Models (1999) User Reviews

What is Seidl trying to say?

[hofnarr · 6/10 · 7 December 2002]

A cinema friend of mine and I were chatting after seeing this film - we'd previously seen ANIMAL LOVE, DOG DAYS and LOSSES TO BE EXPECTED. My friend commented that he got the feeling Seidl didn't like his subjects very much.

I guess that MODELS (1999) makes that point better than DOG DAYS (2001) - some of the people in the latter are likeable, and in the earlier 1992 film LOSSES TO BE EXPECTED, quite a few of the people were rather amiable. I don't know what might have happened to Ulrich Seidl from 1992 to 1995 when ANIMAL LOVE came out, but although the characters in MODELS might be complex and perhaps even interesting, they aren't very likeable at all - not that that need to be, and maybe that's part of Seidl's point(s). If the film is "written & directed", it's not really a documentary, is it? It's a little more difficult to tell in MODELS how much of it is real and how much is being torqued up from whatever "reality" there is - and reality is never quite the same for two different people. Is that a point? Dunno. But if Philip K. Dick was still around these two could certainly whip up some interesting dsytopias.

The life of models of every one and each of us?

[orgasm_machine · 8/10 · 8 September 2005]

Models is a realistic film. The genuine feeling of its characters is mesmerizing. It looks like an every day life film yet it never stops to make routine/cliché situations get a unique and mystical touch... like moments which stretch to become classic. It's scary to see our everyday life portrayed in there, the conflicts, the arguments, the power game, vanity, success, the hedonistic pursuit... etc. Models is about models but all in all everybody, male or female can identify with each and every one of the characters portrayed in the film. Ulrich Seidl once again succeeds in capturing the depth of every moment of every day life, similarly to Erich Roemer for example but in a more crude, less poetic yet highly artistic way. Seidl's art digs through our multiple layers of pretense to reveal the true human and through a self-assessment self knowledge process to lead to a dialectic procedure to evolve the human being a little bit higher than the dirt that we are made of and as primates step on. "Do I deserve to live" the song that plays as the credits go on screen summarizes the point of this film. Brilliant!

The Horrible, Terrible Truths of Our Times

[myboigie · 10/10 · 20 August 2005]

Let's be frank: these times are going to be seen as more decadent in-scope than Weimar Germany (1919-1933). I have only recently come to find Ulrich Seidl's documentaries, but this is how it should be done when portraying a society, and her inhabitants. While this documentary is ostensibly about a subculture of models in Austria, it could be about the same kind of people anywhere in the Westernized world. This is a common-theme of Seidl's documentaries, and I believe it isn't always his intention. Like the director, we are seeing these people and their lives for the first-time.

The same social-trends and phenomena going-on nearly everywhere in our era, and Seidl is simply capturing them as they are. Of course, all cinema is artifice, but somehow, even in his set-ups, the director is able to capture those amazing moments-of-truth that even escape the participants. What is singularly-depressing and distressing is how much all of this resembles America. Why travel, when everything is a hellish urban-sprawl underlining the meaningless existence of our current human-world? Seidl has an answer: People, and how they deal with this yawning-abyss of modernity offers some hope. Somehow, they survive and continue-on. People are what-matters to Ulrich Seidl.

Some reviewers have stated they felt Seidl "hates his subjects," which I find to be patently-false. He shows them unadulterated, and for what they are. His camera's-gaze is--as in all of his films--non-judgmental and authoritative. There has been some controversy over the director's documentaries being "staged," which is unlikely given the obvious sincerity of the models. Somehow, Seidl managed to get his subjects to relax, and to be themselves with no filtering. It's sad that young-women enter this life--if you want to call it that. They mutilate-themselves, starve-themselves, and hate-themselves. Maybe they already did.

The final-tableau is an incredible-moment that is undeniable in its truth: the main-model and her boyfriend are having a post-coital conversation (while drinking-in-bed in a Hotel). An ambulance is heard outside, and she says, "They're taking someone like you away," and she laughs. She continues: "You know, I know a good psychoanalyst." The boyfriend responds, "I didn't think people like you could survive without a psychoanalyst." The extended laughing-fit he falls-into is both hilarious, and chilling, as the model seems to slowly sink-into-herself...a powerful-truth has been revealed in the birthplace of analysis. This is the time we live-in. Models is a documentary that delivers on all-fronts, and exposes the Nietzschean-abyss.

So very real

[Perception_de_Ambiguity · 9/10 · 28 October 2010]

More revealing about the human condition than any documentary (including Ulrich Seidl's own, which in comparison seem like they are only scratching on the surface of what it means to get through everyday life as a human being) while being just as real, honest and immediate as a great documentary.

Although the film is about female models it's really about average human beings with a lot of spare time to preserve their bodies to be beautiful for the camera and to poison and futch up their bodies again to get their mind into a different state or simply out of laziness on a rotating basis. Average people with a lot of spare time to be alone and lonely and to flee into the beds of lovers and fornicate with strangers while the boyfriend (who usually ISN'T waiting at home) isn't any less guilty of caring only about himself. Average people going through short highs, longer lows and a lot more void times that are somewhere in between (the film focuses more on the highs and lows of its main characters, though).

"You don't really know what's going on around you until you look at it from the outside" was never truer than in the case of Ulrich Seidl's films. Through his completely objective camera we have a more insightful look at the characters than the characters themselves. It might seem paradox but although this film again shows that men and women are very different creatures who inherently aren't compatible the female characters in 'Models' are as understandable for men as they are for women. And again it made me think that women are the superior creatures of the two, at least in direct comparison when one man and one women encounter, cope and talk with each other (which describes basically every scene in the film in which a man plays a role) the woman always seems like the more intelligent gender. Maybe it reflects how everything a man really wants is procreation and women have a bit more complex goals like conceiving and raising this offspring. Or maybe it just reflects how little men expect to get from women compared to how much women hope to get from men.

Enough with the rambling. I can't help but wonder how Ulrich Seidl writes his films and especially how he works with his non-actors to create such real films. Just as good as 'Hundstage', 1999 won another brilliant movie.

Thoroughly unpleasant

[mcnally · 5/10 · 10 September 2002]

I saw this film at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival. Models is a thoroughly unpleasant tale, shot in a documentary style, about coked-up and unhappy models in Vienna. The excruciatingly long scenes alternated between existential longings for love and meaning, whining about physical imperfections, real or imagined, and hedonistic pursuits. It made its points in the first ten minutes, then kept making them over and over and over for the next hundred and ten. Maybe that was the point.

a typical life of a model ... and not a good one

[Gambrinus · 10/10 · 19 August 2001]

sleep with everyone and everywhere at any time and perhaps you will see your photo on the cover of a f***ed up magazine. and if not you are one of them. lonely, insecure, anorexic and unhappy. it's a story about a young model who struggles her way through the big bad world of business. the film is kind of a docu/drama with some scenes in it that everyone knows and everyone has it in his own life. i really enjoyed watching the film and i recommend it to everyone

so go and watch it :)

It's okay, but only if you care for the subject and the industry

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 16 September 2016]

"Models" is an Austrian film from 1999, so this will soon have its 20th anniversary. The writer and director is Ulrich Seidl, one of Austria's most known and most successful filmmakers and he made this movie a while before his lauded Paradise trilogy. The title already tells us what the film is about, namely models, namely four of them, which is a bit of a pity for audience members like myself who prefer brunettes. The film certainly looks like a documentary for the most part, even if (I believe) the people in here are all fictitious characters. You see that from the fact that they have acted in other (Seidl) films and also that you see stuff that you would not see in a real documentary like the models being sleazy and willing to get humiliated by naughty gross photographers or also that you see the models use drugs, something that, if these were real characters and real abuse, would get them to jail right away. And one character says for example in one scene something like "don't tell anybody", so obviously he is pretending that this film is not seen hundreds of thousands of people. But even if I like some of the other works I have seen from Seidl, I never enjoyed this one here. Maybe the reason is that everybody in here is just very unappealing, physically and also in terms of their character. But maybe this was Seidl's intention: to depict a profession and society and branch that you really do not want to be a part of at all. If so, then he certainly succeeded. I must say that the film dragged a lot for me and I really did not care for any of the quartet overall. What also did not help is that this film runs for almost 2 hours and I personally felt it had many lengths. It ended up being a definite contender for my least favorite Seidl film from what I have seen so far and level-wise (in terms of quality) it is nowhere near the great stuff he has done in recent years. I don't recommend the watch.