Dogtooth Kynodontas
The feeling of guilty bewilderment a person gets upon arriving five minutes late into a quiet, subtitled screening (and squeezing in beside a stranger, knocking them with your beer bottle) didn’t subside with this film… even after we were well settled into our seats, happily munching on peanut m&ms, the confusing sense of alienation continued with the aberrant and impenetrable relationships we were witnessing… a woman, talking like a girl, whilst sitting in a bath tub and speaking an impenetrable, insider language about taps and play to two other ‘kidults’ set the tone for a film which was so ‘other’ it left one feeling like a continually stupefied voyeur…
Kynodontas is a surprising gem of Greek cinema, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (and 2009 Cannes Film Festival Award winner). The basic premise of the film is of a couple who keep their 3 children confined within the borders of their home and prescribed routines, in order to preserve their child-like ‘innocence’. The children have been indoctrinated to believe that the outside world is a dangerous and inhospitable place, with only their father permitted to leave the confines of the house every day in his car (a vehicle of shelter against the exorbitant threats of that other world). And the only outsider permitted to enter the closited world, a woman Christina, whose sole duty it is to be an outlet for the son’s natural ‘urges’.
The totalitarian control of the children – which keeps them in a perpetual oedipal bond – evokes parallels both to the Josef Fritzl case in Austria, but also to the conditioning of reality in regimes such as Nazi Germany and Communist North Korea. Reality for them is so acutely manufactured that when outside words or concepts seep into their bubble, the parents dismiss them, or rework them into ‘innocent’ explanations; under their reign “pussy” becomes “…a large lamp… when it goes out a room is plunged into darkness…” or “zombies” are explained as “…small, yellow flowers”.
The children characters in this work represent the antithesis of the ideals of the ‘noble savage’ or Rousseau’s idealized notion of primitivism, and the reality when those ideals are put into practice. Namely that the carnal, animalistic and undesirable aspects of human nature will manifest even without the corrupting influences of society. Perhaps more so.
This is a beautiful film, shot in such a way that the immaculate, and antiseptic environment of the home, and it’s claustraphobic atmosphere, is heightened. The perfect shots are only ever ruptured when the outside world defiantly assserts itself (or is introduced) upon the confined nuclear, stagnant world of the family.
I left this film feeling utterly shaken. It’s no exagerration to say I sat in the bar next door with my friend for an hour as we waited for its impact to subside enough for us to function like normal human beings again…..
http://schediosunrehearsed.blogspot.com
