Todd Solondz
Fuga dalla Scuola Media

Adolescence, as my friend Roberta Perandini once said, is the period of our lives when we are all at our ugliest and most awkward. Many, starting from the horrible Italian title, might believe that "Welcome to the Dollhouse" is about the antics of a group of post-modern, spoiled, and clumsy kids. You are gravely mistaken.

"Welcome to the Dollhouse" by Todd Solondz, is an unsettling suburban comedy that features as its protagonist an eleven-year-old, Dawn Wiener (an excellent Heather Matarazzo), the second daughter of a Jewish family attending an average school in an average New Jersey town. Dawn is plain, wears thick glasses, dreadful clothes, and maintains a perpetually half-open mouth, frozen in a vacant and expressionless stare. Because of her demeanor, she soon becomes a target for her schoolmates and is humiliated day after day in the most absurd ways.

Dawn is truly alone: abandoned by a dreary family environment, a family absorbed in the restoration of its petty-bourgeois image, preoccupied with maintaining connections with the upscale society of their little suburb, striving to present a good image both to the neighbor having a barbecue and the school principal. A family focused on appearances, just like many others, really. The same fate awaits her in the school corridors and classrooms: no one seems to notice her little sensitivity, no one at all. Everywhere she turns, she finds classmates and teachers ready to remind her of her inadequacy, eager to emphasize her discomfort. The only friend she has left, if he can be called that, is the delinquent Brandon, a miniature Eminem who always threatens to rape her, but who, deep down, isn't so evil.

Meanwhile, she is in love with a handsome high school boy who considers her a "retard," annoyed by her younger sister who struts around as the princess of the house and receives all the attention from mom and dad, with a brother who is as much of a genius as he is a robot in front of his PC, and believes that life is essentially painful and meaningless, soon beginning to wonder if life might be better away from New Jersey.

In short, this work by Solondz is a piece that, for better or worse, portrays a part of us and our lives; some, in their honesty, will find themselves completely in it. It is a story that is difficult to watch, finding ample reason everywhere to be unpleasant. It is an unseasoned work, served as is. So realistic and truthful that it's painful to the eyes, so intolerable to our gaze, increasingly accustomed to Hollywood's pablum and homogenized fare. No winks, nothing to offer the audience sitting in the theater or at home, just a mandatory gaze at the reality that surrounds us. We are faced with a sadly modern picture, devoid of poetry. It is a film that makes you think, confronting the viewer with the unhappiness and cruelty of adolescence, and does so by forgoing sensational scenes, avoiding the voluptuous game of peekaboo: tension, anger, unhappiness, are narrated through a subtle examination of glances and silences, apathy, and anomie are the true weapons of the violence of solitude and non-acceptance that Dawn suffers on her skin. At the end of the film, what remains with us is pain, the real kind. Solondz's ruthless message seems to underline how today we would be willing to endure any kind of abuse just to find someone who appreciates us, or at least considers us for who we are. And perhaps the message could be extended beyond individual stories. The director, in every moment of the film, seems to emphasize that if Dawn is plain and a bit of a loser, the reality surrounding her is far worse, not even worthy of her and her delicacy.

A film that knows how to scratch without lifting a finger, a fine work awarded at the Sundance Festival in 1996 as the best film: this work has no vain aspirations, the director never seems tempted to deliver himself to immortality or fame; he appears humbly focused on his work and its content, demonstrating, if further proof were needed, that even without great economic resources, one can express oneself at high levels. A work like this, capable of mirroring its time, contains the quality that grants the dignity of Art to any piece that encompasses it.