Hundstage (2001) Reviews

• Experimental documentary-style study of depressed characters in a depressing suburb.

  barnabyrudge2009-03-08

  Hundstage is an intentionally ugly and unnerving study of life in a particularly dreary suburb of Vienna. It comes from former documentary director Ulrich Seidl who adopts a very documentary-like approach to the material. However, the film veers away from normal types and presents us with characters that are best described as "extremes" – some are extremely lonely; some extremely violent; some extremely weird; some extremely devious; some extremely frustrated and misunderstood; and so on. The film combines several near plot less episodes which intertwine from time to time, each following the characters over a couple of days during a sweltering Viennese summer. Very few viewers will come away from the film feeling entertained – the intention is to point up the many things that are wrong with people, the many ills that plague our society in general. It is a thought-provoking film and its conclusions are pretty damning on the whole. A fussy old widower fantasises about his elderly cleaning lady and wants her to perform a striptease for him while wearing his deceased wife's clothes. A nightclub dancer contends with the perpetually jealous and violent behaviour of her boy-racer boyfriend. A couple grieving over their dead daughter can no longer communicate with each other and seek solace by having sex with other people. An abusive man mistreats his woman but she forgives him time and again. A security salesman desperately tries to find the culprit behind some vandalism on a work site but ends up picking on an innocent scapegoat. And a mentally ill woman keeps hitching rides with strangers and insulting them until they throw her out of the car! The lives of these disparate characters converge over several days during an intense summer heat wave. The despair in the film is palpable. Many scenes are characterised by long, awkward silences that are twice as effective as a whole passage of dialogue might be. Then there are other scenes during which the dialogue and on-screen events leave you reeling. In particular, a scene during which the security salesman leaves the female hitch-hiker to the mercy of a vengeful guy - to be beaten, raped and humiliated (thankfully all off-screen) for some vandalism she didn't even do - arouses a sour, almost angry taste. In another scene a man has a lit candle wedged in his rear-end and is forced to sing the national anthem at gunpoint, all as part of his punishment for being nasty to his wife. While we might want to cheer that this thug is receiving his come-uppance, we are simultaneously left appalled and unnerved by the nature of his punishment. Indeed, such stark contrasts could act as a summary of the whole film - every moment of light-heartedness is counter-balanced with a moment of coldness. Every shred of hope is countered with a sense of despair. For every character you could like or feel sympathy for, there is another that encourages nothing but anger and hate. We might want to turn away from Hundstage, to dismiss it as an exercise in misery, but it also points up some uncomfortable truths and for that it should be applauded.

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• Not for anyone

  shaid2002-01-29

  This film show peoples in the middle of the hottest 2 days in Austria. It shows people humiliating other peoples and being cruel to other peoples. It show the inability of people to communicate or talk with others. In the screening I have attended people were leaving in the middle because they could no longer watch the film. And rightly so. Because the film is not and easy one to watch. It has a very depressing message and there isn't any moment of mercy in the film. It is a very cruel movie, not for everyone's taste. You can not speak of terms of enjoyment from this film. It grips you in your throat and never let go and in the end you simply feels breathless because of its intensity. I can not "recommend" or "not recommend" this film. You should make your own mind based on what I have said earlier. Just be aware that this is not a regular film and it is not for everyone's taste.

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• Deeply disturbing and great film

  mrmjoh2002-03-28

  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.

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• A bleak and at time funny reality

  ellkew2002-11-28

  An outstanding film by all accounts. Bleak, yes. Funny, yes. Shocking, yes. To all those reviewers harping on about lack of plot, then surely this is to miss the point. Seidl draws on his documentary background and indeed blends the this with the fictional elements. Do we really need the narrative signposts that we are force-fed in films. Life is not that black and white. I cannot understand the constant desire for fast paced cutting. Go and watch a commercial if you need to but leave the rest of us with well made, insightful films that speak about the bigger issues in life. This is a marvellous film that is disturbing and shocking but not in a gratuitous manner. I think it is in the tiny minutiae of life that these moments are revealed. I found the moment when the couple visit the grave and when the old woman does the striptease to be very moving. You need to look underneath the surface of the characters to see what makes them tick and Seidl has done this. As a result we have complex characters that seem too real for some viewers perhaps to stomach. I should stop defending the film. Just go and see it. Brilliant film-making.

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• A perfect film about life as it often is: Brutal, hard to take but sometimes very beautiful

  anatolvitouch2005-01-07

  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.

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