Dog Sweat

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.

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.

The cast is fine, but the roles are superficial and too concentrated on the film's theme.

It might be sufficient that Dog Sweat exists at all - but only if you believe intention trumps execution.

Great for ADD-style viewing but not for advancing Iranian cinema's currently challenged profile.

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.