SXSW Film ’10 — Dogtooth
I’m not quite sure how to process Dogtooth, the Greek film that won the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
I do know this: I loved it.
Director and co-writer Giorgos Lanthimos has created a movie that is at once both extremely hilarious and grossly disturbing. It’s provocative, obscene and a must see for anybody who loves challenging cinema.
Christos Stergioglou and Michelle Valley play the parents of a frighteningly naïve trio of grown children, played by Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis. The mother and father have apparently taken it upon themselves to raise their kids to be as screwed-up as humanely possible.
They teach them the incorrect definitions of words — for example, the children believe a zombie is a little yellow flower that grows in the garden. They have lied to them about the reproductive process of human beings — at one point, the father proudly announces to the children that their mother will soon give birth to three new additions to the family: a brother, a sister and a puppy. They egg on the children to compete in ludicrous little games such as who can recover from anesthetic the fastest. When their older brother disappears, the children are told he was ripped apart by the most ferocious animal known to man: a common housecat — an animal the children have just had a pretty traumatizing encounter with involving a hammer and kitten screams.
The children are cloistered from the rest of the world — told that they are not ready to handle the dangers that await outside the family’s compound until they loose either their left or right “dogtooth.”
This isolation from the rest of the world leaves the kids dense about pretty much everything. When they see an airplane in the sky, the children call dibs on it if it was to crash. The parents, all too keen to fuel their children’s lunacy, help perpetuate their cluelessness by tossing toy airplanes into the garden — convincing the children that these toys are the same objects they see flying in the sky.
In order to satisfy their son’s urges, the father regularly brings in an outside woman to perform sex acts with his boy. When this woman begins to shatter the children’s perception of the world — introducing them to outside influences — it sets off a chain of events that ultimately threatens to tear the family apart.
Dogtooth looks and feels like a film from the ‘70s. Gritty and uncompromising, the film is a great throwback to the days where cinema used to incubate blatant weirdness.
The film’s actors gleefully embrace the eccentricity contained within Dogtooth. From their bizarre personality disorders to their off-kilter forced perception of the world, the trio of actors who play the family children are absolutely memorizing — daring audiences to take their eyes off the strangeness the family is waltzing with.
If you get the chance, please check out Dogtooth. It’s an absolute trip — at times bloody and at others bloody funny.
Chock full of full-frontal nudity, harsh violence and subversive satire, the film is not for the weak-minded. It is, though, for those who enjoy movies that tread the path rarely taken.
Hi – I agree, brilliant – but I’m amazed at what seems to escape a lot of folks; as follows …
Basically, I went to this film on the promise of the rather sexy publicity shot, I didn’t even know it was Greek – and about 20 minutes in I got completely hooked by what seems, IMHO, the dazzlingly, blindingly obvious metaphor (Greek word, that) that Lanthimos’ film constructs, to whit: the Greek nation being driven slowly berserk within the artificial confinement of their EU membership. (Which we see being played out now for real, BTW.) After the film ended I turned to the couple next to me and asked ‘em what they thought of it (“wow, a bit odd”) – I then asked if the insane project portrayed reminded them of anything, like the European Federal Project, par example ? … and, yup, suddenly the film snapped into place for them too. I could’nt feel smug about this aperçu, ‘cos, as above, it really is blindingly obvious – although possibly not to folks from Canada (me) New Zealand and other far-flung regions … In a dictatorship the film would have been suppressed and Lanthimos would have been swiftly executed. Brilliant … I hope you don’t mind this was a review (my first) iin IMDB. Kind regards, forthespacemen
I haven’t even seen this film yet (set for this weekend) but your analysis is what immediately occurred to me. Not so much the EU membership (I didn’t know about this angle) but I thought it was related somehow to the buildup of the financial crisis in Greece – a zeitgeist of this Greek period.
This film just seemed to come out of nowhere, just like the crisis itself. I haven’t seen many Greek films and the few I have seen weren’t what I could call experimental. I’m really excited to see this.
People take films to literally – most of the time the characters and storyline are symbolic. They can be taken literally and enjoyed as a good story but they almost always have a metaphoric meaning also.
You both bring up some interesting points. While I’ll agree that DOGTOOTH, like most films, has some underlying symbolism hidden beneath its awesome story (and it is a great story), ultimately trying to figure out these allegories is tantamount to mental masturbation. You can hypothesize and theorize all you want but in the end, unless you have the director telling you: “This is what my story means,” you are just grasping at straws. With enough imagination and fortitude, you can convince yourself (and others) that a movie is an allegory for just about anything. I took DOGTOOTH to be a movie more about coming of age and reaching for, yet being denied, adulthood. Whether the filmmakers wanted to bring politics into their story is something that can’t be known (unless they have talked about it in interviews, which very well may be the case).
Yes, and Brokeback mountain was a love story about two gay cowboys and it had nothing to do with making fun of Bush.
All art depicts the times in which they are made on some level whether the artist is aware of it or not. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the artist is attempting to potray or not b/c they are not the creator of the art anyway but more like the radio receiver that broadcasts the signal. Plenty of great artists have admitted that they don’t know what their art means or where it comes from. The artist is the finger pointing at the moon. Don’t mistake the finger for the moon.
Rob,
Mental masturbation ? That’s a bit harsh – here’s why: for myself, I didn’t form the opinion (allegory etc as above) as a result of some tortuous, long-winded and ultimately self-indulgent reverie – and I so agree with you that that can be pretty loathsome – but, as stated in minireview posted on your site, the message of the film, as I understood it, spoke to me directly, came to me in a flash of insight if you will.
Of course it may be that the message I took home might be a million miles away from what the director George Lanthimos intended – but in this eventuality what commentator Matt says in his various posts here is, I think, VERY perceptive, bang on.
Thanks due to you for an excellent site -
I can agree that art reflects the time — if only because the artist is a by-product of the times and his own perceptions were created and formed by the era he lived and grew up in.
So your argument is that the true decider of what art means is not the artist himself but the person viewing the art? If that is the case, there will never be one true definition of what a specific work of art means.
I’m okay with that theory but that also means somebody’s idea of what DOGTOOTH means (or BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN for that matter) is no less valid than mine or anybody else’s.
Even if artists are tapping into some cosmic radio frequency to bring forth their works, they are deciding how to shape it and what to portray. The art may not be the moon, but you can be assured that the artist is putting a lot of thought and insight on how he is going to point at the moon.
And please, explain to me how BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is one elaborate allegory for Bush-mocking? That just sounds like a liberal’s Christmas wish.
Brokeback was a horribly depressing and tiresome film. Bush was a pretend cowboy who grew up with nannies and servants in Connecticut. It wasn’t an allegory b/c it wasn’t that intellectual.
We can never know what a piece of art “really” means b/c it doesn’t really mean anything definitive and what the artist thinks it means is the least important. The only thing we can be sure of is that what gets released into the mainstream and what doesn’t is a result of the political and social climate of the times – basically the trends.
You’ll find that there is a definite shift in art that occurs during leader changes and also during other major historical events. Brokeback actually was a liberal’s xmas wish. Remember all of the gay cowboy jokes at the time? Tee hee – I made the jokes too and there was always a Bush subtext to it all. Some people explicitly made the connection to Bush and the Conservative/Evangelicals in their comments at the time. I’m not saying that the film was made primarily to make fun of Bush but the fact that it did generate a lot of humor at his expense surely helped it along.
I saw an interesting interview with Michael Jackson and they were asking him what the songs on Thriller meant and how he composed them. He said the trick was to not think about it – to just let it flow through you. He also implied that he really didn’t know what his songs meant on a deeper level. The worst art is the most thought out art.
Artists are a product of their times but more importantly what gets seen is also a product of the times. There are many unknown artists that’re great and many known that’re hacks but I’m more interested in why the known are the known and not the obscure. Dogtooth is an extreme film. There are plenty of typical dramas and other type genre films being released in Greece that won’t get seen by a larger audience – they won’t break through. Why does this film break through the static? I don’t think it’s a coincidence but maybe it’s just me.
Matt, as per comment in reply to Rob, above, couldn’t agree with you more.