When the movie quality gets bad in Venice, it gets very, very bad indeed. Critics have started trading anecdotes of the absolute dogs in this year's festival like schoolkids swapping top trumps cards. But the current frontrunners for the golden turkey award (Barbet Schroeder’s inept Inju, Le Bete Dans L’Ombre and Yu Lik-Wai’s nonsensical Plastic City) have just been bumped into a distant second place by the latest affront to good taste and common sense to make it into the prestigious main competition.

Nuit De Chien by the German director Werner Schroeter is a French/German/Portuguese co-production and features the kind of over-cooked visual histrionics that such Europuddings sometimes produce. Adapted from a novel by Juan Carlos Onetti, the story takes place over a single night in an unnamed city (in fact, much of it is shot in Porto and Lisbon) which is threatened with an imminent attack by a violent militia. Various factions jostle for power; cholera sufferers litter the streets and the cadaverous doctor/colonel Vignale (Pascale Greggory) wanders randomly around the city looking for his missing lover.

It’s an unforgivably pretentious piece of work that plays out like a parody of the worst, most pompous conceits of a certain kind of art house cinema. In fact, it’s so ludicrous that, given an edit or two, it could almost play as a satirical comedy.

It’s a heavily, solemnly symbolic work. Religious imagery is rife but not always treated with reverence. There’s a cut that takes us directly from the bare buttocks of a homosexual waiter/revolutionary hero to a close-up of a statue of Christ. You can almost hear Schroeter chuckling at his own audacity. Meanwhile, as the city streets pile up with the bodies of refugees, a whistling man with a large bunch of balloons wanders through the dimly lit alleys. I’m sure he’s a metaphor for something or other but I’m damned if I can figure out what. Likewise the fully clothed and rather unconvincing transvestite that Vignale discovers taking a shower on the roof of a bar.

As the men plot against each other and politically manoeuvre, the women – invariably whores – are beaten and abused. French actress Amira Casar’s Irene gets to do messianic self-sacrifice (with one artfully exposed breast), but the rest of the female cast are little more than punching bags and window dressing. You get the feeling that Schroeter doesn’t particularly like women.

The design of the film is overwrought to the point of silliness – a resistance hero in hideout sits on a giant throne – and the score a combination of overused classical music and strident, discordant choral pieces. It’s a horrible experience on every level.

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