#29 - Dog Sweat

Today we travel to smoggy Tehran, Iran, where director Hossein Keshavarz covertly filmed without a license in order to place Dog Sweat in front of its true backdrop.  The film follows five stories which connect at various points: a singer who sneaks out of her house to illegally record pop music, a gay man facing the pressures of a hostile and prejudiced environment, a girl carrying out an affair with her cousin's husband, a young couple trying to escape the boredom of their regimented lifestyle, and a young man - with a craving for the bootleg liquor that gives the film its title - who is finding himself increasingly frustrated at the Iranian government's inability to keep its citizens from falling through the cracks.

We seem to have a theme this week: Dog Sweat, like Let the Right One In, is a film about what happens to the people who don't fit into their society's mold.  Without the supernatural elements of Let the Right One In, Dog Sweat is real in such a way that it is brutal.  It is quiet, not flashy, filmed almost like a home movie, rarely overt and as such doesn't call attention to itself, leaving room for its scathing commentary on the Iranian situation.  It isn't really a politically charged film and in fact tends to leave viewers to make their own conclusions, which I appreciated.

Its simplistic style doesn't always work in its favor; certain scenes seem randomly inserted and unnecessary - perhaps Keshavarz was simply going for verisimilitude, but real life doesn't always make good cinema.  I am still trying to decide whether the fact that I constantly fluctuated between sympathizing with and disliking its characters was a good point (neutrality) or a bad point (not always fleshing out the characters enough to make them understandable).  I am certain though that the film's silence - there's rarely any music or background sound except when very specifically relevant to the plot - was intended to be jarring, so even though at times Dog Sweat is hard to watch, I wouldn't call this a criticism.  It's something I wouldn't watch again; it's far too emotional, but it definitely drew me into its world and made me think about the complicated issues it portrays.