Kino International are set to release Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth (Greek: Kynodontas) (2009) in the U.S. on March 29th, 2011. Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in 2009, the film has now been officially nominated for Best Foreign Language Film (Greece) at the upcoming 83rd Academy Awards.
"Dogtooth” is a bizarre fantasy that takes the concept of home schooling to squirmy extremes. Some home schoolers try to limit what their children can learn, and others attempt to broaden it. The parents in “Dogtooth” have passed far beyond such categories, into the realms of home psychopathology.
No name is given for the family or any of its members. These involve a father, a mother, a brother and two sisters. They live in a large, affluent home behind a very high wall and a gate, which is always locked. Only the father ever leaves, driving to the factory he owns.
The others are prisoners, the mother apparently by choice. There is a large lawn and a swimming pool. The television set is used only to watch the family's home videos. The children have no idea of the outside world, where they are told man-eating cats roam. On the other side of the wall, they believe another brother lives, who they've never seen or heard.
Man-eating cats? Who knows? The film, which won the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2009, begins with a tape-recorded language lesson in which they're taught the wrong words for things. “Sea,” for example, is the word for the big leather armchair in the living room. Father is a stern taskmaster, free with stern reprimands and a hard slap or two. He also teaches all of his family members to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. He and Mother seem in complete agreement about their child-rearing methods, but never discuss them in detail.
The son is about 20, the daughters in their teens. To slake the boy's sexual needs, Father brings home a security guard from his factory, who has sex with the son with all the spontaneity and joy of tooth removal. This woman also trades a daughter some cheap jewelry in trade for some illicit licking.
The kids are so innocent, they decide that it's much the same no matter where you lick, and trade favors for licking legs, elbows and ears. Sex seems to have no meaning, not even when incest is suggested. The sickness of this family surpasses all understanding, and some have even described the film as a comedy. I wasn't laughing. All I can say of the ending is that it is certainly a possible outcome of the film, and gets much more than you would think out of a shot of the family car.
There is this. “Dogtooth” is like a car crash. You cannot look away. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his story with complete command of visuals and performances. His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it. His dialogue sounds composed entirely of sentences memorized from tourist phrase books. The message I took away was: God help children whose parents insanely demand unquestioning obedience to their deranged standards.
I picked up the region B Blu-ray and liked the film a lot. I watched it with a couple of friends who hated it, though. I'd definitely recommend it to people who enjoy offbeat films. It's not a "Hollywood" type of movie at all. It's shot almost like a documentary, with little to no music and a number of scenes that could make people uncomfortable.
An interesting article with a (bit of a) theory on how Dogtooth could have been nominated at the Oscars:
Quote:
DINNER WITH 'DOGTOOTH'
One of Tuesday's more startling nominations was in the Best Foreign-Language Film category – where the daring, thoroughly unconventional Greek film "Dogtooth," a movie known to have been hated by the category's general voters, landed a nomination.
The film is a divisive, violent, deadpan, bizarre tale of a family that indoctrinates its children into a thoroughly twisted worldview; it can be read as vicious social satire, deadpan comedy or political allegory, but according to all reports it offended and was dismissed by the voters who first saw it at its Academy screening.
But it made it onto the shortlist as one of three additions from the Foreign-Language Film Award Executive Committee (nobody will admit that officially, but there's no doubt about it), and now it's quite possibly the strangest Oscar nominee ever.
So what happened? According to one witness, it might have come down to timing.
The final Foreign-Language nominees are selected by two special committees, most of their members chosen by longtime chair Mark Johnson. The committees, one in Los Angeles and one in New York, screened three movies a day last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with a dinner break after the first two films.
In New York, "Dogtooth" was reportedly the second film shown on Saturday. One person who attended the screening said reaction to the film seemed quite negative when the film ended: "At that point, I wouldn't have given much for its chances. But they kept talking about it over dinner – and the more they talked, the more they realized that the movie had given them a lot to think about."
Would "Dogtooth" have made the list if it had been the first screening of the day, with a shorter intermission afterwards? Or if It had been the last film of the night, when the voters would head home afterwards rather than eating dinner together? There's no way to tell, but the implications are intriguing.
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Dogtooth (2009)
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