Wiener-Dog
classified 15Please note: This was screened in Sept 2016
The travels of an adorable Dachshund are at the heart of this mordantly funny and elegantly wrought portmanteau comedy, as acerbic US indie director Todd Solondz (Happiness, Welcome to the Dollhouse) demonstrates he’s lost none of his bite.
In what’s essentially a series of short idiosyncratic and loosely linked tales, wiener-dog (our aforementioned dachshund) acts as the connector in this utterly American oddity, travelling the country spreading a certain kind of comfort and joy whilst witnessing the full spectrum of human unhappiness and existential angst in its various owners. Starting off with a short stint as beloved best friend to a young cancer survivor, our pup bears witness to some downright troubling yet often hilariously overbearing parenting by mother Dina (Julie Delpy), before being taken in by lovelorn veterinary nurse Dawn Wiener (Greta Gerwig, playing a grown-up incarnation of Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse gawky adolescent heroine). Throw in a self-absorbed and floundering film professor (Danny De Vito), and an embittered old crone (an astonishing Ellen Burstyn) and her needy granddaughter - all of them longing for something more from life – and in true Solondz fashion you are left with a brutally honest and uncomfortably funny look at the American experience.
Displaying Solondz’s unique ability to find a freezing sense of wit in the darkest of subject matter and bisected by a prankish mid-film intermission - scored to an infectiously folksy ditty by South Park composer Marc Shaiman - wiener-dog is both guide and witness to this hilarious piece of societal observation.
- Performances of Wiener Dog will be preceded by a screening of the short A Brief History of Princess X (Dir: Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal / France, 2016, 7 mins) - a supercharged history of sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s infamous Princess X, a futuristic bronze phallus that is actually a bust portrait of Napoleon’s equally infamous great grand niece, Marie Bonaparte.
- Check out what happened when Bella, the cutest sausage dog in Bristol, came to see Wiener-Dog with us and have a look around...