Dogtooth

You may not have heard of this movie, however, it was nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscar's this year. I had seen a blurb about this film in a movie magazine or something a few months ago and thought the premise was interesting. I came across it later while perusing Roger Ebert's site for movies to watch, this one received 3/4 stars.

This movie came out about the same time as Jaycee Dugard was discovered. For those who don't know the story, Jaycee was kidnapped from her neighbourhood when she was maybe 8 or 9 and forced to live in this couple's backyard, until 18 years later someone figured out what was going on and called the police. She gave birth to two daughters by her captor in the time she was there. This film is kind of in the same vein as what happened to Jaycee. It tells the story of a family, a mother, father, two daughters and a son, all children are young adults or at least teenagers. The parents keep their children at home, and tell them lies about the outside world. They invent meanings for words they will never know about, for example, "the sea" refers to a chair. For surely these children will never know what an actual sea is.

Similar to the story about Jaycee, we are fascinated by people in extraordinary circumstances. We know that this sort of thing happens in the real world, but when we see it in a movie, at least for me, I want to look away. There are some graphic sex scenes and it makes me uncomfortable, and I am embarrassed by the fact that I am embarrassed (though that might be more of my Catholic upbringing about sex being shameful that I couldn't fully appreciate what the film is trying to say about perversity and focus more on the fact that I can't believe I just saw a flash of penis). I watched an episode of Oprah a couple weeks ago that was about twin girls who were raped by their two brothers and father for many years - this weird shit really happens in the world, and this movie makes us face this reality and be confused and outraged by it.

The film is Greek, and there are subtitles. I think some is lost in this fact because as someone says something and the subtitles tell me it with an exclamation point, what is being said does not sound to me like an exclamation, and I am disappointed that I can't fully appreciate these nuances. The cinematography is beautiful, the lighting is well done and the camera angles are interesting. At times I thought I had a bum (highly legal) copy because at times the heads are cut off, but this is intentional and even effective, for these children do not have names, so it would make sense they might not have faces. These children could be anyone, they could be living down the road and we wouldn't even know about it.

I do wish this movie gave me more answers though. Similar to Never Let Me Go, I sometimes like for things to be spelled out for me. I was constantly thinking "why is this happening?" "why are they doing this/ acting like this?" "what happens next?" and none of my questions are ever fully answered, sure it makes the film more mysterious and open to your interpretation etc etc, but would it be so hard for the parents to just explain themselves to the audience and for me to find out what fricken happens after the ending?!

My advice:

Take a deep breath and get ready to think about our world.