Released 2024

SUNDAY 27 APRIL 2025 – 10.00 am
TUESDAY 29 APRIL 2025 – 8.15 pm
RUNNING TIME 116 minutes

Synopsis:

In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, an ex-con tasked with rounding up stray dogs strikes an unlikely friendship with a black whippet.

Review: Jamie Tran

Black Dog begins, somewhat unusually, with an avalanche in the Gobi Desert. As the opening shot pans around the arid slopes, affixed to a speeding bus, a torrent of wild dogs tear across the frame and tumble down towards the road.

Among its remarkable qualities, the film’s coordination of live animals provides its most spectacular images. The four-legged wayfarers descend upon Chixia, an industrial town in north-western China, where they traipse along sidewalks, skulk inside condemned buildings, and occasionally bite residents.

While the film took home the 2024 Un Certain Regard award at Cannes, in a just world, the canine cast would have been the recipients of an ensemble prize for its Palm Dog Award.

The film’s human perspective takes the form of Lang (Eddie Peng; Wu Kong), a former local celebrity returning to Chixia following a protracted manslaughter sentence. Once renowned as a motorcycle stunt driver and a musician, he’s since withdrawn into a stoic isolation. His fraught homecoming is endured while barely uttering a word. Swathes of the town now lie in ruins, waiting to be converted into office blocks and apartment complexes.

Black Dog’s early 2008 setting makes overt reference to the Beijing Olympics, an event emblematic of China’s sweeping modernisation and its corresponding tumult, whose shock waves contour the film. When the strays stymie efforts to reinvigorate Chixia’s local economy, a full-scale eviction is ordered by authorities.

The effort is spearheaded by a team of reformed ex-cons and their leader, Uncle Yao, a kindly restaurant owner portrayed by Jia Zhangke — a friend and peer of director Guan Hu, both among China’s ‘Sixth-Generation’ of filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s.

Household pets soon fall victim to a broadening crackdown, accompanied by accusations of black-market dealings. Lang is reluctantly conscripted into dog-catching work, where he ends up sabotaging orders. When tasked with transporting a particularly infamous target — a battered, malnourished whippet by the name of Xin (the runner-up to this year’s Palm Dog) who’s potentially afflicted by rabies — he’s caught in a vicious dust storm that leaves both recovering under the same roof.

Black Dog’s interweaving of social realism, whimsy and sentimentality proves largely cohesive, with Guan reining in the saccharine tendencies that define more conventional man-meets-dog narratives. Moreover, the film is consistently, disarmingly funny. Lang’s problems are compounded by the local ‘Butcher’ Hu (Hu Xiaoguang), who’s hell-bent on punishing our protagonist for his son’s death.

There’s a faintly Looney Tunes quality to the attempted assassinations carried out by the Butcher’s cronies; even when cornered at the end of a bungie jump cord, Lang manages to wriggle out of their clutches. Off-screen, he’s able to dispatch of enemies with action-star efficiency.

Wes Anderson, of all filmmakers, appears to be one of the film’s most apparent visual influences. Even putting aside narrative similarities to Isle of Dogs, Guan and cinematographer Gao Weizhe predominantly communicate the story through the kind of lateral tracking shots, camera pans and anamorphic photography that have become synonymous with the Asteroid City filmmaker, albeit reformatted into its own distinct style.

Ultimately, dog movies are only ever as good as their lead pup. Xin may lack the eminent adorability of Messi, Anatomy of a Fall’s breakout star, but commands a genuine screen presence defined by a ferocity of spirit and fragility. One of the year’s most emotional scenes is carried entirely by the film’s animal lead, in which he searches for and comforts Lang’s ailing dad in hospital. Such perfect moments eclipse the familiarity of the film’s narrative, and the bluntness of its commentary.

The subtext is legible to a fault, with direct comparisons drawn between its cast of furry marauders and those falling through the gaps of China’s economic upheaval.
But even those with ambivalent feelings towards dogs will likely find something to connect to in this soulful, deftly understated film.

Black Dog deserves its day.

Source: www.abc.net.au Jamie Tram 16/12/2024 Edited extracts accessed 10/3/25