"Actor: Christine Jirku"

• Dog Days | DVD | (24/02/2003) from £6.49   |  Saving you £13.50 (67.50%)   |  RRP £19.99

  If your idea of Austrians is of cheerful folk cavorting about mountains or relaxing in old-world coffee-shops, Dog Days will come as quite a shock. Set amid the residential streets and shopping precincts of a charmless, sterile southern suburb of Vienna, documentary-maker Ulrich Seidl's first feature revels in the ugliness, both physical and moral, of his characters. None of these are people you'd want to spend time with: in fact most of them you'd go several miles out of your way to avoid, which perhaps accounts for the strangely perverse fascination there is about watching them. Dog Days--it takes place, as you might guess, during a sticky, sweltering July heatwave that improves tempers not one bit--comes on rather like a low-rent version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts. We meet a dozen or so main characters, all of whom gradually come to impact on each other's lives in various ways. Among them, a girl with a psychotically jealous boyfriend; an elderly man who obsessively stockpiles groceries, first weighing them to check for the least hint of short measure; an estranged couple still sharing a house, where the wife entertains her lovers under her husband's morose gaze; a middle-aged schoolteacher whose abusive lover invites lowlifes to join in humiliating her; a no-hoper salesman of security systems; and the world's most excruciatingly irritating hitch-hiker. There's a dark humour at work here; after a while the sheer bleakness and collective vindictiveness become wincingly funny. Seidl's disenchanted view of his compatriots, and his contempt for their vaunted gemütlichkeit, is epitomised by his image of a man forced to sing the Austrian national anthem ("A nation blessed by its sense of beauty") stark naked with a lighted candle up his backside. To cap it all, he can't remember the words. --Philip Kemp