Dog Days

A settlement at the edge of Vienna. There is a heatwave and nobody goes out. Several lives are told side by side. A divorced couple go on living in the same house and have not spoken since their child died. An old man is fixated on his cleaner. A woman hitchhikes; she talks without stopping at everyone who picks her up and nobody can put her out. A security man sells alarms on the estate. A couple live inside an arrangement of dominance and submission. The heat goes on and none of it arrives anywhere. Ulrich Seidl writes and directs; it is his first fiction feature. Maria Hofstätter, Alfred Mrva, Franziska Weisz and Christine Jirku are in the cast. It is an Austrian production. The film won the grand special jury prize at the 2001 Venice Film Festival. Seidl comes from documentary; most of the cast are not professional actors and some of the dialogue is improvised. The narrative is in pieces; the stories do not connect and all they share is the place and the heat. The matter it treats is humiliation; the characters keep inflicting small violence on each other. The frames are deliberately symmetrical and still; people are placed like furniture. The film caused argument on release and some scenes were found excessive. The narrative builds sympathy for nobody and saves no one. Its limit is the watching; the narrative means to be uncomfortable, the violence is hard, and there is no hope. Who it is for: viewers who like Austrian cinema and harsh realism. Who it is not for: it is uncomfortable, bleak, and there is no ending as such.