Matteo Garrone is arguably one of the most talented filmmakers working today. He is certainly, in my estimation, the most talented active Italian filmmaker. Unlike many of Italy’s greatest names in cinema who started movements (neorealism), genres (giallo), and subgenres (spaghetti western), Garrone doesn’t seem beholden to any rigid thematic, stylistic, or genre continuity. He values storytelling and world-building first and foremost, no matter where or when his films may take place. His stories are deeply moralistic.
His last three films (Tale of Tales, Reality, and Gomorrah) all feature the subtext of age-old lessons similar to Aesop’s Fables. In his latest film, Dogman, he creates a fable with a clear lesson, but an unclear conscience.
The Boxer and the Dachshund
The titular dog-grooming store that Marcello (Marcello Fonte) runs is located in a struggling sea-side neighborhood in the Campania region in southern Italy, the same region that’s featured in his 2008 masterpiece Gomorrah. Garrone is a world-builder and he makes sure that we know that Marcello, frail, short and hunched, lives in a place much more rugged and lithic than he is.
Like in Gomorrah, here too he favors the use of establishing shots to center his characters in a vast expanse of concrete and rust. This makes Marcello seem isolated even though his store does attract a size-able customer base and he maintains a close relationship with his daughter. It’s not until Simone, a brutish street criminal, the boxer to Marcello’s dachshund, comes around looking for his dope fix, do we see just how malleable and helpless Marcello really is.
It’s not his fault of course. Unlike Marco and Ciro in Gomorrah or the King of Strongcliff in Tale of Tales, all of whom go looking for trouble through overestimating their own machismo, in Dogman, the demons come out of the dark looking for Marcello. He’s a weakling, easy to pick on. We watch his life slowly crumble through his own sheepish demeanor.
Not only is Marcello at a physical disadvantage throughout the film, but he is constantly conned into taking the fall for others. Garrone makes it clear, however, that at some point, once things get desperate enough, a wounded dog will fight back.
Tales of the South
The gritty realism of Gomorra, an ambitious film encompassed in a political web, is appropriately discarded for a much more modernist painting of Campagnia in Dogman. When we cut a break from Marcello’s string of bad luck to a little boating trip with his daughter, the frame is painted in hazy pastels of the sun and sea.
When Simone takes Marcello to a nightclub and they dance with beautiful girls dressed in angel outfits, the lights and shadows all blend together transporting the sequence from a dingy club to an ambiguous ethereal space amidst glowing clouds. These dream-like scenes’ surrealness is augmented by the fact that they occur amidst moments of Marcello’s isolated despair. But even in a dream, Marcello is uneasy and nervous.
Marcello Fonte, who won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for his performance, depicts his characters’ meekness perfectly, with hunched shoulders and the facial expression of someone who knows quite well that he is totally out of place and out of sorts. It does wonders once the character finds his footing and plans on retaliation for all of his suffering.
The last scene of the film features Marcello looking to get the attention of a group of individuals playing soccer. They seem distant, scurrying in the fog. When he leaves and comes back to them, they are all gone. Garrone’s camera lingers in the fog the same way it does in Marcello’s boating trip and at the club. He may finally have escaped from his troubles with Simone, but that haze stays present, and his future uncertain.
Dogman: Conclusion
If the fables of Aesop were guides to the moral lessons are dictated either by religion, philosophy, or science, Garrone’s films are moral lessons dictated by man’s own inner conflicts. In Gomorrah the lesson is clear and the only exit is death. In Dogman, Garrone avoids easy sermoning. His character is much more complex, much more at odds with himself, and much more innocent than anyone in Gomorrah.
Marcello never went looking for demons. Some people are simply unlucky and even if they live to tell the tale of their injustice, they live in a fog.
Have you seen Dogman? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!
Dogman was released in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2018 and the US on April 12, 2019. For all international release dates, see here.
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