| All the comfortable trappings of our society – transportation, communication, possessions, convenience, leisure – conspire to distance us from community. Loneliness is our plague, our inescapable disease, and western civilization is the petri dish in which it flourishes.
Dog Days, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s most recent film, is a disturbingly misogynistic, bitterly cruel movie that evokes the western individual’s unconscious, self-enforced, personal exile.
If Dog Days was a painting, no superfluous brush strokes could be found – every sweep of the bristles has a meaning. Seidl wastes nothing – every element of the film reinforces the isolation of his characters or the alienation of his audience.
The most obvious manifestations of this sense of isolation are the characters who inhabit Seidl’s suburban Viennese world during the hottest days and nights of summer. No character is physically alone in their story, but every character is emotionally disconnected.
A crazy female hitchhiker travels the highways searching for someone – anyone – to talk to. An alarm system specialist spends his time staking out a parking lot for his angry clients, connecting with his life through a cell phone. A divorced couple passes through their house like the undead, mourning their daughter. A teacher waits in her home for her sadistic lover, but when he arrives with a violent, emotionally stunted man, the encounter ends in torture. An anorexic beauty queen’s abusive relationship drives her deeper into self-destructive starvation. And a worn-out old man turns a quiet housemaid into a stand-in for his dead wife, dressing her in the deceased woman’s clothes and compelling her to enact a chilling striptease.
Some of these characters brush past one another without recognition, some meet in a sad, twisted dance, and some directly affect the course of each other’s lives – but they never truly connect. There is no sense of community.
But Seidl is not content to leave the desolation onscreen. He creates a series of misogynistic events that forcibly alienate his audience. Women suffer rape, objectification, belittlement, torture, beatings and emotional abandonment. And none of this is the glossy, sterilized, desensitizing violence we’ve become used to. It’s real violence, real hatred of women – and it is disturbing.
Worse still, Seidl’s characters never escape their lot, never work past their loneliness. Whether they end up sitting on a swing-set in a rain storm, running down a highway invoking "Hail Marys," or dragging a dead dog into a house, these tragic humans never achieve anything close to communion. They end the film as alone as they started it – the theme is relentless.
Even Seidl’s camera captures Dog Days’ feeling of isolation. Most shots are stationary with the characters centred in the scene, and if they don’t start in the centre, they move to the centre before the shot is over. This becomes a visual manifestation of their isolation.
Dog Days is not an entertaining movie – it is almost unwatchable. There are no redeeming qualities to be found in the characters, there’s no protagonist to care for and no relief from the film’s oppression. Seidl is making a point and he wants to make sure we get it.
So if you feel compelled to watch Dog Days, don’t watch it alone – watch it with someone you love. It might be the only way to remind yourself that no matter how lonely our society’s becoming, there is hope. |
