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, Rovi
Director Ulrich Seidl presents a mean spirited satire of Austrian suburbia in this ugly movie that is quite possibly the worst film (foreign or domestic) of 2003.
Dark, probing, and truly disturbing, Seidl's astonishing feature debut explores angst, anomie, and alientaion in Vienna's upscale suburbs in visually audacious mode that goes beyond Todd Solondz and Todd Haynes.
Stylistically void, intellectually vapid, narratively coarse, and exploitative of its actors in the worst possible way, the film is an abject failure on every level.
What some detect as cruelty in Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.
Quite perfect film about life in Vienna, Austria. This film isn't for the faint of heart. It's like Happiness with explicit sex and a less optimistic view of humanity. There's animal poisoning, a strip-tease from a senior citizen, an orgy 'esque' bathouse in a shopping centre, anal candle penetration, and the
molestation of the mentally incompetent.Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl has no interest in redeeming humanity here. And why should he? This film features excellent performances from all involved, is always interesting, and is probably the most intelligent social statement to be made on film in awhile.
April 9, 2009
Dean McKenna
Super Reviewer
Set in a heat wave in Austria, "Dog Days" is about four couples, ranging from old to young, genial to one-sided bullying that with the exception of the youngest couple, are linked by Hruby(Alfred Mrva), a security salesman, and Anna(Maria Hofstatter), an idiot savant hitchhiker. The movie's central themes are
alienation and how material items cannot buy happiness but those themes have been handled much better elsewhere. And it does not help that the characters are undeveloped and the plot is thin to say the least.
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