Slumming

Running time: 96 mins

Grab your ticket and climb aboard this riveting existential ride; just don?t forget to make your connection.

Full of inherited money and as frigidly amoral as the Austrian winter, Sebastian likes to play God, delighting in toying with the young women he finds through chat rooms. He meets them?sometimes seven or eight per day?occasionally beds them, but invariably discards them like yesterday?s newspaper. With his equally odious roommate Alex, Sebastian spends his evenings ?slumming? around the lower-class haunts of Vienna in his sleek BMW, guided by the disembodied monotone voice of his car?s GPS.

On the other side of the coin, destitute poet and raging alcoholic Kallman stumbles around the streets of Vienna in his shabby overcoat and askew ear-flap hat, accosting passersby to give him a Euro or two for his rambling verse. When Sebastian and Alex discover Kallman passed out on a train station bench one night, they play a cruel prank by loading him into their car, driving across the border, and dumping him onto a bench in front of a local town?s railway depot.

But Kallman isn?t nearly as hapless as he appears to be, and each player?s role in this game is about to change.


Peter Crane

GLOBAL LANDSCAPES