Michael Atkinson writes on film for The Village Voice, Sight & Sound, In These Times, Moving Image Source, The L Magazine, and elsewhere. His latest book is Hemingway Cutthroat (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur), and his blog is www.zeroforconduct.com.
On Dogtooth (2010)
The Stalker of batshit family pathology, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is 2010′s premier arthouse freakout, falling into line, like an eighth-generation punk returning to Eisenhower-era rockabilly, with the heritage of studied, meta-psych movie puzzles from the ‘60s (read: Antonioni, Resnais, Bergman, Teshigahara, Bellocchio, et al.). It’s difficult to say if Lanthimos is a newfound visionary – his previous movie, 2005′s Kinetta, was lauded by some festival critics but I found it abstruse and unfocused to the point of maddened sighs – or if Dogtooth is a stand-alone strike of sneaky whiplash. Auteurist pigeon-holing is beside the point, at least for now. What we’ve got here is a ceaselessly inventive portrait of a domestic rubber room that is so absurdly specific, so outrageously maniacal, that it effortlessly generalizes to the rest of us, to a flow of concentric ideas about modern life. Think equal parts Kafka, Orwell, Michael Haneke, the genre of prison films (paradigmized, perhaps, by Jules Dassin’s Brute Force), and American-style home-schooling parental paranoia.
But in Greece. Lanthimos drips the reality of his scenario in slowly, so at first we don’t quite grasp what’s strange about the comfortable five-member household we are exploring, centered on a trio of nameless, blank-faced teen and post-teen siblings (older son Hristos Passalis, sisters Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni), except the pervasive sense of preadolescent disaffection, the ESL-style learning of the wrong words for things (“sea” is an armchair, “carbine” is “a beautiful white bird”), the insulated life in the family compound. Eventually, it becomes apparent that the set-up is a nightmare of territorial, dogmatic conservatism, created as an everlasting bell jar for the children, who know nothing about the outside world (groceries have labels removed before they’re brought home), nothing about society, and precious little else. The only TV they watch is home movies recorded days earlier; the only phone is hidden in a safe. Crazy, hermetic, safety-fanatical home-schooling without the schooling, Lanthimos’s terrarium is ideology-free – we’re supposed to project our own suspicions – and virtually emotionless; all the implacable, balding father (Christos Sterglioglou) divulges is a curse on a co-worker who’s betrayed his trust: may there be “bad influence on your children.”
But as the battery of details is unveiled, it’s clear that what began as a scheme motivated by a terrified neo-con hatred of modern society (presumably when the children were young) has devolved, like all ideologies, into an untenable totalitarian tightrope walk. Paid outsiders must be brought in to satisfy the son’s sexual urges; idiotic lies must be propagated about the “man-eating cats” that the offspring are told patrol the grassy hills beyond the fence; the mother (Michelle Valley) even invents a pregnancy, the threat of which is used to keep her children in line. Incest is an eventual given, as are spurts of savage familial violence. But so is insurrection – the evolution of which is inexorable but instinctual; thoughts of breaking through the artificial membrane stretched over the family don’t occur fully formed in the sisters, but as a consequence of their constricted world view and unerasable needs. If families are power systems, then Dogtooth is a snapshot of oppression and its discontents.
Dogtooth is composed and staged in an observational, quasi-accidental style in the eloquent tradition of Hou Hsaio-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Tsai Ming-liang and Pedro Costa, but with a menacing edge befitting what amounts to a science fiction film in miniature. (The late British critic Philip Strick, in a favorite book of my youth titled simply Science Fiction Movies, convincingly roped in Last Year at Marienbad and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie under that genre rubric.) Call the visual sense of Lanthimos’s film Appalled Objectivism, since the camera often seems frozen in horror, and the off-screen space is loaded with potential danger. Still, the grace of the movie lies in how much it musters, thematically, from so little – five people in a house and a barnload of sly ideas about distorted social norms, parental Zeitgeists, and the effects, perceived and genuine, of a liberalized civilization on the well-being of children.
Which is where Dogtooth becomes authentically discomfiting, because as delusional and horrendous as the film’s scenario is, it’s based in a primal parental vibe that’s impossible to deny or ignore, and which has consumed an entire generation of childhood experience since the 1980s. Novelist/essayist Michael Chabon has written about this alarming upkick in protectionism at large and correctly termed it a form of deprivation, even if in reality American parents have come to decry the media walls of their children’s lives but still secretly prefer their kid spend their years at home in front of glowing screens rather than risk going outside and getting abducted by the ravenous pedophile who isn’t, statistically, there. Either way, fear is what’s controlling the conversation, when what children need is courage. Lanthimos’s bizarre and disquieting film stands for now as the only film to probe the paradigm, and its nether lands aren’t very far, if we were all to be honest, from our own living rooms.
