Film of 2010: Dogtooth

It was a sweltering afternoon in downtown Manhattan. The streets were aswarm as they always are late-june, but the heat was focussed on my little pocket of the Lower East Side; hanging around in Union Square park, sipping on a coffee frappuccino to keep death at bay, audience to a nineteen year-old college student playing ska on the corner for dollars and dimes.

When the clock made its mind up for three I moseyed down University Place, taking respite in the shadow of the towering buildings. Cinema Village was nestled between the delicatessens, corner stores and bars characteristic of Greenwich Village; a turn-of-the-century fire station converted into a cinema in 1963, having survived the purge of the movie theatres in the 80's kept its board through a good reputation for film festivals and showing popular movies after their first run.

I was taking a risk on multiple festival award winner (including Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009).

Okay, not that much of a risk.

So I was in the empty cinema scribbling in my empty journal and another chap enters- a tall, lean swept-back-hair guy with a chiseled jaw. He takes a chair two rows in front of me. Then he turns around and starts talking.

He starts telling me about his life; how he's in NYC for a little stopgap before going over to New Jersey for an old college friend's wedding. The problem is that he hasn't seen his friend since college but knows that all his friend's family and loved ones have heard about him because he was this wild Dean Moriarty character who got his friend into lots of extra-curricular scrapes. The Sorority Moriarty, if you will.

He was fretting about all these things, getting them off his chest to me because hell- he knew nobody in that city, just like I didn't. I'm remarking on this because this never happens in England. The cinema is the most unlikely place to meet somebody new, let alone hear their life story. You're more likely to shout at somebody for throwing popcorn, or talking.

When he turned back around and the opening credits started to roll I thought to myself, Why can't home loosen up a touch? You know?

Anyway, this isn't an article about "my greatest cinema experience" or "a bromance made by the movies". I never saw that guy again. This is about a very special Greek film that everybody should watch.

Dogtooth is a world unto itself. Set predominantly in a small house in anonymous rural Greece, it depicts the story of three teenagers who have never left their family home. Their warped perceptions of the world are moulded and controlled by their father, whose bizarre social experiment includes the seemingly random re-appropriation of nouns, and various lies to curb any desire to escape (at one point he tells them that a domesticated cat is a dangerous beast- see trailer below).

When the boy reaches sexual maturity the father employs the services of a security guard, Christina, but the introduction of this unknown element to the home's controlled environment has an effect beyond the scope of the father's control.

Lanthimos's film is slow, but gripping. The long, naturalistic scenes evoke the anarchic possibilities reminiscent of Dogme 95, tension created by the possibility of horror- not the actuality of it.

The performances of the three 'children' are understated but affecting, particularly Aggeliki Papoulia's 'Older Daughter', whose slow descent into an insane, primal state is subtle but devastating.

As the audience, you are voyeur to something dark and forbidden. You are, in effect, a participant in the abuse the children have to endure, but you are helplessly distant.

Dogtooth is also frequently hilarious. To eliminate any curiosity toward the aeroplanes which frequently fly over the house, the father invents the lie that they are very prone to falling out of the sky. Whenever he spots one, he leaves a toy plane in the garden for the children to discover- a trick they they fall for every time.

The prolonged graphic (and in some cases real) sex scenes are likely to put some people off, as is, possibly, the not-understated political subtext concerning the tyrannical rule of a mentally disturbed father figure (government, much?). These are minor patches in a film which as a whole is disorientating, beautiful, engrossing, and entertaining.

Walking out of the cool dark cinema into the crushing heat of west 12th street, I felt drunk. The shop signs, the roaring cars, the anonymous people everywhere, the sounds of the metropolis; all of this became irrelevant. I was in a dream, wandering through the colours, my mind rolling and rolling; lost in an ephemeral daze.

I just walked and walked, and by the time I considered where I was going I was lost. So I sat down and thought some more.

Rarely has a film drawn me in and affected me so much.

Film of 2010? Yes.