Hundstage

This austrian film is rather slow-paced and deals with everyday life's madness. A collection of 6 parallel "stories" - more like incidents from the most miserable people'e everyday life. It deeply reminded me of Michael Haneke's "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (1994), only this one is much more solid, more interesting and much more depressing.

Clearly, I film for the few people that can appreciate non-Hollywood event depiction and shooting and slow-pace at times. Certainly, not a pleasant experience this is a true original as films must be.

This film is great. As often heard, it is indeed very realistic and sometimes brutal, but unlike some other people I am clearly not of the opinion that it is depressing, negativistic or dismantling Austria as a proto-fascist society. Quite the contrary: While there are indeed some very heavy scenes in HUNDSTAGE and some characters are to be called very bad persons, at the same time you watch love, beauty and humor in Ulrich Seidls film. And that's exactly what distinguishes HUNDSTAGE for me from other films that try to show the lives of the 'ordinary people' in an intense, realistic way; their hustle, their wishes, their dark sides: Seidl clearly never tries to prove, that the lives of the working-class people are trash! In my opinion, viewers who come to this conclusion seem to be very afraid of admitting, that nearly nobody's live is as 'clean' and 'normal' as we would like other people to believe. And that every live has its dark and often depressing sides. The most beautiful scene: The old Viennese man, watching his old girl dancing 'the oriental way', as he is calling it. I think everybody who finds this scene ugly lacks a sense of beauty and should ask themselves what it is, that's proto-fascist: The characters in HUNDSTAGE or viewers, who are turned off by the body of a 70+ year old woman, dancing with all her charms for her lover.

This film has got to be ranked as one of the most disturbing and arresting films in years. It is one of the few films, perhaps the only one, that actually gave me shivers: not even Pasolini´s Sálo, to which this film bears comparison, affected me like that. I saw echoes in the film from filmmakers like Pasolini, Fassbinder and others. I had to ask myself, what was it about the film that made me feel like I did? I think the answer would be that I was watching a horror film, but one that defies or even reverses the conventions of said genre. Typically, in a horror film, horrible and frightening things will happen, but on the margins of civilized society: abandoned houses, deserted hotels, castles, churchyards, morgues etc. This handling of the subject in horror is, I think, a sort of defence mechanism, a principle of darkness and opacity functioning as a sort of projective space for the desires and fears of the viewer. So, from this perspective, Hundstage is not a horror film; it takes place in a perfectly normal society, and so doesn´t dabble in the histrionics of the horror film. But what you see is the displacement of certain key thematics from the horror genre, especially concerning the body and its violation, the stages of fright and torture it can be put through. What Seidl does is to use the settings of an everyday, middle class society as a stage on which is relayed a repetitious play of sexual aggression, loneliness, lack and violation of intimacy and integrity: precisely the themes you would find in horror, but subjected to a principle of light and transparency from which there is no escape. It is precisely within this displacement that the power of Seidl´s film resides. Hundstage deals with these matters as a function of the everyday, displays them in quotidian repetition, rather than as sites of extremity and catharsis - a move you would encounter in said horror genre. One important point of reference here is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder also had a way of blending the political with the personal in his films, a tactics of the melodrama that allowed him to deal in a serious and even moral way with political issues like racism, domination, desire, questions concerning ownership, sexual property and control, fascism and capitalism etc. Seidl´s tactic of making the mechanisms of everyday society the subject of his film puts him in close proximity with Fassbinder; like this German ally, he has a sort of political vision of society that he feels it is his responsibility to put forward in his films. During a seminar at the Gothenburg Film Festival this year, at which Seidl was a guest, he was asked why he would have so many instances of violated, subjugated women in Hundstage, but no instances of a woman fighting back, liberating herself. Seidl replied that some may view it as immoral to show violence against women, but that he himself felt it would be immoral not to show it. An artistic statement as good as any, I think. Thank you.

Being absolutely unfamiliar with Austrian cinema, I've got simply astounded by this movie. More than two hours long and all the time developing the slow, monotonous rhythm it could have been a real torture for the beholder, but instead it offers something unique and very captivating.

Here are few characters, whose life paths constantly interlock in a little city in tragic coincidences. The old widower with his dog. The mad hitch-hiking girl, whose hobby is exasperating her companions with useless chatter. The middle-aged couple, whose only daughter had died in an accident some time ago and who hardly speak to each other, despite their living in the same house. The hysterical guy, torturing his girl, who works in a strip club. The aging woman who gets bullied by her macho-looking hairy boyfriend. Everyone is unhappy and that's the simple keynote. But almost no one stirs up sympathy. The world is sweaty, dried-up, brutal, senseless. And all the kindness it can provide is epitomized in the final strip-tease that the elderly maid is doing for the old man with the dog.

The dog is certainly already poisoned to that time. The mad girl is raped. The aging woman is humiliated.

The "everything is bad" slogan can seem trite, but the director Ulrich Seidl proves it with cogency. "Hundstage" is probably the most dismal film of the 21th century so far, but it works great due to its exceptional cinematic merits. According to what I know it's the first Seidl's feature film, all his previous outings were strictly documentary. Spreading his meticulous attitude to things on this work, Seidl attains the highest degree of realism, maybe even what we use to call hyper-realism. "Hundstage" is stunning by all means and comes highly recommended for all art-film fans.

I rented this (the uncut version with hardcore scenes intact) with the thought that it might offer some insight into the daily lives of the people of this suburban neighborhood. I found instead just rather pointless montages of bland characters without any rhyme or reason. It's acted nicely and there is nothing technically wrong with the film it just isn't interesting really. We wander from one scene to another some brutal and vile and some just dull. I'm not sure what the director was trying to go for but short cuts or magnolia its not. I did not feel disgusted really but just disappointed in the lack of purpose the film had.