Main Cast: Maria Hofstatter, Christine Jirku, Victor Hennemann, Georg Friedrich, Alfred Mrva
Release Year: 2001
Country: AT
Run Time: 121 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Famed for his controversial documentaries Models and Animal Love, Ulrich Seidl makes his first fiction film with this impassioned attack on the banality and emptiness of modern suburban life. Using a documentary shooting style and mostly non-actors, Seidl weaves together a series of vignette story lines into a tapestry of loneliness and quiet desperation. A retired old man obsesses over meaningless information in life -- the weight of his groceries, and noise level of the neighborhood. A faded beauty queen's devotion to her boyfriend ends after an ugly night at the discotheque. A couple who has long since divorced though still lives under the same roof engages in a psychological war of attrition, trying to force the other into moving out the house. A young teacher's date with her boyfriend turns unexpectedly into a drunken orgy. This film won the prestigious Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
Ulrich Seidl, creator of a disturbing documentary about pet owners, Animal Love, is certain to shock audiences again with his narrative debut, Dog Days. The film is a uniquely unsettling look at suburban life in Austria, making its American counterparts, like Todd Solondz's Happiness and Sam Mendes' American Beauty, seem tame and positively life-affirming by comparison. The confrontational tone of the film is set in the first scene, in which the jealous Mario (Rene Wanko) assaults an unsuspecting stranger in the men's room of a disco, while he's using the urinal, for allegedly wanting to have sex with his long-suffering girlfriend, Klaudia (Franziska Weiss). Nearly every character in the film, in fact, is suffering, and it's not just the stifling heat wave. The strength of Seidl's film is that it dramatizes how desperate people, like the older teacher (Christine Jirku) with the abusive younger boyfriend (Victor Hennemann), cling to their suffering, even when they appear to have a way to escape it. This is also exemplified by some characters' willingness to continue giving rides to the amusingly demented hitchhiker, Anna (Maria Hofstatter), despite the fact that she never seems to be going anywhere in particular, and their encounters usually end with Anna annoying them by reciting inane top ten lists and singing commercial jingles, insulting them, and getting thrown out of their cars. Seidl weaves a large number of plot lines together with remarkable grace. The film is often difficult to watch, but it's frequently fascinating and darkly funny. In a sense, Seidl's uncomfortable film -- the heat from the sweaty bodies onscreen practically radiates into the theater -- assaults the audience, but with enough insight and visual finesse that it's worth enduring. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Cast
Maria Hofstatter - Anna, the Hitchhiker
Christine Jirku - Teacher
Victor Hennemann - Her Lover
Georg Friedrich - Lucky
Alfred Mrva - Alarm Man
Erich Finsches - Old Man; Gerti Lehner - Housekeeper; Franziska Weisz - Klaudia; Rene Wanko - Mario; Claudia Martini - Ex-wife; Victor Rathbone - Ex-husband
Credit
Ulrich Seidl - Director, Wolfgang Thaler - Cinematographer, Philippe Bober - Producer, Helmut Grasser - Producer, Ulrich Seidl - Screenwriter, Veronika Franz - Screenwriter
Dog Days (German: Hundstage), is a 2001Austrianfeature film directed by Ulrich Seidl. It is characterized by a disturbing naturalistic style which is a trademark of Seidl's directing. The film stars a mix of professional and amateur actors and it became mildly controversial for its depiction of unsimulated sex scenes.
The film follows six interwoven stories set in suburban Vienna over the course of a summer weekend. The film premiered at the 2001 Venice Film Festival where it went on to win the Silver Lion Jury's Special Award.
