2023-10-14 09:04:35
DOGMAN. In the rooms
Report on pain, endemic suffering, humanity gone, violence that rises in facts and thoughts. Wherever there is an unhappy man, God sends a dog. The phrase of a nineteenth-century French politician, Alphonse de Lamartine, opens DogMan, Luc Besson’s great return to directing after a long period as a producer and talent scout. Listen to the incipit: a man dressed like a drag queen, made up like Marilyn, is arrested by the police on charges of having massacred a gang of Latinos together with his un-Disney-like dogs.
In prison, he receives a visit from an unhappy psychiatrist, Evelyn, to whom he tells his story, a via crucis of injustice, abuse, brutality, betrayal. Doug was the son of an abusive father and a submissive mother who loved French songs. To punish him, the brute threw him with the help of his eldest son, a religious maniac, into a dog cage to live like an animal and shot him, forcing him into a wheelchair.
Those dogs, with whom he was able to communicate, protected the boy and became his defense against the world. Doug was freed, he created a model kennel, he was kicked out, he fell in love with an actress who taught him to love the theater and to recite Shakespeare but then abandoned her. Until singing Edith Piaf in a club en travesti, also becoming with his four-legged hitmen a defender of the weak and a nocturnal Lupine. Doug tells Evelyn about her flawed existence, expresses her instability: like a stream of consciousness, a therapy, a prelude to atonement. The soul burns, Doug doesn’t seek revenge, he asks for inner peace. In a highlight of the film it is said: Our roots are the basis of the human being, but they are invisible. Here, we see a human being, but not his roots. What happens if we cut the roots?.
Besson is not just any author: titles such as Subway, Lon, Nikita, The Fifth Element, Lucy are proof of this. With DogMan, he creates the parable of a very personal Joker exhausted by injustices to the point of becoming a subversive, a criminal. He adds autobiography, alluding to the obstacles he had to overcome due to a bad reputation as a visionary director to excess, attentive only to form, and also to the accusations of harassment from which he was also cleared. He enjoys surprising people, he distances himself from the revenge movie, he doesn’t care about the credibility of the story, he underlines the protagonist’s oddities and mental doodles.
Texan Caleb Landry Jones, 34 years old, the director’s perfect alter ego: for an entire year the two, dog lovers by vocation, worked on defining the character. 65 dogs of different breeds appear in the film, while 25 are the instructors who accompanied them on the set. The idea – explains Besson – came to me while reading an article about a French family who had locked their son in a cage when he was five years old. I asked myself: what life can this boy have today after everything that happened to him? What can it become? He adds: I believe that only two things can save us: love and art. Certainly not the money. Landry Jones, who is also an excellent musician, explains: For Douglas, dressing up was an escape, a way of being free. The dogs are real stars: It took us over two months to choose them. They then had to get to know each other and get used to being together. Imagine what happened every day on set, with the voices of the 25 instructors shouting: clap, turn!.
DOGMAN di Luc Besson
(France-USA, 2023, duration 114′, Lucky Red)
con Caleb Landry Jones, Jojo T. Gibbs, Marisa Berenson, Christopher Denham, Michael Garza, James Payton, Bennett Saltzman
Rating: *** 1/2 out of 5
In the rooms
October 14, 2023 | 08:44
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#Besson #dark #tale #DogMan #Bisio #Holocaust #Diane #Kruger #Bolshoi #films #cinema #streaming