Ulrich Seidl-Models (1999)

From one of cinema’s most notorious and acclaimed documentarians -- Ulrich Seidl's Models is a revealing and devastating portrait of a trio of aspiring real-life Viennese models. Vivian will stop at nothing to be a magazine cover girl. Lisa fills her time with routine plastic surgery and cocaine binges, while innocent Tanja focuses on the mystical through tarot cards, yoga, and raw animal energy.Using long, meticulously composed voyeuristic shots, Seidl delves completely into the private spaces of the models, their sexual relationships and personal habits, exploring how sex and career intertwine. KINO




Seidl is a documentarian in the tradition of Luis Buñuel (Land Without Bread) and Werner Herzog. He’s an artist whose realistic, unsparing films about ‘ordinary’ people leading terrible lives have a whiff of the surreal.” – Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0199776/usercomments)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0199776/usercomments)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0199776/usercomments)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0199776/usercomments)




"Do I deserve to live" the song that plays as the credits go on screen summarizes the point of this film. Brilliant! (http://imdb.com/title/tt0199776/usercomments)