Ulrich Seidl achieves his best film in 'Sparta''s bleak portrayal of pedophilia, but in the worst possible way

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Again,

Another question: Can you always and at all times separate the author from his work?

Austrian director

is clear that the answer to the first question is yes.

On the second, reserve opinion until a court decides whether he is guilty or innocent.

The two answers seem the appropriate conclusion if we pay attention to the accusations made by the German weekly

after an investigation of more than half a year in the place where the director's last film, '

', was shot.

What is it about?

Of nothing less than the tribulations and sorrows of

harassed for what he is and hopelessly condemned for his past.

It is a film about identity, about guilt and, most obviously, about pain.

A very good film, it could be added for that of hurting.

Let's say that no tape of all those scheduled this year was expected with so much fear, anxiety and reserve, all at the same time, as the production of yore.

At the beginning of September, the German weekly 'Der Spiegel', one of Germany's journalistic references (or, better, the reference) surprised its audience with a nauseatingly meticulous report in which it recorded the, so to speak, , irregularities committed during the filming of '

'.

According to the testimony collected by journalists door to door, none of the parents of the children who are part of the cast was told what the film was about.

They were told that the story of a judo teacher was being told.

What is true.

It was explained to them that the protagonist and the adult with whom their children would interact represented an adoptive father figure blah, blah, blah... Which, strictly speaking, is also true.

The very long article is actually nothing more than a succession of situations, many close to the anecdote, others inconsequential, a few very debatable, and the last ones, the ones that count, creepy.

Apparently, the director did not hesitate to use the traumas of the children themselves to get the reaction he was looking for.

An example: a child was ordered to drink and was placed next to an actor who pretended to be drunk knowing that the child's own father was an alcoholic.

That day he went home crying after vomiting.

The sequence, however, very well.

Another detail: the children, all from poor families,

in a country with an average income of 400 per month.

The list of barbarities is long, but everything abounds in the same thing: there was deception.

To get an idea, any filming with children in Spain must respect a strict work schedule that does not interfere with their classes, requires the tutor to attend the filming and the script must have been reviewed by that same tutor.

The parent producer, the Austrian, defends itself and maintains that the legal procedures with the families were carried out by a Romanian subcontractor.

In short, they did not know anything, they did not know the legislation of the country, nor were they aware that it was mandatory to contact the child welfare services so that they, in turn, processed

The director and his team assumed that this was already duly completed and, if it wasn't, it wasn't their problem.

They also claim that there was already an investigation, that the police questioned six of the children and that the file was simply closed.

When everything was revealed, the reactions did not take long.

The Toronto Film Festival, where the film was also scheduled, decided to remove it from the schedule until the matter was clarified.

San Sebastián, however, insisted on the same argument as last year when he was pilloried for awarding

then convicted by a London court, and later acquitted by another in the United States, for abusing his ex-wife.

Excuse of San Sebastian: the presumption of innocence.

Immediately afterwards, Ulrich Seidl made public his intention not to attend the Gipuzkoan capital with the argument that the work, his film, speak for itself.

Austrian director Ulrich Sedil.AFP

And, on Sunday, he finally spoke.

She spoke '

'.

And, without serving as proof or refutation of anything, it only remains to say that the film is

reflection on a trapped existence.

Unlike much of his earlier cinema, always bent on turning the camera to the darker side of the privileged welfare society, Siedl now strives for ruthless sobriety.

Not at all exhibitionist and much less moralistic.

' gaze

, which he used with such irony --in many cases indistinguishable from cynicism-- in his previous work, is now annulled to the point of exasperation.

And so on until touching the marrow of a pain that affects us all.

What is being discussed is something more than simply the suffering of a sick person, what is being questioned is the very mechanism of identity observed from the condescending gaze of an adult from a rich Europe who takes over the other Europe, the poor, as a hostage of his suffering.

It tells the story of a man who, upon turning 40, decides to start over.

And do it with a clear awareness of who he is.

Or he wants to be, it is not clear.

He leaves everything, he says goodbye to his father forgetful of his Nazi past in the nursing home and flees to the interior of Romania.

There, he founds a school called Sparta where the kids find refuge from the desperate situation in which they live.

They play, they have fun and, meanwhile, they are involuntary actors of the passion of their judo teacher.

To avoid misinterpretation, there are no sex scenes.

Everything runs in the naked tension of a man forced to digest his own suffering.

The film does not save him, it does not understand him, it does not use him as an excuse for provocation.

On the contrary, only the sentence remains.

The film, by the way, forms a diptych with '

', presented in Berlin.

Originally it was a single tape in which he realized the life of two brothers.

One is a pop old glory for German and Austrian tourists who stop by the Italian city and the other is the protagonist of '

'.

They are united by the impossibility of avoiding the past.

And, it has already been said, the pain.

That and

explained in the most brilliant way.

The result is probably Seidl's best film, the most desperate, the most concise, the crudest... but at what price?

Is it worth everything for art?

Seidl thinks so, the person who signs is convinced that it is not.

However we put it, the presumption of innocence is not applicable in the same way in any crime as when the victims are either the most vulnerable (children, poor children) or those who suffer the consequences of an unjust social structure (women, battered women) .

It is so.

'FOREVER', THE OTHER SIDE OF 'SPARTA'

For the rest, and far (very far) from the controversy and the fray, the official section was completed with just the opposite of '

'.

In every sense.

'

', by the Danish

is one of those films thought to exhaustion for consensus: elegant, careful, intelligent and without a single pedophile.

The film stops at the pain (again) of a family that has just lost one of their children.

And there she lives.

The entire film lives in the lost look of the elderly parents who do not know how to fill such a black and deep hole and in the gesture of desperation of the sister, who fights with an artificial insemination treatment to be a mother.

Aside from the silent prodigy of the ellipsis that marks the transition to pain (the death of the son), the film moves through the spectator's retina like a very deep and suffering ghost.

The challenge is not to film what you see in such detail, but to shed light on the other side, on the simple void.

And in this way, a delicate and elegant wonder remains that without inventing anything, distancing itself from any hint of originality, manages to place itself

Impossible not to get excited, unthinkable not to agree.

The controversies are over.

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