When “Dogtooth” screened in Cannes earlier this year, it was definitely on our radar, but running around in the South of France trying to frantically get to every screening we needed to we unfortunately missed it.
And then when it went on to win the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes and it was definitely on our radar. We then had to see it: enter the TIFF screening.
A stark and unsettling mixture of physical violence and mental abuse, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth” is one of the most striking and memorable features at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The sinewy concoction of impressionistic visuals and austere formalism makes for astonishingly assured cinema, especially surprising considering this is a very new director, with only two prior, lesser known features to his name.
The craft is near-flawless here, but it’s the provocative subject matter that makes “Dogtooth” really impressive: A study in perverse domesticity, Lanthimos depicts a married couple with three young-adult children (one boy, two girls) and their struggle to keep their family sheltered from the outside world. Their property is surrounded by a tall wooden fence and only the father is allowed to venture outside each day for work, regaling his children with made-up stories about the dangers that lurk beyond the borders of their home.
But the parents’ aim is less one of protection and more a social experiment: can they raise slavishly obedient children by limiting their worldview and assuring they only learn what their parents’ want them too? Scheduled exercise sessions are encouraged, as is a strong sense of competition — the opening scene of the film introduces us to the children as they test their individual endurance under a faucet running hot water — and reward good behavior with stickers, with which the children decorate the backboards of their beds and further compete to see who can earn the most.
The only outside intrusion the family allows manifests in the form of a woman hired to sex-up the son, and it’s this chink in the the family’s armor that ends up opening the flood gates to curiosity, knowledge and material from the outside world. The woman gifts the eldest girl of the family with headbands, specialized shampoo and finally video cassettes in exchange for sexual favors. And when the parents find out about this, they retaliate with strict disciplinary action: the father discovers the video of “Rocky” his daughter has been watching after she recites endless quotes from the film, and when he does he duct tapes the cassette to his hand and beats the girl with it until it splinters into pieces.
“Dogtooth” puts to shame similar, far more manipulative studies in domestic violence like Austrian conversation-starter Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” (doesn’t matter which version), by putting the violence onscreen and allowing us to judge it and respond to it in whatever way is natural to us. Will we be entertained by it (there were audible nervous chuckles in the audience during some of the more excruciating moments)? Will it provoke Janet Maslin-worthy trips to the bathroom to cope? Or will over-eager journalists decry it as nothing more than nihilistic and perverse? Lanthimos acknowledges that’s beyond his control and up to the individual to decide.
Crucially, the director doesn’t play anything here for laughs, nor does he temper the tone with an oppressive and stylized stoicism, as found in a film like Carlos Reygadas’ “Silent Light.” “Dogtooth” has the same kind of raw and uncompromising realism of Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl” or Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms.” In fact, the only thing keeping the Greek filmmaker’s achievement from the high-mark set by those two films is its somewhat anti-climactic ending. Whereas as both Breillat’s and Dumont’s films build upon a steadily mounting tension to a sort-of provocatively cathartic release of abrasive brutality, “Dogtooth” — forgive us for this — ends with a whimper when it should bark.
However, perhaps our reaction to Lanthimos’ somewhat ambiguous conclusion is itself something that should be looked at as the response of one individual. The desire for a more jolting end has in effect caused one to reflect on those expectations with the same kind of personal examination Haneke hopes to provoke. So it’s yet another virtue of the film that it can cause such analytical thinking about a person’s reactions to violence without the manipulation usually necessary to facilitate it. [B+] — Sam C. Mac
