When I was about 7 years old or so, my mom would do my fortune cookie for me. And she'd bullshit, in the best, most benign way. "You are a very well-behaved boy" or "Always take care of your little brother". I guess her made-up fortunes were more useful to the little-kid me than any "Go for it" or "Stick with Your Wife". Eventually -- I have this clear memory of Wah SIng Seafood on Baldwin St., one of those tanks at the front where the lobsters have elastics around their claws -- I questioned how each random fortune was also personalized just for me. In Dogtooth, the dad does the same thing to his kids. "Do you want to hear grandfather sing?" he asks. Needle hits vinyl and Frank Sinatra sings "Fly Me to the Moon". The father translates from English to Greek so that his kids can understand. "Fly me to the moon / where we can swing around the stars" = "my father loves me / my mother loves me".
The rub here is that the kids aren't 7 years old anymore. The mother and father have played the fortune cookie game for decades. The son and two daughters are all in their 20s and they’ve never been allowed to leave the house grounds. They have no friends and no outside-culture, except for what's filtered through their parents. They get sort-of Sinatra, myths about a man-eating housecat that lives just outside the compound wall, and zero movies. They're home-schooled and vocabulary lessons are deceptions. 'Sea', they’re taught, is a leather chair with armrests and 'highway' is a very strong wind. A 'zombie' is a little yellow flower. Really though, these kids could almost pass for the walking dead. This is a strange household, to say the least. There's nothing that feels like familial love. The kids have to clip their father's toenails and dye his eyebrows. The parents encourage good behavior with rewards of children's stickers. And sex when there's just your parents and your sisters around is going to be a really hard go. Really hard.
The camera rarely moves in Dogtooth. The characters walk on-frame or are already centered when there's a cut. Often, the camera peeks through a hallway, a doorway creating a frame within a frame. This all reminded me a bit of Ozu and Wong Kar-Wai, circa In the Mood For Love. Domestic life is orderly and structured. But also suffocating. Dinners in this household are formal affairs. The son does a half-windsor and shines the brown of his shoes. The scratching of metal utensils on china. "Mom, please pass the phone," one of the daughter asks, meaning, actually, the salt. Of course the kids feel an inkling to break free and it says a lot that the audience accepts the premise that the kids have gone through their teens without going buckwild.
The quiet of the shots, often long takes, are the intensely-filmic disguised as simplicity and naturalism. All the household objects and minutiae, the mise-en-scene, have to be precise and really mean this family. The LPs leaning on their sides and the glass covered old record player are in the wide-open living room, but obviously the kids keep their fingers away. In Badlands, Terrence Malick made sure that closed drawers were filled with actual bric-a-brac to maintain the mood between actual filming. The stillness in Dogtooth also requires a steady camera-hand. Home videos are the kids' favorite form of entertainment even though they're just records of everyday life, the watering of the lawn and a plane flying overhead. These home-videos are not films. They're each just a series of long, hand-held shots, shaky and unedited. The dad talks as he holds the camera to his face.
So there's a craft at work in Dogtooth and it makes the odd feel really odd. Early in the film, the dad brings Christina, a security guard at his factory, to the family home. "Christina is here," he tells his son, whose shirtless back is to us in the foreground of the shot as he does reps on a resistance belt. There are those stickers, all over the headboard of the son's bed. The dad folds the top sheet and puts it aside before leaving. The camera doesn't move and there's no cut as the son and Christina strip, get into bed, and still no cut as she works his dick, until hard, with her hand. Her black socks stay on in the all-white bedroom and the son thrusts, only looking just above her face.
In his review of Birth, David Thomson lamented the lack of novelty and the predominance of genre in contemporary film. Dogtooth is no genre piece. There's lots of novelty here, particularly in tone, but also in visuals. These two elements combine especially well when the kids entertain. They have adult bodies but move like kindergarten kids in the Christmas concert. There's a dance routine, steamers and balloons celebrating the parents' anniversary. And the son plays some Spanish guitar. The girls do some choreography, shuffle one-two from side to side, jazz-hands. They haven't learned that dancing isn't just rehearsed steps but, even more so, energy and id. Well, the older sister sort of does (she just learned otherwise) and when her younger sister takes a break, she (the older sister) takes it to 11. She runs in place and shakes her head, pirouettes and points at her dad, then her mom, then her sister, and finishes with the splits. It's the routine from Flashdance, a movie of which she'd recently snuck a viewing.
Flashdance is never mentioned by title, and I've never seen it, but I know that dance. The other films she watches are not mentioned by title either but we all recognize the references: Balboa and Creed; a man-eating shark. And now that the older sister knows these films, it's going to be hard to go back to watching just those home-videos. And even harder to live under her parents' rules, Dogtooth more-than-implies. Dogtooth is a Greek production and the climate in Greece is anxious, to say the least, so it's hard not to read Dogtooth as specific commentary. Dogtooth, though, works best as a piece of mood and family and not of politics. The older daughter, at one point, stares at TV static, long after the end-credits ran on her smuggled video-rental. The first movie she'd ever seen. Really lucky, how startling movie-watching can sometimes be.
