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This film is really awful, in my opinion. It tries to be profound, moving, humanist and everything, but the only image actually communicated through it is one of a boring old (Oliveira obviously being in his nineties) classicist, snobbishly holding his nose at all the puerile excesses of mainstream, popular entertainment cinema; or, for that part, the more bewitched strains of art cinema. It makes me real mad: this passes itself of as Art, but is really nothing more than REACTION, imposing the sanctity of Time and the (male) Body, the Home and the Family. Why we even go to the movies, the sheer fun and fascination of cinema, the possession of the screen, the delirium of the moving image, is passed of as something for all those mindless, illiterate adolescents, out of touch (thankfully) with the eternal laws of the Masterpiece, the bourgeois privations around art that we´d better do without. Shame really, with the waste of talent going on here: Michel Piccoli is, arguably, one of the greatest french actors of all time, and it´s not that he´s bad here, he just doesn´t have anything to work with. On this point, check out Marco Ferreri´s La Grande Bouffe, one of the most deliriously unpleasant films ever, and with the equally great Philippe Noiret; or Claude Faraldo´s Themroc, where Piccoli coughs, grunts and laughs his way through the role of a modern day cave man and barbarian, a film without a hint of legible/audible dialogue. Rate: 0.5 out of 10000.

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.