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| Director Guan Hu |
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| Jia Zhang-ke |
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| Director on the set with Eddie Peng |
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| Eddie Peng with his dog Xin |
BLACK DOG (Gou zhen) B China (116 mi) 2024 ‘Scope d: Guan Hu
Like something out of František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967), with wild dogs seen scampering across an empty landscape, this is how the film opens, BLACK DOG (Guan Hu) First Look Clip - New Cannes 2024 ... YouTube (1:00), reminiscent of Jia Zhang-ke’s PLATFORM (2000), specifically the wideshots of a solitary bus traveling through dusty roads in the middle of nowhere and the constant loudspeaker announcements for working together in harmony to achieve a workable plan for economic development during the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics of 2008, representing a period of rapid social and economic growth, investing nearly $40 billion in new infrastructure. This mirrors PLATFORM’s similar model dominated by the “New Rural Development Plan Map” which takes up an entire wall depicting a drawing of a modern, well-planned city, a common sight in towns around China soon after the 1977 announcement of the reforms and improvements promised with the Four Modernizations, setting the tone for Jia’s landmark film with a promise that modernization offered a sense of hope for a seemingly brighter future. In this even more abstract film, that promise has dissipated, as we’re left in the desolate outskirts of civilization, a place where the illusion of economic prosperity has all but vanished, leaving behind abandoned and forgotten towns defined by a stark emptiness, featuring drab, empty concrete structures that are ready for demolition, where life goes on, but in an almost lawless, radically different manner where economic development has stagnated. During the course of shooting earlier films, Guan visited a number of small towns in Northwest China, discovering these towns were once prosperous, with well-developed community facilities, such as hospitals and schools that were a legacy of China’s industrial expansion in the 1950’s and 60’s, now laying empty or nearly abandoned due to the decline of factory operations drying up the resources, so almost all the people have relocated or departed. This contrast between past and present creates a sense of desolation, which sparked Guan’s interest. The beauty of the film is its stark originality, winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, rendered in an independent filmmaking style, where this film is notable for featuring an unexpected screen appearance of renowned Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, who plays an actor in this film, adding a certain allure that would otherwise not be there, especially for cinephiles, where in the same manner as Jia, everything is shot from an extreme distance, with fixed shots and long sequences, placing an emphasis on the empty space that surrounds these characters. Graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1991, Guan Hu became the youngest director in the Beijing Film Studio, the oldest movie studio in China since the industry began in 1949 to make films in Shanghai, but in 2005 they merged into the China Film Group Corporation, becoming the largest, most influential film enterprise in Mainland China. This is the first film produced by the production company Seventh Art Pictures that Guan co-founded with his wife, Liang Jing. Right from the start, though, it’s clear who the real star of the film is, namely the dogs, literally hundreds of them, but the use of dogs as central characters has been done before, like Joe Camp’s BENJI (1974), Lewis Teague’s CUJO (1983), Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (Fehér isten) (2014), or Wes Anderson’s animated 2018 Top Ten List #7 Isle of Dogs, all of which have shown that dogs can take on significant roles as if they were human characters.
Set during a time of urbanization and social change in China, when the rapid economic development left ordinary people behind, told without a trace of sentimentality, using a bit of black humor while providing a window into that all but forgotten world, which plays out like a blight on the landscape, feeling almost like a time warp, as most people have moved on, where all that’s left in this small run-down village has been abandoned, providing a somewhat grim environment, inhabited by large numbers of stray dogs. A poetic and minimalist film, situated on the edge of the barren Gobi Desert, a world marked by bareness, where a lone bus kicks up dust as it traverses its way across a harsh and empty landscape, but is suddenly besieged by an eruption of dogs that seemingly come out of nowhere, where the element of surprise causes the bus the flip over, beautifully captured in a prolonged, single wide, panoramic shot by Gao Weizhe. Among the passengers is Lang (Eddie Peng), a former rock star and motorcycle stunt performer in an acrobatic troupe who has just been released from prison, having served ten years for manslaughter, as he was deemed responsible for another man’s accidental death, killed in a test of courage, the nephew of a local gangster in town, Butcher Hu (Hu Xiaoguang), who now wants to exact revenge. Finally returning to his desolate hometown of Chixia, a transitional space bordering China and Mongolia, things have changed drastically since he left, once a thriving mining site, but now a virtual ghost town, a conglomerate of shuttered shops and mostly abandoned housing compounds, revealing the distressing circumstances that workers in these small towns underwent during the leadup to the Olympic games, fully representative of the millions of Chinese women who work away from home, returning only once a year, typically bringing money, as many of the houses are now empty, scheduled for demolition, with the residents forcibly resettled, leaving their dogs behind, who now roam free in the streets and in the desert hills. A film about an old China that is being demolished to make way for something new, where those on the periphery are shut out from the national discussion, the protagonist is virtually silent, with almost no dialogue, extremely quiet and introverted, existing in his own world, disconnected from the past and the future, as the China he knew is gone, becoming an existential study of human resilience and the complexities of an ambiguous morality. Even in this backwater wasteland, there is a concerted effort to clean up the town to make way for the Olympics, so Lang is hired onto a dog-catching team of reformed ex-cons led by Uncle Yao, a restaurant owner portrayed by Jia Zhang-ke, a friend and peer of director Guan Hu, both among China’s ‘Sixth-Generation’ of filmmakers to emerge in the 1990’s, and both members of the China Film Association. A prized bounty is placed on an elusive black dog (a whippet mix, a Jack Russell-greyhound cross) that may have rabies and has been biting people, with Lang chasing the bounty, but he is bitten as well, with both man and dog forced to spend quarantine together for any developing signs of rabies, where they become deeply connected. “Man or dog, once you get rabies, you die,” we are told.
His elderly father owns a zoo that has gone out of business and he now suffers from alcoholism, yet his manic preoccupation to continue feeding the remaining birds, ducks, a lone peacock, and a Manchurian tiger borders on an obsession, where his stubborn refusal to let them go mirrors that same obstinate trait in his son, who is emotionally distant, yet acutely aware of everything happening around him, developing a deep compassion for the dogs. Lang also feels remorse for the death he supposedly caused, despite continuing to receive taunts and threats from Butcher Hu’s family. An interesting side diversion is running into the traveling circus heading into town, where he meets the free-spirited Grape (Tong Liya), a performing dancer that immediately takes an interest in him, whose personality is very direct and determined, already feeling like life is passing her by, finding few options, which is significant as few other women are present in this hyper-masculine world. Lang and the black dog develop an unbreakable bond, two outsiders against the world, both societal outcasts, part of a portrait of cultural displacement where people are discarded as easily as the dogs, beautifully accentuated by the music of Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd - " Hey You " The Wall 1979 YouTube (4:37), an expression of youthful rebelliousness and one of Lang’s favorite albums when he used to play in a band, the same music used quite differently in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005). Here it adds an eerie element of mysteriously floating electric guitar riffs, a kind of jarring cultural throwback to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), which majestically featured the music of Pink Floyd. While there is a recurring motif of visual parallels between animals and humans, as dogs are seen lining the surrounding hillsides, with the townspeople ascending those same hills to witness a full solar eclipse, purportedly to provide the best vantage point, the film scrutinizes a range of spaces we live in, from the near delirious enthusiasm expressed for the Olympic opening ceremony, even when watched from small television sets, to this desolate landscape that no one cares about anymore, becoming an eyesore on the distant horizon. Lang is defined not by a sense of belonging, but by his profound alienation, a stark contrast to the nationalistic pride associated with the Beijing Olympics, along with its absurdly ironic slogan “Live the Dream.” In the end, Lang is the one who’s stuck there, trapped by his past and the dismal economic realities of late 2000’s China, where the open road is the only promise of hope. The dog acting in this film is incredible, with 300 dogs used and trained for the film, with forty trainers on the set, where you can’t wrap your head around how they got some of these shots, like dogs hitting their marks on command or crashing through a window on cue, as so much of this is truly impressive, providing a rare arthouse aesthetic that has bleak apocalyptic overtones, becoming, in a sense, a survival film. The film is dedicated to the director’s father, who passed away at the age of 100 during the making of the film, also “For all those who have hit the road again,” while lead actor Eddie Peng established such a strong bond with Xin, the dog featured in the film, that he adopted him as well as two others after filming had wrapped.
