Michael Glawogger is best known for his documentary films like "Working man's death" or "Megacities".Though a feature film, "Slumming" shares some characteristics with the films mentioned above,for example an episodic structure and the clinical,thorough look at places and persons.Funnily this films in some respect is more documentary than his so called documentaries,which were partly criticized for their elaborate and highly stylish camera work.Here Glawogger openly follows the path of directors like Ulrich Seidl or Barbara Albert( who co-worked on the script) and maybe even there are hints of Michael Hanecke.The film begins with a terrific, Thomas-Bernhard-like monologue by dirty and drunk down-and-out Kallmann( fantastically played by the notorious theatre and film actor Paulus Manker ) full of misanthrophy and scornefulness.Then we see a young yuppie,whose profession is being a "rich son", together with his buddy on his slumming tours.That is some kind of slum-tourism:Visiting the bars and amusement places of the lower classes and playing dirty jokes on them just because they think themselves being superior humans.One night they run into the as usual drunk Kallmann and act very cruel and inhuman upon him. From that moment on one narrative thread concentrates on the adventures of the poor Kallmann trying to return to Vienna,another on our two irresponsible snobs. A third one acquaints us with a young woman Sebastian falls in love with or at least pretends to,because you never really know where his intricate game ends and his true personality begins.When that girl learns about the mean joke,she sets out to rescue Kallmann,though he doesn't really need her,because he is the most viable person in the film.These three threads are cleverly interwoven.Shot mostly in bleak colours and with occasional black humor the film for the largest part of time avoids the symbolic cliché-traps of art-house cinema.Some symbols are used to often and to bluntly for my taste, for example the snowy landscapes = the coldness of the society or the garden gnomes = the smugness of people.Luckily the film ends neither with a catastrophe nor a happy end.Kallmann is back in his viennese ambiance,while Sebastian swaps the "being a stranger in his own town" to "being a stranger in a foreign country".It would be interesting to know the further paths of their lives and that's speaking for the film.Acting on the whole is superb and the drama well worth watching.
