"Hope" lavishes the same rigorous attention on a chubby girl at fat camp. Melanie's accelerated coming of age happens against a backdrop of strictly regimented camp life, a series of exercises, chores, excursions and physical exams that Seidl frames the way one might photograph a factory assembly line. Seidl's masterpiece, "Import Export," found gentle comedy in the way his young heroine walked to her dreary job over dingy snow, past ugly Ukraine smokestacks, dressed like a glam snow bunny.
Seidl is fascinated with the little ways people decorate their lives to reflect the brighter future they are toiling for within a rigid system that both promises that future and continually denies it. In "Hope," Melanie and her fat-kid friends perform drills best suited to stoic Marines, arrayed in Seidl compositions as orderly as the kids are endearingly sloppy and listless. The white-and-beige walls of this place seem as uninspired as the staff. Yet these middle schoolers find ways to sneak in booze and music for classic spin-the-bottle parties. They are secretly, defiantly alive in a dead place.
