MUST-SEE SYDNEY SCREENINGS: 'Dogtooth' and 'It Came From Kuchar'

"Watching "Dogtooth" was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. I have honestly never seen any other film like it. Sometimes hysterical, sometimes shockingly intense. It is a hypnotic trip that displays brilliant originality and borderlines pure insanity. In my humble opinion, it is a film that should be watched by every single person, for the experience alone."

"Please trust me on this: I am not a prude, I am not easily shocked, and I enjoy a "mind workout" when seeing festival films. But put simply, this movie should not have been made."

-IMDb user comments

It’s been a month since Dogtooth blew my mind at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and scenes and images from it have been replaying endlessly in my head in that time. For that reason alone I say it’s essential viewing, and that you should check it out when it screens at 9pm on Tuesday the 15th as part of the Greek Film Festival program at Palace Norton St. – it might get picked up by an adventurous Aussie distributor, but I wouldn’t count on it. As a few reviews I've read have noted, it’s best to go in cold and cease reading beyond this first paragraph, although I’d warn cat-lovers and those offended by explicit sex to stay the hell away. This is a first-class provocation, and in a year where Michael Haneke has made the closest thing to a middlebrow period piece he could possibly muster (while still remaining Michael Haneke), and Lars von Trier’s riling skills have transformed into to eyeroll-worthy self-parody, Yorgos Lanthimos has more than picked up the slack.

The film concerns a family’s parents playing a cruel and unusual game of big brother on their children, who have lasted until their adult years confined exclusively within the walls of their home, under a system of control that eventually proves fatal. The opening shot is of a tape recorder, reading out a series of misleading word definitions to said adult-children: “excursion” now means something to the effect of ‘solid property’, and so forth. The bizarrely modified language is supposed to pre-emptively quell their curiosity about a world worth exploring beyond the walls of their house, as well as eradicate any possible fears that may complicate the sanitised view of the world they’ve been indoctrinated with. However, the father’s decision to bring home a woman to satisfy the son’s sexual urges sets off a chain of events that upsets the order in the family, in increasingly queasy and absurdly funny ways.

Heightening the tension is Lanthimos’ stellar use of fixed-frame compositions (ala Tsai Ming-Liang or Roy Andersson); of course, there’s nothing new about this as a visual strategy for depicting detached zombified characters, or as a source of deadpan humour, but these seemingly arbitrary compositions not only establish a suitably off-kilter visual language for the film’s utterly singular world, but this simultenously heightened yet unemphatic visual banality generates near-unbearable suspense as well as stasis. And it must be said that this film is frickin’ hilarious if you’re a little sick in the head like I am.

The only thing holding me back from lurving Dogtooth is the quibble that arises from any cinematic provocation; that is, the question of whether there’s anything going on beneath the bluster. For one, the entire scenario is extremely far-fetched, and – with its nameless characters and unexplained histories – is best read allegorically, but do we really need another ‘climate of fear’ parable after the last ten years of cinema has more than exhausted that theme? More fascinating is that, for all its grotesquerie and sadism, the film contains an unmistakably humanistic undercurrent: in the early stages there is an act of utterly clinical prostitution, but the film ends with one of tender mutual affection, and the message of the film might as well be reduced to something as corny as ‘love is the only thing that can’t be un-learned’. But it’s the imaginatively effed-up ways it arrives on that note which makes it register so indelibly.



TRAILER

And some more weirdness, but this time more digestible. Two fascinating and loveable characters (avant-camp filmmakers Mike and George Kuchar, best known for their riotous dissection of artistic ambition Hold Me While I’m Naked) in a doco that wisely lets the assortment of interviewees (Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, and, natch, John Waters among the devoted) and film clips speak for itself. Both filmmakers were big names from the 60’s avant-garde, but their worship of OTT camp and melodrama, displayed in hundreds of DIY-to-the-maxx shorts and a few feature films, separated them from the more high-minded likes of Brakhage, Snow, Frampton, et al. Rather than camp with an experimental sensibility, their films are more like camp that’s pushed to such a ridiculous extreme that it can only qualify under the blanket term of ‘avant-garde’. Not a revelatory doco like Crumb - but in the same ballpark of studies about American fringe art, and just oodles of fun to watch.

Screening as both part of QueerDoc (Dendy Newtown, 7pm Tues 15th) and The Sydney Underground Film Festival (Factory Theatre, Marrickville, 6:30pm Sun 13th)