A Biting Satire
For those of you who checked out my ten best picture nominees a while back, I’ve returned to declare a winner. It wasn’t an easy decision considering the field. After a thorough look back at the year I would actually have to say it was a pretty good one. A lot of you may disagree, and I can understand why. The high profile U.S. releases were far from stellar, resulting in a distinct shortage of memorable films and a bland and predictable Oscars. As is true with nearly every year, it was the foreign films which proved most interesting. Only this time around it wasn’t France, Italy, Sweden, or any of the other reliable movie making nations that delivered what I found to be the finest film of 2010.
This time around it was Greece.
Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is a deeply disturbing, darkly hilarious film which is slowly seeping into the cynical cinephile consciousness. Thanks to its Oscar nomination for best foreign language film and a convenient release to Netflix Instant View it has become quite a conversation piece for movie bloggers like myself. And with all the endless discussion, I’ve noticed that no one seems to agree on how to read this alternately complex and straight forward film. Dogtooth is a movie so rich with seditious subtext that it could easily be deciphered from a variety of angles. Many have already written scores of contradictory critiques on this film, with equal right to claim their take. In this author’s opinion, it doesn’t really matter.
Dogtooth is a satire. A story form that is usually ripe for philosophical and sociological survey. But here we have an exception. These filmmakers don’t seem particularly interested in being prescriptive or specific when it comes to social commentary or soul searching. They seem decidedly more concerned with manufacturing an experience meant to imbue the viewer with a certain perspective; emulative of the ambiguous way we all see the world from day to day. Lanthimos’ expert direction guides the performers and crew into creating an experiential exercise; a more immersive cinematic experience, with the writers interjecting just enough allegorical content to give us all something to chew on.
Perhaps the most effective way Lanthimos (and his DP) go about creating this filmic interactivity is through the off-putting and oddly ambiguous placement of the camera. It seems as rare as uranium for a director these days to have an eye for using the camera as a story telling device. In this case, the effectiveness of the story is reliant on the ability of the viewer to relate directly to the characters, as well as their hermetic environment. For a film based on such an outrageous premise, there is a distinct verisimilitude. Dogtooth is a film so shrewdly shot that the zombie-like performances and otherwise unbelievable circumstances are visually translated into images that feel like they’re straight out of real life. The compositions are sometimes formal, sometimes passive, and from time to time downright hard to wrap your head around. Many of these shots feel like the wandering of the eye, and some of them even feel almost peripheral. All of this is done without flare. The camera set-ups are not accentuated by excessive movement or exaggerated design elements that speak to something outside of a living breathing world. Dogtooth is a thematically complex film, but in a way it’s actually quite understated.
It’s that simplicity that creates the contradictory motif which results in its deep subtextual richness. This film is set almost exclusively within a sprawling Grecian estate deep in the country. Only a few scenes take place outside the family’s home. But the small world in which the family dwells works to create a microcosm of society which conversely creates a scope of global scale.
The entire visual design of the film contradicts its inherent cynicism. Save for a smattering of night scenes, the set is almost always soaked in sunlight. The atrocities committed are shown in the cold light of day as if to say that they are as common as washing the car or taking a swim. Everything is exposed, from the raw and cringe-inducing violence to the casually revealed private parts of each of the principle characters. Although almost everything that happens in this film is a perversion of commonly accepted human behavior; nobody lurks in the shadows. Nothing is hidden. And no one acts as if any of it is strange. To me, it is very reminiscent of the world we live in. Horrible things happen every day and we all accept them as normal because we’re told they’re normal. Reality is manipulated for us in much the same way that it is for the children of Dogtooth. Basically all of our understanding of the ways of the world is filtered through the fine mesh of the popular media.
The eldest daughter’s unauthorized viewing of a pair of videotapes (Jaws, Rocky IV) results in one of the funniest and most poignant sequences I’ve seen in ages. It’s this occurrence that causes the cracks that will eventually put a leak in that Plato’s cave. After watching the films, the girl immediately begins acting out scenes from each. She even acts out some of the iconic dance moves from Flashdance, though I’m almost certain that she has never seen that film. I like to think that the effect the video tapes has on the girl is a nod to the transcendent, Godardian sense of the revolutionary potential of cinema. (Cinema is truth, even if it is only Spielberg and Stallone.) More than that, however, is that her viewing of the films seems to create an imaginative spirit in her which resides outside of the mangled, misinformed mentality carefully constructed by her loathsome parents. As far as we know, her experience with any media prior to these movies consisted only of wildly mistranslated Sinatra listening parties and home movies. Once she is exposed to something outside of that controlled environment, her human nature starts to emerge. This is just one of the many allegorical aspects of Dogtooth which only scratches the surface of what this film is about.
Dogtooth is about many things: parenting, despotism, the malicious manipulation of the media, the deconstruction of language and the resultant disconnection which results, etc. But the bottom line is that Dogtooth is most effective because is submerges us into a revelatory model of the world and forces us into a subjective point-of-view. This creates an infinitely nuanced subtext, limited only by the amount of viewers. Everyone who watches this film will read it as they see it.
