Todd Solondz, the doleful master of American suburban angst in films like Happiness and Storytelling, is to return to a character from his breakthrough film Welcome to the Dollhouse in his next project.
Dawn Wiener, the bullied, sexually curious teenager in Dollhouse, is to be revisited in Wiener Dog, an ensemble film with a strand featuring a grown up Dawn, to be played by – who else? – Greta Gerwig. The film is also set to star Julie Delpy, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Wiener Dog was the nickname cruelly given to Dawn, but the new film will actually focus on a real canine, a dachshund around which all the stories are linked. Megan Ellison, the monied champion of leftfield US movies like True Grit, The Master, Her and Zero Dark Thirty, is to produce, alongside Happiness producer Christine Vachon.
Welcome to the Dollhouse has accrued a cult following, drawn to its brutally unsentimental take on the US high school movie, and it created an indie-world sensation when it was released in 1995: it won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, while 12-year-old lead actor Heather Matarazzo won an Independent Spirit award for her performance.
It’s not the first time Solondz has revisited his own material. In Life During Wartime, he picked up again with the characters from Happiness, even recreating the earlier film’s opening scene.
Wiener Dog will be Solondz’s first film since 2011’s Dark Horse, in which the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw detected a mellowing of his earlier style: “After the death-metal of emotional horror in his earlier movies, Solondz gives us quieter chamber music in a minor key.”
- From the archive: A tender comedy about child abuse? What is Todd Solondz up to?
