Welcome to the Dollhouse

Colour, DIGIBETA
USA, 1995, 88 min
Section: Sundance at Karlovy Vary

Synopsis

The life of 11-year-old Dawn Wiener, unfolding between her seventh grade class and her “content”, middle-class home life, is not really a barrel of laughs. The main butt of her classmates’ jokes, Dawn’s life is no bed of roses, to say nothing of her family, where her apathetic father and slightly hysterical mother give precedence to her nerd brother and pampered little sister. At the same time, the maturing “ugly duckling” wants nothing more than to belong somewhere and to be liked, at least a little bit. So one day she decides to pick up the biggest heartbreaker in the school. This black comedy gives only an inkling of what is later to become Todd Solondz’s main interest: the confrontation of the bizarre and the perverse with the so-called “normal”. It is in this, his second film, however, that the screenwriter, director, and producer in one voices his passion for the outsiders in life (which binds him to another icon of independent film, Terry Zwigoff), and the unsentimental, bitterly comic intersection of their fates.

About the director

Todd Solondz (b. 1959, Newark, New Jersey, USA) studied film at New York University. In 1989 he shot his first feature film, Fear, Anxiety and Depression. His next film, the bitter comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse has been screened at a number of festivals, including Toronto and Berlin. After that, his film Happiness (1998), which was shown at the 1999 Karlovy Vary IFF, won Solondz the FIPRESCI prize in Cannes and a nomination for a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. His Storytelling (2001) was ranked among the top ten most interesting films of the year by the New York Times. Solondz’s most recent film, Palindromes (2004), the bizarre tale of a twelve-year-old girl named Aviva who yearns for nothing more than to become a mother, was seen at last year’s Karlovy Vary IFF.