Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) A Film by Xavier Dolan (2010)

Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats - the Canadian wunderkind's second feature at an astonishing 21 years of age - exists in a milieu where looking a part and acting a part is boiled down to a precise science. Style is the raw material with which characters wage war on each other. When they can't speak their thoughts, they express themselves through their clothing, their hairdos, and the rapidity with which they renew both. The generalized ennui marking their default expressions is a code designed to indicate their lack of interest in communication and their perceived self-assurance, but it really just illuminates how desperately they desire attention. Dolan's signature theme in the film is how the superficial becomes a parasitic growth on the meaningful, an obsession that disguises deeper feeling until it's too late. It would be too easy to lob the same theory at Heartbeats itself, a film so self-consciously concerned with style for its own sake that it neglects great waves of narrative detail and momentum, but it contains too much conviction in its mood shifts and its emotionality to be easily dismissed as "style over substance", or whatever that platitude has come to mean. Dolan's not guilty of creating a prolonged fashion show if only for the sense that he's aware of how style inflects his character's behaviors and motivations, how it plays such an integral role in their psychological metamorphoses.

In the case of the menage-a-trois he has created to express his themes, Dolan has devised a scenario where uncontrollable lust leads directly to angst and madness. Good friends Francis (Dolan himself in the lead role) and Maria (Monia Chokri) both develop an unspoken desire for Nicolas (Niels Schneider), an outgoing, confidently stylish newcomer in their circle of friends with the kind of shaggy dog haircut and laid-back persona that makes him instantly lovable to the shy and disaffected. Such is the situation with Francis and Maria, who are both, in spite of their loud, flashy external presentations, quite troubled internally, choosing to hide their social ineptitude beneath the veil of exorbitantly priced sweaters and countless cigarettes. The film's loose, stripped-down narrative traces the passive-aggressive mongering of Francis and Maria as they vie for the attention of a boy who remains a mysterious surface pleasure throughout, a vexing personality who seems to communicate everything and nothing simultaneously in the courage of his tossed-off vernacular.

Dolan proves to have little interest in fleshing out the particulars of his narrative. Instead, he's content to focus hyper-attentively on the present moment, using (and sometimes overusing) ravishing slow-motion sequences to pick up on every microscopic shift in the emotions of a scene. There are plenty of times when this fetishistic slowing of time suggests Dolan has yet to digest In the Mood for Love, particularly when his compositions - such as that of Maria swaying her birthday present for Nicolas by her side as she struts down the street - are such transparent thefts of Kar-Wai. But in other instances, Dolan is able to capture an enormous amount of emotional clarity in the elongated fleeting moments when Francis and Maria first meet Nicolas for lunch (wherein Francis ducks his head down temporarily in obvious attraction) or when they watch, hypnotized, as Nicolas dances under a strobe at his crowded party. The rejection of traditional characterization here (no back-stories, no casually revealing expository dialogue) makes perfect sense given the decidedly noncommittal qualities of the characters themselves, who'd rather stand like a mannequin in the corner of a party than openly tell you about their lives.



Comparisons to the French New Wave and the souped-up melodramas of Pedro Almodovar are inevitable with a film so spontaneous and free in its dealings with youthful love, so littered with varied musical offerings, and so awash in primary colors, but they're especially apt for Dolan, who hasn't so much invisibly integrated his influences into his cinematic vocabulary yet as he has rehashed them in all their dazzling glory. Heartbeats is almost never less than fraudulent - albeit a kind of acceptable fraudulence given how beautifully and comfortably Dolan seems to adopt the mannerisms - which means that when it manages to possess its own singular vision it's particularly special. Dolan has the finicky (some may say masturbatory, and they'd be primed for support when his character indeed masturbates in the film) eye to sensationalize anything he finds visually compelling - the kiss of a breast in extreme close-up, Maria's voluptuous behind in a hot pink dress, the pirouette of cigarette smoke up nostrils, the drip of rain across an umbrella, the scrape of a red high heel shoe across a forest road covered in leaves - and it offers a painterly inspection of detail rarely seen in narrative films with an agenda. Moreover, Dolan has a talent for rendering key moments abstract in his juicy shallow focus cinematography, such as the climactic hissy fit thrown between Francis and Maria in the woods, in which his camera thrusts into the frantic movement of their entangled bodies, creating a swirl of colors and blurry action.

My initial reaction was to scoff at Heartbeats for its deeply self-conscious gimmicks and its glaring hipness, but I was pulled under its spell rather quickly, sympathetic to its experiential approach to the rhythms of unrequited love. Dolan would have a fairly solid and consistent sophomore feature if only he was smart enough to trust his narrative alone and do away with the insufferable faux-documentary questionnaire segments with 21st Century Romantics that periodically interrupt the plot and severely weaken the growing mood with irritating snap zooms and stuffy dialogue. As it is, Heartbeats, aside from occasionally being a fantastically sensual experience, merely reveals the fertile ground on which Dolan will hopefully refine his style in years to come. In other words, it's a tantalizing if flawed work, and if Dolan can take a lesson from his characters and learn to better direct and shape his stylistic assaults, he can probably wind up with something equal to his vivid influences.

Cyrus (2010) A Film by Mark and Jay Duplass

The Duplass brothers have a knack for first acts, that prolonged down-in-the-dumps segment where the plot is free to go wherever it pleases and the characters have nowhere to go but up. It's where their uncanny feel for dialogue, pacing, and awkward silence is most readily apparent, and where their cast tends to let loose the most before being constrained to fit into the boxy, strategic dramas their films become. Cyrus takes that tendency and magnifies it, coming away with a dynamite opening thirty minutes and a mere pedestrian, forgettable progression from there. Following John (John C. Reilly) in his drunken stupor around a party in search of a new female prospect at the insistence of his curiously nurturing ex-wife of eight years, Jamie (Catherine Keener), the film effectively strikes a typically Mumblecore-esque brand of hilarity that the Duplass brothers have been credited for originating. A lot of this has to do with the professional nonchalance of Reilly, who has now built up a sizable repertoire of these kinds of bumbling, idiotic, perversely lovable figures (Step Brothers, Walk Hard, and especially his turns as Dr. Steve Brule on Tim and Eric Awesome Show and Check it Out!). His garbled, tossed-off delivery of the phrase "get more drunk" when faced with the iconic predicament of what more to do at the party, is priceless.

Unfortunately, and unlike the Duplass brothers' previous features, very little of this has to do with the direction or the writing. For all intents and purposes, everything behind the camera is rather clumsy and tired. In The Puffy Chair, the brothers set up complicated scenarios for their characters - such as the question of what to do with a two-person limit on hotel rooms with a limited budget and three twentysomethings - that unleashed a narcoticized form of slapstick that was unique to their comedy. Furthermore, they were able to slip in stray lines that hilariously deflected the mounting drama (Rhett's probing "don't forget about the lizards"). Not to say these qualities are entirely absent from Cyrus, but they're few and far between. Instead, the brothers are comfortable and settled in their banal, overused setups (a party, a wedding, a stuffy household), preferring to rest all the weight on Reilly's shoulders. The majority of this film's comedy - which, to be sure, dwindles quickly - spawns from Reilly's goofy mannerisms, his flimsy euphemisms and his uncertain gait.



As drama, the film is even less convincing. When Molly (Marisa Tomei) finds John pissing in a bush at the party and she's instantly taken by him, the romance that ensues is criminally underdeveloped. Because the script is more interested in using their newfound relationship as a function through which to investigate the progressive bloodlust between John and Molly's son Cyrus (Jonah Hill), it's inevitably reduced to a footnote. One can simply check off each benchmark in their relationship (the cute introduction, the subsequent dance, the first sex, the first fight, John's move-in) without finding any of the necessary cushion to provide any kind of complete character development. Molly's merely an overprotective free-spirit who remains illogically faithful to her conniving son even when he's threatening the first relationship she's had in 30 years, and the seeds of this gullibility and maternal over-enthusiasm are left unexplored. John's transformation from depressed deadbeat to born-again romantic retains very little of the childish awkwardness and clownishness that is central to his character, and Cyrus' sudden epiphany of his own destructive behavior carries not an ounce of pathological realism.

Before sounding like I'm railing gleefully against what is essentially a pretty modest rom-com, I should remark that there's nothing outwardly objectionable about Cyrus. It's a light, breezy film, capable of making you laugh and even feel sympathy for these characters. Its fundamental setback though is that it's so sluggish and programmatic that it slips quickly from the mind. Another Mumblecore film, regardless of whether or not it's a crossover hit with Hollywood stars (and this definitely strikes the same terrain as Greenberg), is bound to obscurity if it follows the same guidebook. And the Duplass brothers certainly seem stubbornly fixated on their trademark style, immune to how their particular techniques are beneficial to the material or not. For every instance that they employ a snap zoom that effectively augments the laughs (like when Cyrus gives John a blank-face stare while showcasing his amateurish techno music), there's a time when this same camera flourish aggressively imposes on a more dramatic scene. At the very least, this makes the Duplass brothers filmmakers for our generation: refusing to alter their insistent signature in the face of circumstances where adaptivity is increasingly necessary.

Screening Notes #2

Secretary (2002): A work without a soul. This is clinical pathology on film, and it points to nothing greater than itself. Its characters are not human beings but rather a bundle of tics for the director to giggle at and judge. Worse, it suggests that the foundation for a romantic relationship (which the film hardly earns) is an endless power struggle, and that oppressiveness can be forgiven if one can ape the other into thinking there's something behind the bag of tricks. As for whether or not there's a built-in critique of its own content, I don't buy it because of the tonal confusion.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008): A hugely entertaining romantic comedy with a script of machine-like propulsion that makes you forget how dumb and predictable everything is. Machine, though, is a word that should only suggest the sprightly, economical assurance of the craftsmanship, not the acting. Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, and especially Russell Brand are uncharacteristically alive in rather cliched roles, and director Nicholas Stoller has some clever visual matches for the script's structural conceits. That another getaway-to-Hawaii movie from Hollywood actually possesses this much energy and wit is something to be happy about.

Trash Humpers (2009): Harmony Korine's made the kind of anything-goes potty film every 14-year-old rebel makes with their friends, only he's packaged it with more extremity in its haywire form and content than a youngster could ever dream of. At the end of the day, it's a pile of meaninglessness, but as always with these kinds of provocations, it's not the actual object that matters but rather the storm of opinions surrounding it. Hence why Korine is quick to admit his film is a juvenile piece of garbage found in the trash somewhere. Anyway, I had a good time and its garishly smudged VHS images have stuck with me.

Some Like it Hot (1959): RIP Tony Curtis. Billy Wilder's fat middle section to Some Like it Hot is near comic gold, for it seems there are endless sight gags in the zany gender-shifting and identity-swapping play between Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Before this kind of comedy became a tired cultural staple and cheap source of laughter in deplorable films like White Chicks, Curtis and Lemmon brought a spark to it. It's also one of Wilder's most playfully scathing critiques of image-based identity (i.e. the pop culture vacuum), an idea built into the fabric of the film in the shape of the unpredictable Marilyn Monroe.

Another Year (2010): Every time Leslie Manville's Mary graces the screen, you wish she'd leave. But at the same time, she's such a fully developed and rich character, such a convincing human being, that you feel obligated to watch her. And there are enough foils to her character to make the domestic tensions of each scene deeply dramatic. The film's structural blueprint (four prolonged episodes play out during the four seasons) remarks subtly on the inexorable passage of time, the way the changes and lack of changes in the characters are amplified by the weight of each new day. My only gripe is how stubbornly traditional Leigh is behind the camera; technically, this is closer to theater than cinema, but the final act set in winter offers some unexpectedly striking compositions, momentary detours from the banal ping-pong of close-ups and medium shots.

In Bruges (2008): Another film that often feels like filmed theater, only this time it makes complete sense given director Martin McDonagh's prolific stage background. Even so, there's something more cinematic about McDonagh's engagement with his characters and his setting. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are fundamentally movie types, and given the long cinematic lineage of disenchanted hitmen in foreign countries, they rank as two of the most memorable (they're certainly the most crass). An explosive third act underscores the fairy-tale aura of Bruges that McDonagh plays with throughout. It's a film to further prove that Farrell's got some of the best thousand-mile stares in cinema, and that there ought to be a micro-genre in which he keeps visiting and getting pissed at new countries.

Screening Notes #1

For a while now, I've aimed to find a solution to the endless pile-up of movies I see and don't end up writing about right away. The problem has increased exponentially the more work I have to do outside of blogging, and it just so happens that I'm in the thick of pre-production on a new short film right now, so matters have become worse. Less time to write, less time to commit myself to thinking about a movie for four or five consecutive hours. So the ideal way to solve this is to do quick-and-dirty write-ups on all these stray films, making sure I don't forget my primary thoughts on them by the time I do a formal essay. Therefore, I present "Screening Notes", an idea heavily indebted to Ryland Walker Knight's "Viewing Logs" over at his blog Vinyl is Heavy. I like the off-the-cuff quality to his work, and I find myself reading it (and other work like it) with more frequency than long-form essays simply because I don't have as much time to devote to them. This is not to say that I will be eschewing my common approach at all; I just hate to find myself abandoning films because I forget what I wanted to say about them in the first place. Here's the first entry in what will likely be a continuing journal of notes, and as you'll see, my notes will refer to both full features I've seen and other various media clips (single scenes, short films, youtube videos, etc.).

Lost in Translation (2003): In some respects a theft of the calming, moody nighttime ambiance of Hou Hsiao-Hsein's Millenium Mambo (and more generally all of Hou's films), Coppola's most popular film nonetheless gathers its own steam over its modest running time, due largely to Murray and Johansson's chemistry. Like her male protagonist in a Japanese scotch commercial, Coppola is mostly posing for cool sensuality without actually being sensual. It can be a dull slog, but I suppose that's the point. Great soundtrack and great hidden final line.

Leon the Professional (1994): In spite of his hitman/pre-pubescent girl romance taboo, Luc Besson's debut is fiercely unimaginative, more interested in being a Hollywood sleeper hit than in using its independent spirit for something worthwhile. Some of the dialogue here - particularly in Jean Reno and Natalie Portman's first revealing conversation - is hysterically obvious, and Gary Oldman's sniveling villain makes me laugh more than cower. And for a work that purports to be a muscular action film, it doesn't actually grow any muscle until its final act.

Marie Antoinette (2006): Unfortunately, I caught Coppola's third feature on the Sundance channel at what I suspected to be somewhere in the middle. Normally, I would never continue watching a film I haven't seen before if dropped awkwardly into the bulk of its run-time, but Coppola's sedate rhythms were striking to me, especially after a long and physical day of skiing. She certainly was watching some Malick when she made this one, evidenced by all the offhand shots of blowing grass and sunlight. Turned out it was the final thirty minutes that I watched, but I was unusually moved by it. I'm not sure what all the negative fuss was about. I'll be returning to it in its full glory for sure.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004): A similar story here, except I've already seen Salle's sprawling travelogue/coming-of-age tale about Che Guevara before he became Che Guevara. Complaints are often lobbed at the film's generic apolitical tone, or more politely, its refusal to stuff the blossoms of Che's ideological tenets down the audience's throat, but I like the universalism of it, the way it treats the notorious revolutionary's drama as a hazy realization of global inequities rather than a scholarly essay on the precise forces that cause those inequities. The final act, set on a Peruvian island full of the terminally ill and deformed, is a prime example of honest, humane filmmaking with a breathtaking backdrop, and the epilogue, a series of moving postcards of the various people Che meets on his journey, is a reminder that time is not a static document but a continuum.

The Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King) (2003): A single cadence within all the mayhem is quite lovely: little Mary sings a local folk tune while the barbaric warrior beside him devours food. Elsewhere, an army charges violently at orks. Jackson builds a rhythm by intercutting between these two scenes, and the collision between the gentle airiness of Mary's voice and the impulsiveness of man around him is a marvel of Eisenstinian montage.

My Winnipeg (2007) A Film by Guy Maddin

Found footage, super 8mm, and shoddy digital video collide in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg just as much as fact and fiction do. In a conventional sense, this is a documentary, one made for Canada's Documentary Channel at that, but Maddin, as usual, has little to no interest in a straightforward presentation of factual information. Narrated like esoteric beat-poetry throughout by Maddin himself, the film's title is on-the-nose: this is not necessarily the real Winnipeg, but rather his Winnipeg. Maddin, one of cinema's greatest living mythologists, has created a potent dream space that collects the mood of Manitoba's cold, dreary capital and refracts it through his singular aesthetic, one that filters autobiographical information through a dense collage of lurid 1940's Hollywood melodrama, the handmade spectacle of Georges Méliès, the formal experimentation of Stan Brakhage, the cryptic associative strategies of Soviet Montage, and just occasionally, the familiar practices of low-budget documentary filmmaking. His films are funhouses of cinephiliac associations, inviting an active engagement with film history along the way, but miraculously, in spite of all the pastiche, Maddin emerges with his own individual style that is so steeped in the hyperspeed sprawl afforded to film production by modern technology as well as the giddy postmodernism that inevitably results from a century's worth of images that it could only exist today.

A tip-off to Maddin's tongue-in-cheek, self-fictionalizing attitude arrives early when we see that he does not cast himself in the part of himself - a man sleeping his way through an endless cross-city train ride - but rather Darcy Fehr, a recurring actor in Maddin's corpus. Furthermore, his mother comes in the form of Ann Savage, a burnt-out actress who achieved fleeting cult status in a variety of Hollywood B-films in the 40's and 50's, hinting at Maddin's interest in letting pop culture overlap with personal history. No doubt indebted to her experience in the kinds of stuffy melodramas Maddin is consciously reworking, Savage brings a terrifically authentic presence to the film, playing out Maddin's outsized Oedipal Complex perfectly in grand, often times hokey gestures and menacing facial expressions, which frequently dominate the screen in the film's many shambolic superimpositions. In fact, Maddin frames the whole city of Winnipeg as an emblem of maternal possession. One of the film's many repeated inside-jokes is a succession of cartographic images of Winnipeg's various bodies of water, within which Maddin uncovers perverse visual analogies to his mother's body parts. (The "forks beneath the forks", or the merging of two major rivers, aligns with a crotch, and the "lap", the pool where the rivers dump, is self-explanatory). It's a bizarre turn of comparison and allegorical guiding force, but it effectively communicates the fact that Maddin's obsessive urge to escape Winnipeg is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, an urge to escape the clutches of his mother.

His logical solution to escape? Well, he decides it best to "film his way out" by re-staging ordinary domestic scenes from his youth with local actors and actresses, which ultimately end up looking like a cross between the hysterical "Ledge-Man" sitcoms Maddin claims his mother watched religiously in his youth and the disturbingly off-kilter dinner scenes in Eraserhead. Maddin's approach is hilariously self-referential in these artificial family mini-dramas, as his voice-over comments explicitly on what is happening and critiques the deliberately hammy performances of the amateur actors, giving the sense that the scenes are being directed as they unfold. The long, mundane two-shots and flat lighting absolutely nails the aesthetic of cheaply-made 50's sitcoms, and the scenarios - Guy's sister is chastised and picked apart by her mother after coming home too late from a date, the children force their mother to get up and make pancakes by scaring her with a bird - are so convincingly goofy that Maddin's affection for campy home entertainment is made palpable. Through staged reenactions of his own past, Maddin is being open about his effort to use the filmic medium as a way of exorcising past demons, even if those demons are more laughable and eccentric than they are unsettling.



Political and social histories of Winnipeg are interwoven with the personal musings, but even in his handling of potentially drier material Maddin is no less whimsical. The film is almost anti realism in its approach, always creating a larger-than-life story out of raw information like historical data, geographical and architectural sites, and wayward Winnipegian rituals and festivities. In one of the film's most thrilling passages, Maddin documents his alleged birth and impassioned upbringing in the grandstands of the Winnipeg hockey stadium, which the film proves through crummy prosumer camera footage to have been recently demolished. Maddin critiques the modernizing behavior of his local government not with cold polemics but with unapologetically childish pathos; a sequence introducing each and every one of the Winnipeg Maroons players that Maddin looked up to as a child is playfully staged as a classic sports broadcast, with each washed-up, near-geriatric athlete skating into position in front of the camera as Maddin, with the intonation of a sportscaster, announces their name. The film's charting of the illicit back roads that are used only by citizens and not by public transport becomes a minimalistic exercise in road hypnosis, with Maddin's hazy, snowy camera sprawling relentlessly down the dark and narrow shoots as if placed on the hood of a car. And of course actual occurrences transform into surrealistic nightmares: an ode to the local pool becomes a trip back into the recesses of Maddin's pre-pubescent mind when his sexually curious peers made a simple swimming excursion into a "Dance of the Hairless Boners", and the tragedy of the racetrack fire, which left a great number of stampeding horses frozen beneath acres of snow, provides the film's most haunting images.

Historically, My Winnipeg may be the inaugural (if not one among a very small handful of) instance[s] in which a pure mood piece disguises itself as a documentary, and vice versa. Retrospectively, the film is more about layers of snow and darkness - literalized in the many kaleidoscopic black and white collages in the film - than it is about anything else, and in its own unique way crystallizes a feeling of being in Winnipeg without actually being there. But Maddin's vision is never excessively dour or overtly self-involved; it's joyously self-deprecating, and universal in a way that manages to loosely connect all the manic eccentricities to concrete stages in the development of a modern human being - the obsessions, the couch-ridden over-saturation in media, the sexual awakenings, the various releases from parental figures, and most importantly, the feverish connection to one's hometown. My Winnipeg is an emphatic argument in the latter half of the nature vs. nurture debate, suggesting that the imprint of one's local experience becomes hardwired in a complex manner, revealing itself deeply in the pains and creations of an individual.

Camera (2000) A Short Film by David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg has been fixated throughout his career on the idea of the camera, the apparatus of cinema, being an intrusion on the human body. Often times, as in The Brood and Naked Lunch, this is merely a hidden subtext, its implications obscured in the onslaught of body horror, but other times, as in Videodrome, Cronenberg makes it explicitly clear what his thoughts are on the relationship between the voyeuristic mechanism of the camera and the vulnerable human body. But perhaps his most direct and potent evocation of this theme is his 6-minute short Camera, which is not only open with its title but also with its blatantly suggestive imagery, vacillating between crude, claustrophobic digital video and clean, formulaic production values.

What’s particularly fascinating about the film is its all-encompassing array of ideas, which sneak subtly into the film despite the seemingly obvious nature of the premise: a group of young kids jovially wheel a new Panavision camera around the interior of a house, preparing to shoot a scene with their “father”, the actor Leslie Carlson. The film begins with a long monologue by Carlson addressing his disenchantment with aging and acting, especially how the two interact in a not-so-glamorous fashion. Cronenberg shoots these scenes by getting right up in Carlson’s face, roving over the contours in his expressions like a satellite observing a foreign planet. His camera makes an abstraction of the face, watching closely as the sweaty sheen on his skin dances around in response to the moving shot. Ultimately, Cronenberg is capturing the unvarnished “truth” of the human face, as opposed to the mechanical artifice of the climactic shot when the children spruce up Carlson and prepare for a slow dolly in that illustrates a commodified perception of the human face. His makeup conceals the growing threat of his own mortality, suggesting that the dominant cinema form denies acknowledgment or exploration of human mortality and aging.

Carlson’s shifting manner of performance – from grizzled, hostile cynic to pleasant, easygoing actor – further implies that the camera has a hypnotizing power that suffocates accurate human feeling, encouraging a strained approximation of truth. In spite of Carlson’s impassioned resentment of the overbearing weight of the camera lens, and the way he sees it as a machine that neglects and thus emphasizes his aging, the moment the children turn it towards him, he alters his behavior. Tellingly, Cronenberg makes the film crew a group of children Carlson treats as his own kids, a conceit that is at first a silly sight gag and subsequently a rather insightful commentary on the increasingly youthful film industry. It’s as if, while recognizing the promise of this young talent pool, Cronenberg is also lamenting the loss of the older, and potentially wiser, school of filmmakers and actors, as well as the scarcity of elderly concerns in films. Camera, notwithstanding its short length and deceptively limited scope, is actually one of Cronenberg’s most multifaceted dissertations on his own medium and its industry.

Dogtooth (2010) A Film by Giorgos Lanthimos

(Many spoilers ahead!!!)

Giorgos Lanthimos wouldn't be out of place in Texas Chainsaw Massacre based on the number of times he cuts off heads in his third feature film, the otherworldly and mordant Dogtooth. His default image is a geometrically ordered room whose occupants eventually situate themselves in such a way that their heads skirt just above the top of the frame, leaving only their lifeless bodies within the composition. Unsurprisingly, the effect is dehumanizing, and the accumulation of all of these seemingly offhand but very deliberate images is akin to being forcefully denied entry to these characters' thoughts and emotions, encouraged to see them only as figures in a grand design. And of course, to the psychopathic parental unit at the core of the film, they are. Lanthimos is blending both an insider and an anthropological eye to capture the sick social malpractice that is the film's central premise: a married couple have cultivated their children in a closed-off, forbidding domestic atmosphere, teaching them that the world beyond their backyard's imposing walls is cruel, dangerous, and amoral. The irony, readily obvious from the very beginning of the film, is that the absurdly overprotective lifestyle they have carved out for their offspring is the only real danger.

Before cracking the whip on Lanthimos as a misanthropic freak himself, it's important to realize the glaringly obvious: Dogtooth is a bold thematic brushstroke, a cautionary tale about, among many other things, the intricacies of a child's impressionability in which the shocking behavioral experimentation on display has nothing to do with the director's own belief system. The film is aggressively acontextual and timeless - save for one possible reference to 9/11 that is, before any extratextual associations, more about the extremity of the childrens' sensory deprivation and numbness to figure/ground relationships - in an attempt to be applicable to any time or any context. It is an intellectualized, Brechtian form of cinema, so what seems like an absence of humanity at first is actually the intention. Sometimes within the same extended camera take, Lanthimos is alternating between viewing the children through the lens of the father and mother - that is, as passive, nameless objects - and viewing them as living, breathing humans capable of independent thought and rational rebellion. Witness the first scene, for instance, when a small portable device mechanically reads off new, coded vocabulary for the children to learn. First, they sit silently, digesting the artificial knowledge. Then, in a spark of imagination, they rail against their parents' insistent computerized lesson, attempting to devise a game that will put to use their newly acquired understanding of "endurance." Moments like this, as well as the eldest daughter's incorporation, later on, of behavior she learns illicitly from Rocky and Jaws, are proof that the stilted, robotic qualities of these children are entirely the product of external forces, that they possess an ability for individuality that is being oppressed by their parents.

At this point, it's necessary to drop the fact that these "children" are actually not children at all. The young daughter, the son, and the older daughter - played by Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, respectively - must all be in their late teens at least, if not their twenties. Their ages are obviously not followed closely by their parents, who prefer arbitrary bodily check-marks as indicators of their development in life. The film gets its title from the parents' rule that the children may not leave the grounds of the home until their dogtooth falls out and grows back. Of course, the "dogteeth", or the pointed upper teeth on either side of the mouth, never naturally fall out, meaning the parents have created an obstacle that cannot, in reality, be overcome. They tend to rely on these kinds of false manipulations to insure they have complete control over the evolution of their children. At one point, the mother (Michele Valley) threatens them with the prospect of giving birth, stating that she will not "have to" disrupt the orderly flow of life with a new kid if everyone behaves themselves. The father (Christos Stergioglou), who is the film's most disturbingly senseless creation largely due to his greater screen time, comes home from work at his factory and sneaks three large fish into the backyard pool either to force his children to deal with an unknown object or perhaps just to screw with them. Supposedly, the parents do what they do because they love their children, and in an age of increasingly wayward homeschooling practices, their unconventional methods, though exaggerated, don't stretch the imagination too far.



The film's most fascinating plot ingredient is the figure of Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a security guard from the father's factory whom he hires to relieve the instinctual urges of his son. In light of so much autocratic suppression, it's unusual that the father actively allows his son the freedom of sexual release, but even this act of seeming indulgence becomes a calculated contrivance, a nearly unwatchable display of passionless, somnambulistic sex captured by Lanthimos in extensive, harshly symmetrical compositions. When Christina loses interest in the somber and inexperienced son, she goes against the father's wishes and engages in bartering with the daughters, leading to the trading of various outside goods for oral sex. The household becomes a sexualized free market economy, and ultimately Christina represents the infiltration of the external world in spite of the father's persistent attempts at security (blindfolding her on the way to the house).

Lanthimos has an immensely refreshing aesthetic sense, a genuine knack for composing striking shots. The world he has created is a warped replication of our own, a quiet, bucolic countryside where everything, even the patch of bright palm trees in the backyard, seems to seethe with malign purpose and menacing geometry. Lanthimos contrasts the vibrant, overabundant jungle of the backyard - with its artificial ideals of a slickly manicured lawn and a spotless pool - with the more lifeless triangular formations on the buildings at the father's factory lot. There are rich internal editing rhythms at work (the lovely sound bridge that takes us from an underwater shot of one of the daughters swimming to a family dinner scene where the son is playing on the out-of-tune piano in the living room) and dynamic interplays between minimalist shot structures and off-the-cuff handheld camera. In an interesting touch, Lanthimos actively engages with lens flares, often making bubbles of light a part of the composition rather than an intrusion or an optical error. All of this lends a phenomenal sense of place to the film, which is crucial given the fact that it's the only atmosphere the children know.



Dogtooth could very well be interpreted as a modern-day riff on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, insofar as the domestic prison represents the cave. What's interesting, in this scenario, is that the ultimate enlightenment, the moment where the eldest daughter "sees the light," is brought about by popular culture. In one of their many secretive trades, Christina presents the eldest with Hollywood films on VHS tapes, and slowly, before she is punished violently by her father, Lanthimos works in scenes of her appropriating behaviors from the movies, such as her pretending to be a shark attacking her brother in the pool. Rather than decrying the mass media's influence as demoralizing, it seems Lanthimos is embracing it as a form of catharsis, reacting to a general anti-media bias within some schools of developmental psychology with a scenario that posits the integration of media into life as the only route to freedom.

The final thirty minutes, wherein the eldest daughter finally devises and enacts her clever escape plan without taking into account a fundamental precaution, left me feeling a kind of deep-seated unease that I haven't experienced in quite a while. Long after I completely discredited Dogtooth as the "dark comedy" it's been marketed as (though, admittedly, there were moments where a restrained chuckle or two slipped out of me), the film settles into a daunting, challenging, and horrific denouement that is littered with one shocking, retina-burning image after another. Far from being out for simplistic shocks though, the film has a deceptive, understated quality of disturbance to it. Yet it's this understatement that makes the film so difficult to grapple with on thematic levels, simply because it gestures vaguely in so many directions. Although somewhat simplistic in its overt criticisms of dictatorial family units, the ideology of homeschooling, and the more widespread idea of national security, the film has such a distinctive stylistic sensibility that it's disingenuous to make any claims of lackluster artistry. I haven't made up my mind yet as to whether Dogtooth actually is as intelligent as it's cracked up to be, but it's certainly a tense, unforgettable experience.