno hum as Sebastian and his friend drive around town or the cracking of ice on a lake as Kallmann wanders the Czech wilderness. There are some nice surreal touches in the film which work quite well, including the most creepy use of garden gnomes that I’ve come across. Moments such as deer wandering around downtown Vienna or the most chaste (but strange) prostitution ritual in Jakarta, Indonesia nicely reflect the characters inner states, even if they remain largely powerless at the hands of fate. Apparently the row of "prostitutes" are real, and somewhat of a tangent from Glawogger's previous documentary, "Workingman's Death."
Any movie that understands that a man dressed as a woman is comic, where a woman dressed as a man is sexy is fine in my book. Proving yet again that Black comedy is best made from countries with cold climes, Slumming is certainly worth a look.
