IMPORT/EXPORT

Directed by Ulrich Seidl. Starring Ekateryna Rak, Paul Hofmann, Michael Thomas, Maria Hofstatter Club, IFI, Dublin, 135 min

ULRICH Seidl is very definitely some sort of genius, though not the sort of genius you'd invite round for tea. Following on from Dog Days, a grimly brilliant film from 2001 that I never want to see again, the Austrian sado-realist now brings us an icy meditation set among less lovely parts of Ukraine and his own homeland.

Import/Exportis a symmetrical epic in which very little happens. The first of the two discrete stories begins in Ukraine, where Olga (Ekateryna Rak), an apparently amiable young woman, toils both as a nurse in a maternity hospital and as a sex worker for an internet pornography operation.

Unable to take care of her baby, Olga travels to Austria. After being fired as a cleaning lady by an archetypically mean-spirited bourgeois capitalist, she finds a job working in a grim old-persons' home.

The other tale follows Pauli (Paul Hofmann), a young Austrian dope, as he too bumbles from one unsatisfactory job to the next. After failing comically as a security guard, he joins his nasty, foul- mouthed father servicing gumball dispensers and poker machines in eastern Europe. The last act finds the two characters - who never meet - living unhappy lives in each other's country.

No sensitive viewer could fail to admire Seidl's gift for composing striking images from unlikely material. The walk to Olga's workplace takes her past an epic sweep of industrial monstrosities - cooling towers, warehouses, vast clouds of toxic steam - that attain an unlikely sort of angry beauty. Elsewhere, by putting the ancient inhabitants of the old-persons' home in festive hats and arranging them for a hopeless Christmas party, he persuades us to laugh at something that is the opposite of funny.

The combined effect is overpoweringly oppressive, but, for all the supposed seriousness of Seidl's approach, there is something rather adolescent about his desire to show off ever more wretched miseries. The film's stark socio-political posturing also lacks subtlety: fruit machines represent capitalism; Olga moves from a place of birth to a place of death; ladies in big houses have spoilt children. And so on.

Still, for all its flaws, Import/Exportremains the work of a singular film-maker. That is not to suggest I'd savour shaking his hand.