When the film opens, we see a man staring intently at a huge white serpent in a glass case in front of which is a sniffing guinea pig which gradually approaches the snout of the apparent immobile white reptilian until it gets too close, when it swung at lightning speed at the guinea pig and had it in the grips of a fatal squeeze.
We are shown a further dozen such other basements. In the first, we are shown that of a gun lover who runs an underground shooting range where he practices shooting at paper targets and computer generated images of live targets all the time and uses the facilities also to each a few beginngers in gun using and sings opera arias in that empty room or in the toilet when he's not so engaged. In a second, we see how a big game hunter proudly displays on the wall his trophies from all parts of the wild world. In a third, we are shown how a 50'ish cleaning lady would hide nicely dressed dolls in the storeroom of the building where she is working and whenever she is off work, would go in there to caress and to talk to her "sweet babies". In a fourth, we are shown how a group of men would gather in a cellar full of pictures of Hitler, the Swastika flag and discuss such manly subjects as the future of the German race and the degeneracy of other races over a few drinks. In the sixth we are shown a group of teenagers gathered together for a joint of marijuana or do some drumming. In the 7th, we see how an old couple would sit behind a bar counter nicely decked out with hundreds of bottles of different kinds of wine, gin and other alcoholic drink, wine glasses with 3 pairs of speakers above them, a secret hideout where they can indulge on their passion, something which the man says is in his family's blood.
In the 8th to 10th basements, we see successively how a young man boasts about his ability to satisfy the sexual desires of all kinds of women, including prostitutes from whom he said he learned lots of what turned women on and an actual demonstration of how he did so with his natural and physical equipment; then how a middle aged woman who says she likes to be in absolute control dominates her male sex slave with all kinds of sadistic devices and how her opposite number who is into masochism is flogged by her male partner. But in the last basement, we are shown how a plump and naked woman would lock herself in the smallest of three piled up iron cages placed at the top in which she scarcely has enough space to make any sort of changes in her curled up position: probably intended to bring home the message, if any, how some of us would, if stripped naked or stripped of our external clothings and allow the true and unrestrained play of our deepest, our most secret and most private wishes and desires of our "self", might, paradoxically, voluntarily imprison ourselves, each in their own way, in some kind of prison or cage, an iron-clad enclosure of our own making or choosing, whether in the form of some kind of passion, some kind of ideology, some kind of most individual and unique ways of obtaining certain sensual and sexual stimulation, at least as far as contemporary Austria is concerned or if Austria is to be taken as a symbol of the modern civilization in general, then universally. If so, they illustrate the truth of what Rousseau said more than two centuries ago, that man is born free but everwhere, they are in chains. However, unlike what that 18th century romantic philosopher thought, those chains may not necessarily be those imposed by others by religion, by culture, by political institutions, but may be those forged by themselves and more specifically, by those of their own mind, heart or psyche. Ultimately, ware all slaves, but not to others, as many like to think, but slaves to one part of our very "self".
What is unusual about this quasi-documentary is the way that Ulrich Seidl is able to get the consent of the owners of the relevant basements to confess so openly about their peculiar manner of obtaining some kind of pleasure or enjoyment out of what they are thinking or doing in their own private basement and allow him to film them. There is no narrator in this film to pass any form of moral judgment upon the "actors" and "actresses' all of whom are "playing" their roles in what is shown to be happening and what is being filmed. They are all allowed to speak for themselves. The result is a sense of realism and authenticity which can't possibly be obtained in any other way. The actors and actresses speak in their own voice about who and what they are and what they do in their basement and why. It is as if we had been shown the raw data of a social or psychological field study of certain sections of Austria living at the margin of that society. That is certainly more than what an ordinary tourist to Austria or even some other members of Austrian society is likely to be able to see. Through the documentary, we are permitted get a previous glimpse of that mysterious world. Having seen this documentary, Austria can never ever again quite be the Austria of Bach, Beethoven, Brahams, of Mozart, the Vienna Opera, the Sound of Music or even of Goethe, Hegel, Scheler, Schopenhauer ,Husserl, Heidegger, Marx, Marcuse, Dilthey, Frege, Popper, Woolf, Wundt, Wittgenstein, Buber, Jaspers, Adorno, Gadamer. Nietzsche perhaps. Freud perhaps.But whatever or whoever it is, Austria will never be the same again for me.
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