The weird and the wonderful combine to thrilling effect in Yorgos Lanthimos's perplexing second feature Dogtooth. So what's it all about, DONALD CLARKEasks the Greek director
WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER a film as conspicuously bamboozling as Yorgos Lanthimos's
Dogtooth
, you sense the last question the director wants to hear is: what's it all about, mate? Professional bewilderment merchants such as David Lynch have spent their adult lives refusing to say why the man with the orange hat shot the bald monkey (or whatever).
Lanthimos's superb, eerie, sourly amusing film is not as surreal as the works of Lynch. Nothing that happens in the picture - the Greek director's second - defies the laws of physics or the basic principles of causality. But it is, very, very strange indeed. The story focuses on a middle-class family living in stark modern house some distance from any neighbours. As events progress, it becomes clear that the father has constructed terrifying myths about the outer world - domestic cats are savage animals, for example - to keep his children imprisoned on the property. Only the tyrannical patriarch is allowed off the premises. Electronic communication with the greater world is prohibited.
However hard the viewer tries, he or she will find it impossible to avoid wondering what Dogtoothis telling us about the world.
"It's been interesting to see how differently people take the film," Lanthimos says. "In America, interestingly, people felt that it had to be something to do with home-schooling. In Europe, they say it's about the way, bombarded by bad news, overprotective parents don't let their children go out on their own. It depends on your experiences. Your own culture dictates what you bring to the film and what you make of it."
Noting the political history of Greece - it is only a few decades since the country escaped dictatorship - the observer might reasonably assume that Dogtoothhad something to say about totalitarianism.
"That was not a conscious thing," he says. "But we understand why people say that. We welcome all these different interpretations. The best thing that can happen in cinema is that people take all these different views of something. That is why you make films."
You will have read enough interviews with mild-mannered horror directors and lucid, ordinary surrealists to experience little surprise at the news that Lanthimos, now 37, turns out to be an articulate, unthreatening fellow in sober, fashionable clothing. Raised in Athens, he attended film school in that city before going on to forge a career in music videos and television commercials. In 2005, he somehow managed to finance a weird little feature called Kinetta.
"I got into serious film quite late," he says in near-perfect English. "I grew up watching Hollywood films and Bruce Lee movies. It's only when I went to film school that I became introduced to more serious film. I guess my inspirations are John Cassavetes and Robert Bresson. Every day I wonder if what I am doing has anything to do with what they did."
Kinetta played successfully at a number of festivals. But Dogtoothhas - insofar as a bizarre exercise in paranoid claustrophobia can do such a thing - achieved a different level of success altogether. Unveiled to an appreciative audience at last year's Cannes Film Festival, the picture went on to win top prize in the Un Certain Regard section (the competitive strand devoted to less established film-makers).
"That first screening was a wonderful experience," he says. "It was a full theatre and after 10 minutes, we knew they were into it. There was a physical reaction: they were laughing. To even get in Un Certain Regard is an honour. If a major director enters the main competition, he will probably get in, even if it is a weaker film. If you get in Un Certain Regard, that means they really like the picture."
The last Greek film to win a major prize at Cannes was Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Dayback in 1998. Following the Un Certain Regard triumph, Lanthimos found himself lauded in his home country's media. Despite the picture's proud oddness, it played successfully in quite a few mainstream venues. Given the notorious decline in Greece's economy, Lanthimos is not surprised to find himself still struggling for funding, but he does long for his next film to involve a less furious degree of struggling and making-do. In Dogtooth, the actors often wear their own clothes and, to save on expensive lamps, natural lighting is used whenever possible.
"It is almost impossible to finance a film in Greece, but here it is," he says. "And it is not really fully financed. People are working for very little money. We had to ask for half-price deals on renting the camera. It's hard."
The film does not look cheap. If anything, the necessarily stark visuals fuel the sense of dread that accumulates as Dogtoothprogresses. One of the few outsiders allowed within the house is an employee of the paternal tyrant. She is brought in to offer the eldest son an opportunity for sexual release (in this totalitarian male fiefdom, no consideration is made for any urges the boy's sisters may encounter). When the girl brings in a video cassette, the confusing footage of life in the wider world spreads poison throughout the household.
The second half of Dogtoothproves even more deliciously confounding than the opening act. Is the degree of terrified order the family initially experiences preferable to the anarchy that looms in the closing movements? At a (mighty, mighty) stretch, you could read the film as an argument for authoritarianism.
"I don't think so," he says. "You know, the way the film is received has more to do with each individual audience in particular screenings than with the country the film plays in. I have been at screenings where nobody laughed and at screenings where they laughed all the way through. I have had people come up to me and say: 'I really wanted to laugh, but nobody else was laughing, so I didn't feel able to."
The picture is certainly funny. In particular, the logical convulsions the family's dictator must go through to explain the world are ingeniously absurd. He suggests, for example, that planes really are as small as they seem and, to prove it, deposits a "crashed" toy jet in the back garden. Yet, for all its tar-black gags, Dogtoothdoes seem to be saying something to the viewer. We are back where we started. What's the film about, Lanthimos?
"It began with me wondering about the future of the family," he admits. "Is it going to be the same forever? Should families stay the same? If it was discovered that there were different ways to raise children, that might frighten people. How would those people react? It all starts from that."
It's hard not to consider the gruesome case of Josef Fritzl. The father in Dogtoothdoes not sexually abuse his children, but both he and the Austrian sociopath seem to see themselves as omnipotent household deities.
"We started before that came out and I really didn't want to think about all that. We absolutely did not want that to be part of the film. In fact, we don't think too hard about why a person would do this. This is a film about consequences, not excuses."
This is as explicit an explanation of the film's purpose as we're likely to get. That's how it should be. The ambiguity is a vital part of the awful fun.
Dogtoothopens next Friday
