Dog Sweat (the title is slang for alcohol) is surprisingly polished, the young actors warmly believable despite being restricted by the film's narrow focus.
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Slant MagazineBill Weber
Slant MagazineBill Weber
With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.
Whatever personal risks first-time director Hossein Keshavarz took to make the film, there's little sense of danger in the finished product, which offers snapshots of middle-class Iran but falls flat on the dramatic front.
Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.