For its first half, Ulrich Seidl’s documentary In the Basement is a brisk, bracing, and often very funny film about the seeds of fascism in contemporary Austrian society. The people Seidl observes in his short, sketchlike sequences are generally obsessed with order and domination, yet he renders their obsession nonthreatening, if not comically pathetic, by presenting them like characters in a comic strip, centering each of them in symmetrical or near-symmetrical compositions with lots of negative space at the top. They look small in relation to their environments, which is one reason they come across like children. Another is that Seidl presents their narrow-mindedness as childish and naive, not actively malicious. These are simple people with simple outlooks; the cramped, meticulously arranged suburban basements where most of the film takes place seem like their natural habitats.
The woman with the dolls seems at first like an outlier in the film, her mania unrelated to fascism. Yet her scenes, which can be embarrassing to watch, color the rest of the movie with their naked expressions of loneliness. She wants intimacy with another person, yet her means of satisfying this desire are pathetic. Watching her, you wonder if Seidl’s other subjects aren’t similarly motivated and whether they would be so obsessed if they felt loved. In any case his long takes of the woman mothering her dolls in cramped-looking storage rooms are increasingly hypnotic.
Directed by Ulrich Seidl
