How do you make a film about the unrepresentable? The director Ulrich Seidl addresses pedophilia and has thus made allegations. Now the audience can make up their own mind.
A stranger comes to a Romanian town and sets up a youth center for boys behind an opaque fence. What happens or doesn’t happen behind it is the subject of Ulrich Seidl’s film “Sparta”. And what happened or didn’t happen during the shooting is at the center of the allegations against the Austrian director (“Hundstage”, “Rimini”). After the premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September was canceled due to the controversy, “Sparta” will be shown in German cinemas from May 18th.
At the center of the film is a middle-aged Austrian named Ewald (Georg Friedrich), who works in Romania as a power plant technician. The camera accompanies him into the bedroom of his Romanian girlfriend Aurica (Florentina Elena Pop), where nothing works despite her attempts at seduction. The camera is also there when Ewald frolics around with school-age boys and scuffles with them. This not only leads to feelings of liberation and excitement in Ewald, but also to horror at his own pedophile tendencies.
Eventually, Ewald leaves Aurica and sets up a fenced youth club called “Sparta” in an abandoned school, where he practices judo and holds wrestling matches with the village boys. There are no sexual acts in the narrower sense, but a series of border crossings: touching, photographing the scantily clad children, looking at the pictures in close-up. Violence in the film does not come from Ewald, but from the boys’ fathers, who hit their own sons and threaten the stranger.
According to research by the magazine “Der Spiegel”, the non-professional child actors in Romania were confronted with scenes of alcoholism, violence and nudity without adequate preparation and supervision. In addition, rules for working with children are said to have not been observed. The allegations from cast, parents and production staff were made anonymously.
Clichéd Eastern European sadness
At one point, for example, the young “Spartans” in their underpants shower with the naked Georg Friedrich. Another time, the actor who played Ewald’s favorite protégé, Octavian, bursts into tears when his stepfather tries to force him to drink schnapps. The tears were real, Seidl has now admitted. But the boy only cried because he was afraid that his real mother would think he was really drinking alcohol, the filmmaker said in interviews.
The children were very well prepared and professionally cared for, defended Seidl. He said to her parents: “It’s about a man who wants to surround himself with children and feels attracted to them, who is also affectionate with them,” he told the Austrian magazine “Profil”. It is not a film about pedophilia, but about fathers, sons, violence and abuse of power.
That is not completely right. The director hints at physical abuse by Octavian’s stepfather and builds up a framework story around Ewald’s demented Nazi father, who also played a role in Seidl’s previous film “Rimini”. Nevertheless, the story is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Friedrich’s multi-layered portrayal of Ewald. What moves the boys and their parents is hardly worked out. Visually, a clichéd Eastern European sadness often prevails.
Trailers
The film functions above all as a challenge to the audience. Seidl demands empathy for a person with a terrible disorder. And he pushes viewers to their limits by making them accomplices when they look at Ewald’s childhood photos, for example. The fact that the plot and key scenes are already known because of the extensive preliminary reporting spoils the film experience.
– Sparta, Austria/Germany/France 2022, 99 min., FSK 16, by Ulrich Seidl, with Georg Friedrich, Octavian Nicolae Cocis, Florentina Elena Pop.