Dog Days (2001)

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Movie
Original title Dog days
Country of production Austria
original language German
Publishing year 2001
length 121 minutes
Rod
Director Ulrich Seidl
script Ulrich Seidl,
Veronika Franz
production Helmut Grasser ,
Philippe Bober ( Allegro Film )
music Marcus Davy
camera Wolfgang Thaler
cut Andrea Wagner ,
Christof Schertenleib
occupation

Hundstage is a feature film by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl . The film depicts the deep abysses in the apparently ideal world of a Viennese suburb on the hottest days of the year.

For his work Seidl was in 2001 at the Film Festival in Venice awarded the Grand Jury Prize.

Six independent stories are told in the film, some of which merge towards the end. The action takes place in Vienna's suburbs that appear dreary, bare and dry. You can see a lot of highways, supermarkets and small houses. The film is distributed by the film shop and is also available on DVD as part of the “ Der Austrian Film ” edition.

action

The film begins with the first story : Klaudia (Franziska Weisz) is dancing in a disco, several men turn around and stare at her. Her friend Mario (René Wanko) is bursting with jealousy, provokes a fight and leaves the bar with her. He beats her in the car, blames her for his behavior and abandons her on the highway. The next day, drawn from the previous evening, she meets with him again, he apologizes awkwardly, then the reconciliation sex in the car follows and then again blame and violence.

The second story : Anna (Maria Hofstätter) speaks to total strangers in front of supermarkets and asks to be taken away a piece. She has no goal, at least she never mentions it. She is obviously “crazy”, provokes the people who take her with her with sentences like: “Do you still fuck?” Or “You look pretty oid” and pushes them against their skin without a distance. They all react differently to it, yelling at her or trying to explain their situation to her, like a child who always asks "why".

The third story : The alarm system agent Hruby (Alfred Mrva) tries his luck in a larger residential complex. But his business is not doing well. So he also has the task of finding a mean "car scratch", which he does not want to succeed. In between, his wife annoys him on the phone, who seems to be addicted to alcohol. To make matters worse, the owners of the damaged cars are beginning to threaten him if he fails to identify the car vandal.

The fourth story : Ing.Walter (Erich Finsches) is a pensioner and widower. His purpose in life is to check the weight of groceries that he has bought and to complain about them. He has a housekeeper (Gerti Lehner), from whom he wishes for his 50th “wedding anniversary” that she wears one of the dresses of his deceased wife and prepares him a roast pork. After dinner she strips in front of him in the living room.

The fifth story : A middle-aged teacher (Christine Jirku) comes home. She dreams of being desired by her lover Wickerl (Victor Hennemann). Wickerl is a pimp type, gruff and indignant, vulgar and violent. She assumes the victim stance, only defends herself when she is forced to do so by Lucky, a friend of Wickerl's (Georg Friedrich). He and Wickerl sexually molested her the night before while intoxicated with alcohol and other drugs .

The sixth story . An ex-couple still lives in the same house with or next to each other. The woman visits a swingers club in the shopping district while the man appears to be waiting for her in silence in aggressive idle acts. They don't talk to each other; the daughter was killed in a traffic accident. They visit the accident site separately from each other. The ex-wife (Claudia Martini) orders a masseur (Christian Bakonyi) home and has fun with him in the living room in front of the ex-husband (Victor Rathbone) that evening. The situation escalates, the ex-husband threatens the rival with a gun. The next day, both spouses sit next to each other on a children's swing. This scene is one of the few glimmers of hope in the film.

Connections

Hruby initially meets Ing. Walter. He also wants to sell him an alarm system, but the latter has a watchdog and answers Hruby's doubts that the dog is better than any alarm system. The dog is later seen lying poisoned in the garden.

The ex-husband orders a security system for his house from Hruby. The same domestic help is employed in the household of the ex-spouse as at Ing. Walter.

Around the middle of the film and at the end of the film, Anna is taken by the alarm system representative Hruby and portrayed by him as the supposed "car scratcher". She is locked in a room in the basement, the angry residents informed about the scratched cars, and one after the other lets out his anger on the innocent Anna.

The bouncer, who prevents the conflict between the young couple in front of the disco from escalating at the beginning of the film, is also Wickerl's friend, who later tries to force the woman to resist.

Wickerl, in turn, is a visitor to the swinger club. You can see him reflected several times in the windows of a “surveillance corridor”.

backgrounds

In an interview with Thomas Maurer , Ulrich Seidl replied to the question: “Do you consider films that tell of loneliness, speechlessness, suffering and violence to be more truthful than those in which happiness can be achieved?” With: “What can you say about that Tell happiness? Life is not about happiness, at most about the search for it and the disappointment that happiness cannot or can only rarely be achieved. Perhaps that is why our everyday life is so characterized by promises of happiness. Everywhere - down to our most intimate areas - the promises of happiness are at work. And take a look at the people on the street. Apparently all happy people. "

Awards

criticism

“The director holds the mirror up to our time, and the caricature that stares at us is not due to a wild fantasy, but to the reality of a mental neglect. With his theater of cruelty, Seidl shows us people in a state of self-inflicted regression, which is also a kind of natural state: where the human being is the human being, ruthless. "

- Berliner Zeitung

“Seidl's world is a perfectly styled, content-wise intense and gripping nightmare. And yet you can feel in every minute of his film that Seidl loves his characters more than hates them, even if as a viewer that is often difficult. "

- arte

"In their aggregation, Seidl's episodes take on the character of a demonstration critical of civilization, so the characters sometimes only seem like living indications of the apocalyptic worldview of their director [sic]."

- The time

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Interview with Ulrich Seidl on arte.tv ( Memento from July 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Bergen International Film Festival ( Memento from February 23, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ↑ Marli Feldvoss: Emotional neglect - in: Berliner Zeitung of 1 August 2002
  4. ↑ Katja Nicodemus : Stickige Stille - in: Die Zeit No. 32 of August 1, 2002, p. 37