Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days uses abuse as a metaphor for modern culture and is a very difficult movie to watch as a result. It follows half a dozen people going about their daily routines in a suburb of Vienna, cross-cutting between them in the style of Robert Altman. In the dog days of August, a man goes door-to-door selling electronic security systems and describing ugly scenarios to the owners of guard dogs. An elderly man whose life seems like a ritual of the mundane weighs his food purchases in a pantry the size of a small convenience store, making sure the contents of the containers match their labels, thereby detecting when he's been overcharged for his dog food. A woman who hitchhikes around town just to talk to people, ask them questions, and go through their belongings, becomes one of the common elements tying the people together. Much of her dialog is made up of jingles and advertising slogans, as if she's a personification of those sound bites sprinkled throughout Don Delillo's novel White Noise.
Although the movie takes place in Austria, this town could be just about anywhere in the modern world, as long as it's suburbia; the movie's skeleton consists of the containers of life — homes and cars — separated by open spaces. Seidl has an obvious talent for visual rhymes, apparent in the movie's recurring images of prone, sagging sunbathers, shoes crunching across gravel driveways, and metal shades sliding down over windows, sealing the people inside. The residents of this town eat, drink, sleep, converse, and have sex in automobiles, but they pace edgily around their white, secure houses. Some of Seidl's framing and the cold interactions of his characters seem influenced by Stanley Kubrick. One jealous man, sharing a house but little else with his wife, bounces a racquetball off of the walls of his home like Jack Nicholson did in The Shining, although here, rather than being large and empty, the space is tight and confined, but the character is no less of a coiled spring. The harsh sunlight and cultural noise is reminiscent of Todd Haynes' Safe, which is itself indebted to Kubrick's crisp lines and clean interiors.
The movie begins with a sure and steady hand, but these tales of suburban malaise are merely the benign starting points for Dog Days which moves quickly into Blue Velvet territory and beyond, exposing the disgusting secrets that supposedly lie beneath tract neighborhoods and spending more and more time on its stories of beaten and humiliated women. As it progresses — or degenerates — the movie begins to lose its form, relies more on a handheld camera, and eventually abandons most of its editing rhythm.
In one scene late in the movie, a man forces a woman at gunpoint to demand apologies from her abuser. This guy, it must be said, also participated in the abuse and then showed up at the bruised woman's door the next morning spouting apologies and confessing a fascination with the awful things that people can do to each other. Seidl is no doubt aware of the similarities between this character and his movie, but I can't find much comfort in that. Like the character, his movie paints these men as demons and does not flinch from showing the unflattering flesh of the morning after, but the movie is certainly a participant in the affair, and it increasingly does little more than parade one awful thing after another past the camera. Movies with interwoven story lines often seem to stretch for ways to braid their threads. The unifying element that Seidl uses for Dog Days is a hideousness that might be easier to stomach if its use as a metaphor outweighed its use as a mere plot device.