Director: Giorgos Lanthimos
Producers: Giorgos Lanthimos, Iraklis Mavroidis, Athina
Rachel Tsangari, & Yorgos Tsourgiannis
Screenplay: Efthymis Filippou & Giorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis
Editor: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Running Time: 94 minutes
Cast: Christos Stergioglou (Father), Michele Valley
(Mother), Aggeliki Papoulia (Older Daughter), Hristos Passalis (Son), Mary
Tsoni (Younger Daughter), Anna Kalaitzidou (Christina), Steve Krikris
(Colleague), Sissy Petropoulou (Secretary), Alexander Voulgaris (Dog trainer)
Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2011 Oscars, Dogtooth tells the story of three teenagers living in an isolated country estate somewhere in Greece (presumably) and raised according to the strict whims of their authoritarian parents. No actual names are given to the members of the family: they are known only as Father (Christos Stergiolou), Mother (Michele Valley), Older Daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), Younger Daughter (Mary Tsoni), and Son (Hristos Passalis). Within this remote compound, which the teens are forbidden to leave, the family is sequestered from all references to the outside world (or said references are skewed by their parents) and consequently indoctrinated into a false reality of Father's rather meaningless design.
There is no television, and they do not watch movies save old family videos. The mother expands the children's vocabulary by teaching them the wrong defnitions of words ("sea," for instance, is a soft chair; "telephone" is salt: "keyboard" is vagina). The teens are kept at bay with fantastical stories of an outside world they've never seen and an invisible brother who lives on the other side of the wall. What little information they do get is manipulated into a lie by the parents (when they listen to a Frank Sinatra album, Father tells them it is their grandfather singing and translates the lyrics of "Fly Me To the Moon" into a piece of propaganda encouraging their way of life). As such, the teens find disturbing and often cruel ways to amuse themselves through cutting, strange incestual bartering (that culminates into real incest late in the film), and contests to see who can suffer pain the longest.
The film progresses without any blatant arc in any of the characters until Father brings in an outsider, Christine, a rather plain security guard who works at Father's factory. Christine's job is to provide a sexual outlet for the Son, but as she involves herself with the Eldest Daughter, elements of the outside creep in to dismantle this carefully constructed microcosm.
Of the reviews I have seen, I am surprised no one has seen the obvious parallels with Pasolini's Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In Salo, four wealthy libertines in fascist Italy abduct several teens and detain them in an isolated villa, where, with the help of four aging madams, the libertines act out numerous fantasies of sex, torture, and oppression upon the youths. A few elements of Dogtooth seem directly pulled from Salo: the sterile white undergarments the daughters wear (similar undergarments are worn by the female victims in Salo); the static, stationary camera work that allows scenes to unfold as if the viewer is looking in on a security monitor; and when Father has his children get on all fours and bark like dogs, it is a clear homage to the Salo's naked victims being led on leashes and fed from dog bowls.
There is a major conceptual difference, however. Salo was Pasolini's indictment of fascism (and ultimately consumerism), and in his film the children are plucked from one reality and placed in another, thus finding themselves trapped a world where they have no rights and where suffering is their only currency. In Dogtooth, however, the children have been born into this quietly (and at times, not-so-quietly) abusive world, thus giving them no perspective with which to grasp what is happening to them. Pasolini, it seems, was attacking institutions that literally stole innocence and corrupted it for selfish purpose. Dogtooth director Giorgos Lanthimos, almost 35 years after Pasolini, pours his anger into a new societal conceit: with the passing of enough generations, we no longer need to steal innocence; we can corrupt it as soon as it emerges from the womb.
Some critics read this film as home-schooling gone bad. I found the plight of these teens to be the plight of the world, where the amoral majority sits ignorant while our leaders and media feed us false information or manipulate us into processing truths as they would see fit. As I have implied on one of my video reviews, most of us think what we are watching is good because we don't know better; we have not learned because no one is teaching us how to process and think for ourselves. I have used the analogy of taking the average American who had never been outside of the country, dropping him in Paris, and offering to buy him lunch. Nine times out of ten, that man would head straight for McDonald's; he doesn't know real food because he has never tasted it.
So is Dogtooth a good film? It's hard for me to say. I didn't hate it, but I didn't find it as astonishing as others did. At times, the message seemed ham-handed, and a scene where the son kills a cat with hedge shears, while important to the narrative, put me off a bit. As a cat lover, I have no patience with cruelty directed at felines, so that scene alone demoted Dogtooth a bit for me. That scene aside, however, I admit to finding the idea of Dogtooth intriguing; I certainly wasn't bored with it. Still, I really don't see what all the fuss was about. Best Foreign Film nominee? Really? There weren't any better films that somehow didn't make the cut?
On the Netflix site, one blubbering viewer (who found the film "BRILLIANT!"--his caps, not mine), suggested that the only people who did not share his enthusiasm were "1 - Boring, 2 - Prudish, 3 - Ordinary, 4 - Old-Fashioned, or 5 - Resistant To Any Change." I might add a 6th type of less-enthusiastic filmgoer to his list: "6 - Has Seen a Lot More Movies Than Most of the Internet Critics Who Rave About Dogtooth."
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