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Life in the suburbs during the dog days, the hottest days of the year: A
young hitchhiker (Maria Hofstätter) does nothing but hitching rides with
strangers day-in day-out, driving everybody to despair with her naive
attitude, her unnerving stories and questions, and her total disregard for
the feelings of those who give her a lift to nowhere in particular - in a
few words, she's a pest. One day, she hitches a ride with a security guard
(Alfred Mrva) who gets so annoyed by her that he throws her out after only
a few minutes. Presently the security guard has an especially shitty job,
which has him spend night after night at the stake-out in a neighbourhood
where whoever scratches the cars of the residents. The stake-outs rpove
unsuccessful though since in the night the security guards on the lookout,
the scratcher just doesn't show up - and the residents get angrier and
angrier at our guard, since in their eyes, it's his fault. In his
frustration, he runs across the hitchhiker again, who is naive enough to
let him give her another lift - and he cold-bloodedly seizes the
opportunity to lock her up and present her to the angry neighbours as the
scratcher and lets them have their way with her ... A girl (Franziska
Weisz) is deeply in love with her boyfriend (René Wanko), though his fits
of jealousy take a more and more violent turn ... An old man (Erich
Finsches) is preparing for his 50th wedding anniversary, even though his
wife has died years ago - so he pays his housekeeper (Gerti Lehner), who's
not the youngest herself anymore, to take his wife's place ... A man
(Victor Rathbone) and a woman (Claudia Martini) were married once, but the
death of their daughter has ended their relationship - yet they still live
together. It's only when the woman starts an affair with her masseur
(Christian Bakonyi) before his very eyes that he realizes he still has
feelings for her, which eventually leads him to threatening his rival with
a gun - but when the woman, his ex wife, wants to get him to talk to her,
he just can't ... A woman (Christine Jirku) is in a relationship with an
abusive man (Viktor Hennemann), who one day takes the whole thing too far
when he brings a friend (Georg Friedrich) to a sexdate, and the two abuse
her physically and mentally. The next day, the friend, a rather naive and
violent guy, actually comes by her place to apologize and confess his love
to her - and he offers to kill her boyfriend, which she outrightly
refuses. Later that day, when the boyfriend is at her place, his friend
storms in and humiliates him before her very eyes - and he's unable to
understand why the woman still loves her abusive boyfriend and not him
after all he has done for her ... An ugly look at the (not
always idyllic) Viennese suburbia, where the people seem to have just as
many dirty secrets (if not more) as people from anywhere else, and where
it seems living out in the green comes with a high pricetag. The
interesting thing about this film is that it doesn't give a rat's fart
about political correctness, but it also refuses to judge its often
immoral protagonists - and part of the reason for this might be that
Ulrich Seidl actually started out as a documentary filmmaker and tries to
remain as neutral as possible towards his characters ... and as sober as
possible concerning his directorial style, which isn't always a good idea
but works in this case, since it totally shows the shabbiness of the
characters and their surroundings, so much so that the film at times takes
a turn towards the disgusting, even the grotesque. All that said, Hundstage
is definitely not a film for everyone, some scenes are a bit too direct
for comfort, but if you can handle a certain degree of tastelessness, this
might be just for you.
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