This isn’t the primary movie to serve up redemption by means of a furry emissary – and it gained’t be the final. Guan Hu’s Chinese language drama-cum-western-cum-state-of-the-nation missive gained Un Sure Regard at Cannes this 12 months – however extra importantly, its heavy canine quotient meant it additionally bagged the second prize within the competition’s Palm Canine award. Its heartwarming facet comes framed with actual grandeur, and a stark absurdism and tightly wound sentimentality reminiscent at occasions of Takeshi Kitano.
Rising from an extended stretch in jail for his half in a homicide, Lang (Eddie Peng) will get a job on a dog-catching patrol cleansing up a Gobi desert outpost prematurely of the 2008 Olympics. When he lastly lays fingers on the rail-thin, and presumably rabid, critter that has tormented him since his return, he adopts it – and the animal provides the taciturn former rock star respite from his different woes. His alcoholic father is haunting the remnants of a soon-to-be-demolished zoo, and native kingpin Butcher Hu is in search of amends for his lifeless nephew.
Hu has most just lately overseen a couple of state-sponsored status pics, so it’s a shock seeing him slip into the sort of societally probing work extra akin to that of Jia Zhangke (who seems right here because the chief of the canine catchers). Initially, the movie operates in the same vein of stifling realism, as Lang slopes across the metropolis’s decaying estates and the charred desert fringes. However there’s something innately humorous a few squadron of dog-catching minions sprinting after a bevy of hounds; thereafter the director by no means misses an opportunity for deadpan framing, just like the gangsters catching up with Lang whereas he’s bungee-jumping.
Maybe, on a private degree, Lang’s irascible new buddy stands for some interior feral trait he should restrain, whereas the canines at giant characterize the dispossessed of China’s financial march ahead. The latter facet is netted in epic, dark-toned compositions of canines sweeping throughout plazas, and the forlorn inhabitants shot in situ in opposition to their crumbling backdrop, largely eschewing closeups till they’re completely wanted. This rigour dissipates a contact in a plotline a few travelling circus, in addition to a speculative romance, that comes over a bit Indie Movie 101. However the splendid desolation of the imaginative and prescient of China makes the movie’s feelgood belly-rubs really feel all of the extra very important.
