Black Dog (2024)
Director: Hu Guan
Screenwriters: Rui Ge, Hu Guan
Starring: Eddie Pang, Tong Liya, Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yi, Zhou You, Yuan Hong, Vision Wei, Wang Yanhui, Hu Xiaoguang
Winner of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard award, Black Dog is an affecting, low-key piece of social realism interspersed with moments of stunning beauty. Director Hu Guan, one of the filmmakers behind 2020 box office megahit war film The Sacrifice also proves to be talented at mounting smaller-scale, more intimate stories.
Black Dog opens with a slow pan across a beautiful desolate landscape of the Gobi desert with a cavernous grey-blue sky, then dogs! So many dogs running wild, enough to cause the passing bus to swerve and topple on its side. We will return to this stark image of humans and our technology mismatching with the natural world later in the film.
June 2008, the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Former rockstar and stunt rider Lang (Taiwanese superstar Eddie Pang) is released from prison on probation and looks to start a new life in his home town. He is assigned to help clear the local area of its plague of stray dogs, making an unlikely four-legged friend along the way.
This takes place in what is essentially a ghost town, a place of crumbling buildings trapped between old-fashioned and modern eras and with its last, most stubborn residents being forced out to make way for Olympic-ready infrastructure. About the only attraction that remains is a sad, almost empty zoo where the animals in cages are vastly outnumbered by the dogs on the streets.
Is this a tale of two strays? When a reward is offered for a rabid black greyhound terrorizing the locals, Lang baits it by urinating on the same street corner as it, only getting some nasty bites on the behind for his trouble. Later, once he has captured the canine Most Wanted and his truck gets toppled in a vicious dust storm, you begin to understand the kind of man he is; one who will rescue a potentially dangerous creature from the elements and bring it back to shelter with him despite its teeth still being bared
The dog, which is essentially a harboured fugitive still being hunted by the authorities, starts out chained in the yard, then moves to a chair in the entryway of Lang’s tumbledown house, before joining him in bed and even at bath and meal times as the two become inseparable. It is touchingly poetic to learn that Pang ended up adopting the dog Xin after the film wrapped.
Lang has a violent past, but, when he is reluctantly recruited to the dog-catching team, he doesn’t have the heart to be rough with these animals that only bite to defend themselves, nor can he bring himself to confiscate beloved family pets when their owners refuse to pay to get them chipped and registered. He won’t even shoot a rabbit for food.
When Lang does need to turn to violence to defend the defenceless, he does with gusto, the film’s only would-be-conventional action scene a bold directorial choice taking place offscreen, behind chained doors with only the sounds of a physical struggle informing us of the fight’s progress.
The local gangster that Lang has a history with runs a kebab restaurant, breeds snakes and goes by Butcher Hu (Hu Xiaoguang) which, in addition to being a scary mob name, handily describes his day job too. His main beef with Lang is the untimely death of his nephew, for which Lang served time, though Hu highly doubts the truth of the verdict that he, as he sarcastically puts it, “accidentally fell off a cliff.”
Lang’s sponsor Mr Yao is played by acclaimed director Zhangke Jia and the cameo seems very deliberate. Jia’s own movies are blatantly referenced in Black Dog’s presiding themes, tone and pacing. Ash is the Purest White was far more explicit in its gangster movie conventions, but A Touch of Sin tells a very similar story of lost souls and trauma.
Lang’s dad (Wang Yanhui), living in what’s left of his zoo and slowly but surely drinking himself to death, hardly features in the narrative. Any character who isn’t Lang and arguably Hu doesn’t really get to become more than broad strokes archetypes. They certainly don’t get complete arcs. You can also predict most of the film’s later dramatic plot turns even if they don’t arrive in exactly the same manner we are used to.
You can definitely see this being subjected to the Hollywood remake treatment in a few years, as not much would need to be changed to make basically the same plot work in the US. But why wait when this visually arresting, big hearted movie of relatively few words is right there now for your enjoyment?
With a spellbinding central human performance, a hugely expressive animal companion to match him, and several meticulously constructed tableau shots (particularly one towards the end of the film involving dozens of animals posing statuesquely against the landscape which must’ve been an absolute trial to achieve in-camera), Black Dog is a hugely memorable viewing experience.
Score: 20/24
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