Different universes

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2002)

On a recent weekend, I went to see both Todd Solondz’ Storytelling and Ulrich Seidl’s Dog Days. Well, I’ve never been accused of going to movies just for the spiritual uplift, but maybe this was taking things a little too far. Each film has a caustic view of mankind; each is uncompromising in its own way. But not too unsurprisingly, the European film’s notion of uncompromising comes from an entirely different universe than that of the American one.

Dog Days (an Austrian movie) follows a few characters in a seemingly affluent suburb, suffering through a heatwave. The movie opens with a young man humiliating his girlfriend and abandoning her at the side of the highway. Then it shows a fat old man pottering around the garden in his underwear, followed (quite shockingly if you didn’t know it was coming) by some hardcore orgy footage. This turns out to be in some kind of private club beneath a shopping mall, from which one of the orgy participants (looking prim and middle-class) drives home to the house she shares with her ex-husband. He endlessly prowls the rooms bouncing a tennis ball while she lounges naked and hangs out with her paid bedmates.

Dog Days

A few more characters are introduced too, but we’ve already been exposed to the crux of Seidl’s methods. How does he get people to expose themselves like this? We perceive quickly enough that the woman at the orgy is unfulfilled, compensating for a huge void in her life (the death of a child). But we’ve also seen her in explicit, unquestionably unfaked sex acts, during which, by the way, we’ve been amply able to observer her (like almost everyone else’s in the film) tired, droopy body. Dog Days takes the voyeurism inherent in cinema and blows it up to the point that conventional pleasures quickly wither, leaving us scrambling for self-justification.

Seidl provides enough relatively easy (if never comfortable) laughs and points of identification that the film’s generally an enveloping experience, but to the extent to which it’s straightforwardly pleasurable just makes all the more uncomfortable the myriad occasions on which it isn’t that. Near the end, a dumpy old woman (let’s say maybe seventy years old) performs a striptease, which Seidl’s camera captures with his usual lack of reticence. After she’s finished, the old man watching her pronounces it very good – “Just like in the Orient.” This could be viewed as Seidl’s cruelest exploitation, and yet I think the scene should be read straight, allowing us to see the woman as a functioning sexual being.

When our concepts of sexuality are so consistently associated with beauty and conventional allure, Seidl arguably does something truly valuable here. His characters may look pathetic in a certain way, and we may wonder about the sanity of the actors, but the point is that we end up pondering a unique sexual terrain, and one that’s expansive rather than limiting.

Storytelling

Ironically, nobody is talking about the wild sex in Dog Days, whereas article after article discusses the red rectangle that, for American release purposes, blocks out the offensive bits in a certain scene from Storytelling. In Canada, we get a clean print, but everyone writes about the red rectangle anyway.

Where Seidl’s film is rough-edged and grainy, Solondz’ Storytelling is glossy and carefully composed. The film consists of two separate, although thematically connected stories. The first, titled Fiction, involves a college student who sleeps both with a disabled fellow student and then with her college professor; both these encounters generate short stories that are discussed in class. In the second, called Non-Fiction, a documentary filmmaker makes a movie about a dysfunctional suburban family, centering on the disconnected oldest son.

Storytelling has evoked quite a debate over whether Solondz is a petty, mean-spirited creep who creates characters only to abuse them, or whether he’s something more valuable than that. I think it’s the latter, but not by wide enough a margin to get excited about. He has a facility for clever plotting, for concepts and characters that tap a timeless (but essentially adolescent) cynicism about bourgeois values. Storytelling’s short ninety minutes pull in homosexuality, interracial sex, sex with the disabled, racism, Jewish self-consciousness, and much else. The effects are sometimes shocking, sometimes trite, but rarely profound or even stimulating.

This may not be clear while you’re actually watching it, for the movie does have a certain crisp earnestness. Fiction in particular has a symmetry and ambiguity that, in tandem with the segment’s daring elements, almost seem as if they must be significant. But in the end it can offer up only humiliation and evasion. Non-Fiction is more explicit about a theme that lurks below the surface of Fiction – that the creative process will almost inevitably belittle those who get caught up in its glare. But since this insight is built on a character who’s a nebbish, no-talent filmmaker with no artistic vision or talent, it’s not clear how wide an application this thesis might have. Maybe it’s not meant to have any. The film contains a leaden moment of self-reflection where the filmmaker’s editor tells him the rough-cut of his movie condescends to the characters. I guess Solondz thinks he’s being smart in anticipating his critics, but that just shows how narrow his preoccupations are.

In the Bedroom

Almost everything in Storytelling is clever, but almost nothing in it is intelligent. I have no problem accepting that Middle America is a solid bucket of banality. But Solondz just swats snidely at one thing after another, seemingly blind to the weariness that this provokes.

When I watch movies, I sometimes try to imagine the director behind the camera, watching and nodding and coaxing and shaping. If you did this while watching Storytelling, you’d imagine a precocious but whiny guy with several chips on his shoulder who seldom leaves his bedroom. Which means that rather than make the movie, maybe he should have just gone outside and got some fresh air. On the other hand, for all his film’s rampant sleaziness, Seidl comes across as a weirdly genial eccentric who’d talk your head off in the bar for hours. You wouldn’t agree with everything, and once in a while he’d probably make you wince, but it would be – not just euphemistically – an experience.