Kynodontas

Yorgos Lanthimos (2009)

I don’t know the chronology of Dogtooth‘s development in relation to the revelations about the subterranean world of Josef Fritzl and his family but the Amstetten story can hardly have been far from the mind of Yorgos Lanthimos, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Efthymis Filippou.  Fritzl was arrested in April 2008 and his trial took place in March 2009.  When Dogtooth was shown at Cannes in May last year (where it won the Un Certain Regard prize) its scenario was topical, to say the least:  a Greek husband and wife have three adult children – two daughters and a son – none of whom has set foot beyond the family’s large rural residence or will be allowed to leave until he or she has lost a dogtooth.  This isn’t to suggest that Dogtooth is crudely imitative of the Fritzl story.  The motivation of the parents in the movie remains obscure (and all five family members remain unnamed).  There’s no suggestion that either father or mother has sexually abused any of the children or has plans to do so.   (The parents still have a sex life together, helped along by porn videos.)  Late on in the film, the younger daughter seems to offer herself to the father but this is in the light of the awakening sexual complications that develop in the course of Dogtooth.  More typical of the way the household lives is a sequence in which the son, when he can’t sleep, goes from his own room to snuggle down innocently between his parents in their bed.

In other words, Lanthimos brings to mind the Fritzl case by virtue of the basic situation but subverts our assumptions of what this kind of house detention is likely to entail.    Some of the most striking elements in Dogtooth are those that undercut the horror of the situation.   The cinematographer, Thimios Bakatakis, has given the family residence, inside and outside, a bleached, antiseptic, sci-fi look but there’s no sense of claustrophobia – there’s space and light and the ‘children’ spend a lot of time in the swimming pool and playing in the huge garden.  The high fence round the property does its job but the isolation of the place – there are no other buildings – allows for skies clear of anything except the occasional plane.  (The son and daughters are made to believe these planes fall from the sky and end up on the lawn, as the toy aircraft the father plants there.  There’s a distinct absence of birds to confuse the situation.)  At the same time, Lanthimos keeps you wondering, and tense, about how nasty things are going to get.   Christos Stergioglou, who plays the father, is a saturnine, malignant presence:  you wait for a psychopathological ulterior motive to express itself eruptively.

Interviewed in Sight & Sound n May this year, Lanthimos is quoted as follows:

‘As the ideas took form for Dogtooth, we obviously realised it could be about many things but I didn’t really try to put them in.  I tried to concentrate on the story.  I leave my films open to allow different readings – even ones we didn’t think of before.  I like to leave the viewer free.  That’s why I don’t really use music or make my films dramatic in any way, so as not to direct or explain to the viewer.’

While it’s true that the meanings of Dogtooth aren’t easily pinned down, I think what Lanthimos said to Kieron Corless in that interview is disingenuous.  The allegorical and metaphorical possibilities of the story range from the nationally particular (the tyranny of the remnants of Greek patriarchy) to the humanly universal (a perversion of parents’ natural desire to protect their offspring and more ambiguous wish to keep them children – the mother and father here tell the kids that they have a brother who, in punishment for venturing outside the compound, has been banished from it).  Lanthimos could have done no more than observe the fascinating rules and rituals of the bizarrely sequestered household and still held our attention.   Not surprisingly, though, he does dramatise the situation: he describes and builds a crisis in the family routine that we infer has carried on – without any such problems occurring – for many years.  Lanthimos evidently decided that he needed, in order to catalyse the drama, to move beyond the grounds of the house but that decision injects a shot of realism into Dogtooth which it wouldn’t have if the audience were housebound with the three young people – if we too, for the duration of the film, had no sense of any other world.  One thing we and this trio do have in common, though, is that the director, like the paterfamilias, would prefer to avoid questions about the weltanschauung he imposes.  Of course, we’re not expected to evaluate the psychology and motivation of the characters as we might in a realistic drama yet, once Lanthimos has widened the scope of what’s shown on screen to include life being lived in a more familiar, mundane way – through the shots of the father’s factory workplace, of the father in his office and his car, of his visit to a dog trainer – the family’s existence can no longer be viewed in complete isolation.  It’s inevitably juxtaposed with the world outside.

Every so often, the father brings home Christina, a young woman who works as a security guard at the factory, to copulate (it is a mechanical, loveless routine that they go through) with the son.  The father seems to regard it as natural that the son (as distinct from the daughters) has sexual feelings that need satisfying, and there’s no suggestion that Christina’s visits are a recent innovation.  Things start to get complicated when the son starts preferring to mount her from behind and Christina herself asks the elder daughter to lick her genitals in exchange for the present of a headband.  You can’t help noticing that, whereas the daughter, whom you supposed to be clueless about worldly transactions, is soon demanding better presents than a headband in return for cunnilingus, Christina never asks the father for a pay rise – for the same reason of keeping things secret – for having sex with the son.  When Christina gets the sack for corrupting the elder daughter with – as ‘better presents’ – videos of Jaws and Rocky, the father decides that, rather than take the risk of a replacement from the external world, the son should be serviced in future by whichever of his sisters he prefers.  Given their apparent lack of sex education and the physical nature of their regular play in the pool and the garden, it seems surprising that the three kids haven’t already experimented with each other at some time; yet it seems we’re meant to think it’s a new experience when the brother starts feeling out his sisters’ bodies after Christina is no longer available.  When he discovers the loan of the videos, the father metes out physical punishment both to the elder daughter and to Christina.  Unless he’s injured her so seriously that she can’t speak about the attack (which doesn’t look to be the case), it’s hard to understand why Christina doesn’t report it.

This is an example of how Yorgos Lanthimos’s eschewal of conventional narrative development is eclipsed by what’s convenient from his point of view as a storyteller – and the director is not as indifferent to audience expectations as he implies in the S&S interview.  He devises a sequence of events that lead to various and unignorably compelling sexual interactions between characters, and rationed but gruesomely literal violence:  the father’s brutal assaults on the young women; the climactic sequence (which I had to look away from) when the elder daughter resorts to shocking DIY dentistry to remove a dogtooth and justify her exit from the property.  (She hides in the boot of the father’s car, which she knows he will drive to work next morning.)  Lanthimos seems to ignore linear plotting in exact proportion to the difficulty of suggesting what happens next and the final shot of Dogtooth is the culmination of this approach.  The father parks his car at the factory and walks into the building.   The camera lingers on the car:  is the girl in the boot alive or dead or able to get out?  Lanthimos ends here and doesn’t suggest what happens next because, I think, he doesn’t know where to go.  Early in the film, the father visits a dog trainer and demands to have his dog returned. The trainer refuses because, he says, the dog has reached only the second stage of a five-stage training programme.  He stresses the importance of completing training and asks the father, ‘Do we want an animal or a friend?’  A cat appears in the garden:  the son stabs it to death with pruning shears.  When the father comes home, he has shredded his clothes and daubed himself with red paint to suggest fake blood – he tells the children their unseen brother has been mauled to death by a cat.  He teaches them to get down on all fours and bark to frighten off marauding cats.

The younger daughter, the brother and the mother all go through the barking routine on the night that the elder daughter disappears and the father says to the mother, ‘We’ve reached the fifth stage’.  The canine imagery, with dogteeth which should never fall out at its centre, is cleverly organised but hard to make sense of.  Does the son kill the cat out of fear of the unknown or because he already knows from the father that cats are lethal creatures?   If the former, how is that a cat hasn’t appeared in the garden before in the course of two decades?  If the latter, why does Lanthimos show the father instructing the children about cats after the killing of the intruding one?   Why doesn’t the father do more to find the elder daughter when she appears to have absconded?   The lack of satisfying answers to these questions has the effect of weakening our suspension of disbelief in the world that Dogtooth presents.

A real bind of Dogtooth is that the situation would be more credible if the children were younger but Lanthimos could hardly have asked adolescent or pre-adolescent performers to do what is required of the adult actors.  There are a number of scenes of remarkable physical frankness and intimacy, and the cast’s fearlessness is admirable.  Their lives outside the compound make it harder for Christos Stergioglou as the father and Anna Kalaitzidou as Christina to be fully satisfying but Aggelika Papoulia and Mary Tsoni makes the daughters’ arrested development – and their fear of emerging from it – touching, even though Lanthimos uses them as images to a greater extent than the other characters.  (It’s noticeable how often a shot of the two young women, in pale, shapeless clothes, preparing to dance to their brother’s guitar at a celebration of their parents’ anniversary, is being used in reviews of and publicity for Dogtooth.)  Michele Valley is very fine as the mother:  she quietly suggests a woman inured to but devastated by the family’s extraordinary modus vivendi; she has a worn but still attractive ordinariness.  There’s a similar quality in the film’s outstanding performance, from Christos Passalis as the son:  in the evening, when he puts on a shirt and tie for the family dinner, you get an upsetting sense of how this pleasant, presentable young man could have functioned successfully in a normal society.  His infantilisation seems both starker and to go deeper than that of the two girls – because he’s a relatively prepossessing figure and thanks to the rich human detail of Passalis’s portrait.

Dogtooth is fascinating, no question, and hooks you from the very first scene.  The three children, in the bathroom, listen to a voice on a tape which teaches them four new words for the day.  Each of the words refers to an object to be found in the outside world; each of the meanings the speaker supplies describes something found or experienced within the home environment – the sea is a sofa, a motorway is a light breeze, and so on.  This opening raises hopes of a script that is linguistically stretching for both writers and audience.  Yet Lanthimos doesn’t follow this exciting idea through in a very challenging way – he uses it more as a running joke and far from rigorously.  There’s rarely any conflict between the use of a word in the family vocabulary and its usual meaning.  I noticed only one exception:  at dinner, one of the daughters asks her mother to pass the ‘phone’, the local word for salt shaker.  When the elder daughter starts memorising and acting out sequences from the videos she obtained from Christina, the word ‘phone’ occurs and means ‘phone’ – the daughter seems to understand the truth quickly and starts trying to use a phone hidden in a bedside cabinet.  But why would the parents need a code word for ‘salt shaker’ anyway – and why choose ‘phone’, with its extrovert potential?   Why use ‘keyboard’ for ‘vagina’, when that means having to call a keyboard something else?  The son asks his mother what ‘zombie’ means – she says it’s a small yellow flower.  Later on, he announces triumphantly that he’s found two zombies growing on the lawn – but if the garden is the universe, wouldn’t he have been frustrated not to have found them sooner?

Some of the crazy introverted routines are grimly amusing:  the family’s favourite evening entertainment is watching videos of themselves or listening to a singer whom they’re told is their grandfather – the kids sing along to ‘Come Fly With Me’ with the invented translation from the English their parents have taught them.   The leitmotif of blindfolds – Christina has to wear one for the car journeys to and from the house, as do the children for a number of key domestic events – works well.  And there’s plenty of humour in Dogtooth:  the fact that it’s Jaws and Rocky that play such a part in unloosening the family ties is amusing both as a new take on the evils of American cultural imperialism and as an homage to the liberating power of cinema.

24 August 2010