Dogman

A well made modern fable [contains spoilers]

I sprayed him with gasoline in his face and set him on fire. With his head he breaks through the wire mesh of the cage and begins to scream. He screamed like a madman. I tie him with two chains around his neck, the ones I use to hold dogs. I turn up the volume on the stereo, grab a stick and hit it. Twice. He faints, his head hanging from the broken wire, his body extended and his legs open. I take the scissors, I cut the thumbs and the indexes. I spray the gasoline on the wounds and burn them to stop the bleeding. He wakes up. He is gro__ggy, looks at his hands and begins to scream again. And he growling: "I swear that when I am untied I will kill you." It's five o'clock by now. Every now and then I go to the bathroom and sniff some coke. I leave the shop, take a breath of air. Then go back inside. I leave for half an hour to go to the nearby school where my daughter is. I take her to my ex-wife's house and return to the shop. I took the scissors and I cut his face. Then the ears, then the nose. He screamed, but the volume of the stereo covered everything. He was bleeding and I sprayed fuel on the wounds and burned them. He is no longer responding. He was still alive. He never died, he had a strong heart. He was breathing, but now he was no longer talking. He understood who was the strongest. I took the scissors and I cut his tongue, then his cock and balls. I opened his mouth with pincers and put everything in it. Then I whispered to him: "once a man, now you are a woman!" He kept moving. Then suddenly he died. Suffocated. But the torture is not over. I break his teeth, stick a finger in his anus and two more in his eyes. Then I hammer open the skull and wash his brain.

• Daniele Mastrogiacomo quoting Pietro De Negri; "E Alla Fine Si E' Deciso A Morire..."; La Repubblica (February 23, 1988)

Loosely based on a real-life incident, Dogman is an intimate character drama telling the story of an inheren...

Marcello Fonte delivers really capably here as the marmoset-like "Marcello" who has striven for years to develop his dog grooming business. To supplement his meagre income, he dabbles in a bit of cocaine dealing and in that he's partnered with the violent "Simone" (Eduardo Pesce) who is as selfish and unstable as he is brutal and ruthless. Unfortunately for the rather nervous "Marcello", his pal loses his temper just once too often and so soon is in need of a large sum of cash. To get that, he organises a robbery that ends up sending the loyal dog-man to prison for a year. Upon release, he feels that maybe "Simone" owes him a debt of gratitude. Failing that, €10k in compensation. When his reasoning falls on deaf ears, he decides to engage his brain and concoct a particularly unique form of revenge. This is quite a poignant look at a society that really does epitomise the keep your head down mentality. Nobody in this town is prepared to put their head above the parapet to challenge "Simone"; the police are lazily incompetent and the culture of fear that prevails is well illustrated here by the photography and look of their grotty estate. The writing rather shrewdly, I thought, leaves much of the punchier elements of the story to the visuals, and so whilst is does help to emphasise one man's timidity and another man's indifference, it isn't so crucial in telling the story. This is also a film about loyalty, and about how fickle or misplaced that can become when the scenario changes - for better or worse. Some of the dogs wouldn't bear messing with either, as this grim and compelling story warns of the dangers biting the hand that feeds you, or underestimating the potency of revenge.

Marcello runs a dog grooming shop in a grim, rain-soaked Roman suburb, and he is far too soft for the town he lives in. He deals a little coke on the side to fund scuba trips with his daughter, gets bullied into robberies by Simone, a former boxer twice his size, and somehow the film convinces you the whole time that this is still a decent man making bad choices out of loyalty to the wrong people.

The dog work is the tell. Marcello washes and calms animals other groomers would muzzle, and the scene that defines him has nothing to do with crime: he climbs back into a burgled house to pull a chihuahua out of a freezer where it was left to die. Matteo Garrone builds the entire moral case for the character around how he treats an animal nobody else in the film bothers to notice.

Marcello Fonte won Best Actor at Cannes for this, and it is earned, his face does more work than most scripts. The film also picked up the Palm Dog, Cannes' unofficial prize for best animal performance, which tells you exactly how seriously the dogs are treated here, not as props but as the only creatures in Marcello's world who never betray him.

Where it gets hard to watch: once Marcello finally turns on Simone, the film sets it up as puppy-like devotion curdling into something closer to a mad dog act, and it does not flinch from where that goes. Bleak, well earned, not for a casual Friday night.

Full review here: https://dogwithblog.in/dogman-review/