Todd Solondz
Fuga Dalla Scuola Media

On the first day of middle school, you wear lavender jeans, a pink checkered shirt, and a sweatshirt with hearts printed on it that you carefully picked out the night before. And when you enter the class, you don't immediately realize it, you need to observe that of the three female classmates, one is made up like a lady of the night; it takes the looks of your peers to understand that you have just become the queen of the losers.

Then you grow up, you become a Nuvenia customer, you have your first kiss, your breasts grow, and that feeling of inadequacy rarely shows up, only on very rare occasions. You grow further, you turn twenty, and one evening you tell a friend about the trauma you suffered when you realized that in a class with two fourteen-year-old boys repeating the year, there was no space for your pink shirts. And she tells you about her middle school, about how rebelling against the trend of glittery wedges (we should seek damages from the Spice Girls for how they made us dress) could lead to social isolation.

And finally, after a good seven years from the end of your little nightmare, you rationalize a concept you have always believed in: middle school was a mess for (almost) everyone.

At this point, after watching "Welcome to the Dollhouse", it becomes automatic to elevate Heather Matarazzo as the champion of ten-year-old dorks. Dawn Weiner (known to all as Wiener-Dog) is ugly, walks awkwardly, has an ungraceful voice (in the original version), and probably it's her mother who chooses the horrible clothes she wears. This is enough to be hated by everyone, accentuating the unlikable streak of her character. But for us, the overlooked, it's easy to love her; all we need is to reread our own ten-year-old ego in her. She falls in love—a fairytale sequence, perhaps the best in the film—with the sensual singer of her nerdy brother's garage band, becomes the object of desire for the most feared boy in school (actually marginalized as much as she is), Wiener-Dog tries to change her life, attempting to dress better (failing, but after all, we are still talking about middle school), to accept the advances of the bully while simultaneously making a move on the cool guy. In vain. There's neither an event nor inner maturation that will make Dawn better; in the thin plot of Solondz's movie, we find no traces of Propp that will lead her to change something or to love herself as she is; we know her sad at the school cafeteria and leave her sad and unsatisfied on a coach heading to Disneyland.

If it had a happy ending, they would have added this film to the afternoon schedule during the Christmas period. The award-winning Sundance '96 work, however, was shown on Italia1 after an episode of South Park. And South Park aired very, too late. Red label: You can describe violence without gallons of fake blood. And Solondz has understood this very well.