Black Dog

Black Dog

Black Dog

96
96

(7.1)

1h 50m 2024 HD

You do not always get the dog you desire, but you always get the dog you happen to need. This expression, normally spouted by dog lovers, fits intriguingly well with the Chinese director Guan Hu’s “Black Dog”. On such a scale, the maverick director’s latest – an Un Certain Regard antagonist at the Cannes this year – is much less of contemporary epics “The Eight Hundred” and “The Sacrifice”, although it still hands the domestic story a grand and adaquately epic scope which has a decidedly stylized historical parable.

“Black Dog” is set in a small town on the edge of the Gobi desert and it has some aspects of Western genre, for instance, the anti hero loner Lang, marvelous in the role by Eddie Peng, who travels back to a decaying hometown after spending some time in prison, feeling guilty about the crime that led him to jail. But, salted with social criticism and drenched with the pessimistic ethos of a place that had to go on for years despite having no future, the movie is also true to the genre of ‘film noir’, where protagonists are doomed by fate, usually desperate and inclined to crime, to struggle against destiny.

But in a twist that counters the grim tone of works like Diao Yinan’s “The Wild Goose Lake” or Wei Shunju’s “Only the River Flows”, the femme fatale archetype here is merely a chien fatal. The character Lang has a human love in the form of Grape (Tong Liya), an artist working in the touring circus, but it seems that the sexual politics of the anime don’t go to the extent of Grape’s dalliances with him. Rather, it seems more of a soul of the hound than a human being.

That bold opening sequence rather quickly lets one appreciate the bleach-bone splendor of DP Gao Weizhe’s wide-screen shotmaking with the skies looking like bleached denim and the far-off mountains as well as the nearby escarpments as terrifying as the surface of some uninhabited planet. A wittle witen bus is slowly travelling over the untidy dry lands when, as an awe inspiring tribute to the film’s animal-wrangling unit, a pack of shocking, somewhat wild dogs comes edible over a dam that a nearby hill slopes down. The bus driver, who had been stunned by the approaching army awoke from his stupor and caused the bus to veer off the track, causing the rickety vehicle to topple. All the people, including Lang, got out from under the debris, with their cheerful resilience and sense of humor intact, except for one frail man who immediately yelled that all his money had been taken from him. Lang is disturbed by this and “voluntarily” waits for the police, making this homecoming of hers a little louder and a bit more official than she would have liked.

Prior to his imprisonment, Lang was the town’s local star who lived a life of banished celebrity in this cul-de-sac town: the son of one such ex bigwig, a stunt bike rider and, a guitarist. He has now relocated to the family house which is adjacent to the rather drab local zoo until full content, where the father is an addict and obsessed with alcohol.

Nowadays, Lang Lee does not want anything, apart from quiet life behind the scenes, away from the lowlife gangster and snakecorator Butcher Hu, who wants revenge for Lang’s role in the death of his no-good nephew. However, he’s going to have to find some money. So when he finds out that a bounty has been placed on the vicious black dog that he saw earlier, he makes a net and goes hunting for it. He returned wounded and battered: The black dog (a very lean whippet mix named Xin) turned out to be a slippery one that Lang never imagined it would be.

Instead, there are sufficient dogs in this city, and with the approaching of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, money has been found for a special unit that will catch all the undocumented dogs. Lang gets on the crew for obvious reasons being the relative of crew leader Uncle Yao who even scenes in the film appears to be played by the director JIA Zhangke. In fact the next time these canine fighters meet, it is during a cold desert night, waiting for rabies to develop the dog boy manages to woo the dog, and a voluntary quarantine of 7 days.

When it comes to the last act of the film, one is faced with a little too many, rather conning tropes such as a solar eclipse, a zoo being broken into or Uncle Hu devising intricate schemes of retribution that from that point on always feel ill-conceived and designed strictly for aesthetics.

Gao’s visuals here—and stunning as they are it is for both the sense and the frozen blue seaglass feeling which overwhelms everything—become an end in itself. Stunning frames of free roaming wildlife in a shuttered city, someone walked up to a bungee jumping from an industrial crane, and why is Lang there with a custom side car and a black dog attached to him, etc.

Guan manages to combine in her work sympathy towards this degree of stunning violence and/such a lot of total uncivility within such sad events drama/ or a major comedic relief which would buster Keaton in every antic tragedy, in this case not without aid from Peng’s deadpan monotonic and yet very mobile body and incredible dog. Each does not give what the others want, yet both are indispensable which is how these warlike perceptions of themselves which they have to wear because in the feeble hearted world they don’t survive get laid to rest. Every bad boy is a very good boy- good boy is trapped inside, and tries his occurrences quite hard.

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Black Dog

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