Opiniões dos críticos

By redefining the dichotomous categories of “victim” and “executioner,” Garrone creates an intriguing coming-of-fear story.

The worst film in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival may be Dogman. Italian director Matteo Garrone’s film offers up art-house-by-numbers neorealism with an angle of political-power allegory that quickly turns deterministic and tedious.

Earlier in the film, Marcello learns of a dog locked in a freezer. At great personal risk, he rescues the dog and slowly revives it in the sink. It is a beautiful moment of quiet unfussy heroism and suggest that though Dogman might well be bleak, it recognises humanity when it sees it.

An early scene hints at a sense of community—of genuine place—surrounding the brutal, linear trajectory, but Garrone’s camera often seems more interested in sordid escalation than genuine exploration, some brief passages aimed at locating a sense of human dignity (with Marcello’s daughter, primarily), notwithstanding.

By depriving their David and Goliath story of geographical and chronological specificity – both setting and time period are kept purposely vague – Garrone and his co-writers, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudisio, have also stripped the film of any genuine social relevance. The result is a philosophically bankrupt, if effectively constructed, spectacle of violence.