Italian Movie Dogman
Violet Mcdow
Dogman is the most recent work by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone (The Embalmer, Gomorra). The film was presented at the Cannes film festival in May to a favorable reception, and is yet to be released in the United States. It is a serious attempt to deal with a difficult, and in the present climate not particularly promising subject.
One might have imagined, considering the current cultural atmosphere, that such a story could have attracted exactly the wrong kind of artistic interest. A film about the dogman could have slipped almost seamlessly into the grooves of the well-established torture and porno-sadistic tendencies in contemporary film. Garrone could just as easily have ridden the wave of the often uncritical fascination with criminality and gangsterism in contemporary film, having already done so to a considerable extent in his previous film Gomorra .
Instead, Dogman displays unusual and, frankly, unexpected sensitivity, approaching its difficult subject humanely and with considerable restraint. Garrone (born in 1968), who is from Rome and was a young man at the time of the murder, stated that he began working on this project 13 years ago, but could not shoot the film until he found a suitable actor to play the protagonist.
Visually and narratively sparse, Dogman relies on the ability of the main actor. There are few characters, saying little to each other and operating in a forlorn setting. In fact, there is a certain artificiality to the unspecified seaside location chosen by Garrone. Everything is a bit too neatly run down and desolate. But when the camera is on Fonte, who could conceivably have been asked to portray a monster, the viewer feels his humanity in its emotional complexities, and sympathizes with the impossible conditions in which he finds himself.
Marcello is a physically weak man, on that score totally incapable of handling the intimidation and abuse dished out by Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce), his tormentor. Yet long before the horrific denouement, Marcello takes a stand courageously in his own way, and tries to salvage a dignified existence.
He deals drugs on the side, and participates more or less unwittingly in petty crimes in the wake of Simoncino. But Marcello loves his job and through it, and his relationship with his daughter, is shown repeatedly to be a decent human being. His relationship with Simoncino is moreover not simply based on violence and crime, bullying and intimidation, but also contains elements of friendship in a setting where it was impossible for it to find anything resembling a productive channel.
It is not a question of morally and factually sanitizing an otherwise unspeakable event, but of extracting its essential human content. The people involved did in reality do terrible things, but were themselves the contradictory products of immense social degradation and of a system they did not control.
Allan Crillon was a dedicated and devoted man - devoted to his wife, to his many friends, to his art and, in an obsessive way, to San Miguels stray dogs and cats. One of those eternally active persons whose days were too short, the artist was guilt-ridden that he never did enough. He did too little for his fellow men. Too little for the environment. Just too little for life. To hear him tell it he felt culpable because his devotion to plants lagged behind his sentiments for animals.
Once the winter before, after a particularly hard cold spell, he stood with me and his five dogs in the center of his patio, ran his long sensitive fingers through his thinning blond hair and stared at the wilted potted plants lining the patio walls. "I forgot to cover them and the freeze wiped them all out," he said sadly. "What have I done?"
Most foreigners in San Miguel Allende - they call themselves Gringos - dedicated more time to the flora and fauna than they did in the United States or Canada or Europe. They simply had more time here in this resort town isolated high on the plateau. But that wasn't the case of Allan Crillon. He had less time than he had ever had before when he was the editor of an art magazine in North Carolina. His wife complained that they had to go to Mexico City or Laredo just to find time to make love. Allan was so busy he had to make advance appointments for his two favorite diversions: making love with his artist wife and drinking bouts with me.
And he would be there - ready, responsible, devoted. Tireless Allan went about our drinking sessions like everything else - energetically. His only rule was, "you can drink all night, as much and as long as you like but it must never interfere with your next days obligations." And sure enough, the morning after such escapades, he was on his feet and devotedly busy even earlier than usual - his handsome boyish face a little grayer, heavy lids obscuring his blue eyes, maybe a lump or a bruise here or there from mysterious bumps, falls and accidents, and showing his 55 years more than usual.
A partner in one of the towns major art galleries, Allan was on duty there one full day each week. He taught drawing classes two afternoons and two evenings, acted in the community theater and painted the backdrops for all its productions in the Angela Peralta Theater. And he worked 30 hours a week in the Dog Shelter of which he was the co-founder and major fundraiser. As Godfather to a Mexican child from Veracruz he was involved in the complex festive activities of that family of eight children. Traditionally he hosted in his home in the Old Town enormous groups of both Gringos and Mexicans for parties at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween and on his and his wifes birthdays. In the winter he led hikers along his favorite trails in the surrounding mountains. An ardent aficionado of tauromachy he traveled wide and far - including an annual pilgrimage to Spain - to follow bullfighters and their battles. Therefore it was unusual to see him standing quietly in front of a canvas in his studio painting one of his Mexican saloon scenes as if he had all the time in the world. Yet every day, usually late afternoons, as darkness fell over the highlands and the magic winds blew down from the Sierra Morena you could see him walking his five dogs across the fields or up the ravines or along the shore of the artificial lake under Los Balcones and the Botanical Gardens.
Late one warm afternoon over vodka and tonic in Tio Robertos Bar - that was several days before he discovered that the dogs were disappearing and Allan had just closed the gallery and was already late for the dogs walk in the hills - I asked him about his candidacy for the Dog Shelter presidency. Just how much did he have to do in life anyway? His frenetic activity was still an enigma. Since Allan was neither a romantic nor a religious man, I was surprised at his answer and wondered where in his experience it came from.
"Like Kierkegaard says, sometimes we look into our hearts and realize that God knows how imperfect we are. Were concerned all our lives about that question: How much can we do? Of course I dont want to crawl too far out on the limb and be subject to all that anxiety. And Im always asking myself whether to risk again or not. But I believe if you dont risk then you spend your life wondering if you did all you could."
"That is the risk," he said, drumming the marble table with a spoon and ordering two more vodkas. "And the fear! The fear of being wrong. Or at least not being right. If you dont do it, youre wrong. But sometimes I feel that if I do it, Ill still be wrong. So whats a man supposed to do? Nothing? Just wait? No, I believe that you have to choose. If only to enjoy life. Look around you at all these Gringos here in San Miguel who prefer to suffer here rather than admit theyre wrong. Otherwise theyd pack their things and go back where they came from."
"Yes, but how edifying to know youre in the right." I still had difficulty believing that anyone was as perfect as he seemed to be - dedicated and generous worker, devoted husband, animal lover, curator of the arts. Did he never err? Did he never backslide?
The dogs didnt disappear overnight or from one day to the next. It wasnt like that at all. At first the people of the town didnt notice that every day there were fewer stray dogs creeping sociably under their feet while they took the sun at el Jardn. The growing absence of the rangy brown dogs short-haired mongrels, their ribs leaping from their undersides, habitually scratching for fat nourishment at the food stalls around the square or wandering single file up and down the steep back streets - didnt register on anyone.
If town people had even thought of them they would have concluded that the dogs, like people, had retreated to cool interiors behind the towns thick stone walls because the June days that year were unusually hot and sultry even at 7,000 feet altitude. For weather was indeed a factor in that summers bizarre events. In luxury villas on the hills as well as in stone houses sprawling haphazardly in the lower town ceiling fans turned all night. Mosquitoes were rampant. Cactuses in the parks and on the surrounding hills stood still. Mesquite trees shimmered brown and tan during the day. The mountains were silent under the everlasting sky. Yes, something indefinable had changed.
The people gathered around the bandstand in the shaded center of el Jardn discussed the strange atmosphere. Electric lights seemed to burn dimmer. Street illumination flickered and failed. The restaurant Le Fumoir inexplicably shut its doors for the season while the most popular discotheque laid off its rock band from Mexico City. Fewer tourists were arriving. For the first time in its history the Allende Art Institute registered a fall in enrollments. In that strange season residents began doing unaccustomed things - even on payday Mexicans stayed home from work and Gringos suddenly traveled to the United States or decided on out-of-season vacations in Acapulco.
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