When Ulrich Seidl looks for points of friction, he does so without pain. JESUS, YOU KNOW is not even his most tactless work (in the best sense), but it is already a curiosity: looking into the souls of people in church as they pray - initially scandalous and voyeuristic, shameful and lacking in distance. The highlights however are the contrasting points, the home recordings. When the woman in the foreground is ironing and her husband - barely recognizable behind tinted glasses - is watching the television, half dead. Or when the boy with the "impure thoughts" walks up and down the room and sends pitiful prayers to heaven. Pity arises between loneliness in life and being abandoned by God; while the exposure of the middle-class facade that all the characters try to maintain, including their clumsy naivety - and yes, stupidity - invites contempt above all, somewhere in between Seidl expresses his love-hate relationship with these people. That is what makes his films so honest and special.
Ulrich Seidl's particular register of imperfect austerity—we'll affectionately refer to it as "We have Haneke at home"—often foregrounds a need for control, and in its imperfections, an inability to achieve it. Such a desire, such a primal need, to regulate and find neat answers proves fitting for an examination of religion, and in Jesus, You Know, Seidl finds in his very design a question of control constant throughout his chosen framework.It's an oft-discussed paradox of documentary filmmaking that, in attempting to shine a light on "reality," there will virtually always be an element of construction in what you're seeing; you may very well tell your subjects to "act natural," but the second you place a camera in front of their faces, their first instinct will be, whether intentionally or not, to put up some sort of front that will make themselves appear more gracious than they truly believe themselves to be. Seidl's camera, by that token, is clinical but not distant, his subjects mere feet away from his lens as Jesus, You Know becomes an endless series of prayers-turned-monologues from people expressing a sense of piety whose truth can never truly be gleaned from what we're enabled to see. The longer these gentle diatribes go on and bleed into one another—and maybe this is merely the religious cynic in me going off—the more each insert shot of the hanging crucifix or portrait of Jesus to which these subjects are praying read as something of a bitterly humorous reaction of a figure who seemingly only exists to bear the brunt of our complaints.According to Mubi, Jesus, You Know is in fact composed of scripted monologues alongside its genuine interviews, but Ulrich Seidl never affords us the distinction between them. In so doing, his sharpened detachment becomes a testament to the inherent transactional nature of religion and prayer as a whole, even in its most genuine intent of worship; an answer only comes in exchange for a prayer, salvation only from continuous devotion.
All the iconography - the crucifixes, the portraits, the altars - impose a grand religiosity though at the centre of the church resides deeply humanist filmmaking; a cathedral of faith architecturally sound, yet the struggle resides in all its occupants. Most unexpected is how this proves an accompaniment to Seidl's Models in the formal arrangement of the camera as a mirror, these private conversations with Jesus reflecting back upon the individual such that confession becomes introspection; their darkest thoughts released in a dialogue that constitute a hope for safe passage yet finds its guiding light in their own conscience. It's a simple glance at the great complexity that is human existence, the universality of every struggle coming to occupy the empty pews with empathy for those whose guilt exceeds the significance of their sins; the final prayer in particular is so profoundly sad, a plea which must remain unanswered no matter how the great the sanctuary or direct the camera.
