It is a lyric poem that the director sings for us, the Cannes Film Festival award-winning "Dog Race"
Director Guan Hu's "Dogs in the Shadows", which won the "Un Certain Regard" award in the first Cannes International Film Festival, is obviously an allegorical work. However, it uses the shell of a genre film and integrates realistic concerns, thus achieving the trinity of genre, reality and allegory. It is also a story that encompasses the past, present and future, expressing the protagonist's mental journey from despair, disappointment to hope, thus achieving the effect of using the West to represent China and China to reflect the world. Although the film's narrative is sometimes detached and the emotions are occasionally abrupt, it is natural for it to win the award with all kinds of ingenuity.
The film is based on a classic western genre. The story takes place in Chixia Town, a small town on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China. The opening shot gives enough of the western genre. A bus is seen driving across the desolate Gobi Desert. A gust of wind blows and hundreds of wild dogs suddenly rush out. To avoid the dogs, the bus hits a rock and flips over in the wilderness. Then the protagonist Jilang climbs out of the car. He is a "murderer" who has been in prison for 10 years and has just been released on parole. This is a common protagonist in westerns - violent, with a criminal history, and full of drama.
The film arranges two powerful opponents for Erlang. One is the avengers, the uncle of the person he killed that year, Hu Tuhuo, and his followers. They have repeatedly looked for opportunities to take his life back; the other is the members of the town dog-beating team he joined temporarily for re-employment. The boss played by Jia Zhangke is obviously a person with a background and authority. Erlang had a direct violent conflict with his teammates because he released dogs many times. The film also pays tribute to many classics, arranging a caravan for mobile performances, so that Erlang and the belly dancer Grape in the caravan fall in love. Unfortunately, the love triangle between Erlang, Grape and the owner of the song and dance troupe is only touched upon and not developed in depth. The genre formula of westerns creates most of the conflicts in the film, ensuring that the film is good.
However, if this is just a western film, it will not be favored by the film festival. In terms of space selection, the film brings the cold realism to the audience. From the rows of empty abandoned residential buildings and dilapidated auditoriums in the western small town, we can imagine that there was a prosperous population in the early years. But as resources were exhausted, the big factories moved away, the population dropped sharply, and the auditorium was abandoned. The dilapidated zoo was deserted, the keepers fed the tigers with porridge, and the sign of the amusement park next to the zoo had fallen off. The desolate landscape presented in the film is not an allegory, nor does it only happen in the story time and space of 2008. The hundreds of wild dogs running across the Gobi Desert were abandoned by their owners who moved away. The phenomenon of wild dogs in groups and the accents of the old people who stayed in the town explained the former prosperity of this place, and also put the current hopeless reality in front of the audience. These background information beyond the plot elevates the film from a genre film to an art film.
If the film only goes here, it is still a long way from winning the award. What really elevates the film is its allegorical expression. In addition to winning the "Un Certain Regard" award, the black dog in "Dog Battle" also won the "Dog Palme d'Or Jury Award" - don't take this award seriously, but it tells us that the dog is the protagonist of this film. The black dog is a stray dog that was mistaken for a mad dog. Its confrontation, reconciliation and friendship with Erlang are the real main line of the film. He first met it in an abandoned residential building. Erlang's pee attracted the black dog to defend the territory. The black dog drove Erlang away and urinated on the spot to declare sovereignty. Later, Erlang accidentally discovered the revelation that there was a reward for catching the dog. He tried to catch the black dog but was bitten instead. It was not until the dog-beating team collectively surrounded and intercepted the black dog that they captured it. Unexpectedly, Erlang overturned his car when he drove it to the concentration area due to a sandstorm. Although it bit Erlang again, the man and the dog could only snuggle with each other to resist the cold until they were rescued by a passing song and dance troupe caravan. In order to observe whether Erlang was infected with rabies, Erlang and the black dog were quarantined at home for ten days of fear, and the two sides established trust. Erlang did not hesitate to fight with his teammates to fight for the right to keep the dog. After being released from prison, Erlang got a job in the dog catching team after asking the police for help. The reason why Erlang repeatedly let the captured dogs go was obviously related to his own experience of imprisonment. He empathized with the dog curled up in the cage, and also aroused the empathy of the audience, including the Cannes judges.
But the allegory of the predicament of life in "Dog Array" is not just despair. At the end of the film, there is a sentence that points to the theme: "Dedicated to all friends who are on the road again." This of course first refers to the protagonist Jilang, who was paroled from prison and needed to reintegrate into society and find the meaning of existence. Now he has gained the friendship of the black dog, the care of the community, neighbors and friends, and even love, and has achieved his goal of being on the road again.
The warm realism of "Dog Array" is clear. Although the black dog died of illness, it gave birth to a litter of puppies with the female dog that often accompanied it. They are undoubtedly the offspring of the black dog. The film is also very careful in the processing of light and shadow. The tone of the first half is gray and cold, which implies Erlang's pessimism and the decline of the western town. As Erlang rescued Hu the butcher who was bitten by a poisonous snake and achieved reconciliation with his enemies, as he established feelings with the black dog and had a good impression of Grape, the tone became brighter and hope came to the town. On the day of the solar eclipse, the quiet and lonely town suddenly became lively. People came out of their homes, riding motorcycles, driving cars, taking buses or running hurriedly, rushing to the so-called best observation point of the solar eclipse on a hillside in the suburbs. The madman in the town took the opportunity to run into the zoo and opened the cages one by one, so the monkeys, dogs and tigers also walked out of the cages and walked onto the sunny street. As an audience, at that moment, although I was slightly dissatisfied with the film's overly straightforward expression, I couldn't help being moved...
There is a poem in the film that is recited repeatedly, "Stand tall and walk forward, trees and sandbanks in the sky, rugged roads... Hey, let's hold hands tightly." Rather than saying that "Dog Array" is an ecological film calling for harmonious coexistence between humans and animals, it is better to say that it is a lyric poem sung by director Guan Hu to comfort the audience.
The author is the president of the Shanghai Film Critics Society and a professor at the Shanghai Film Academy, Shanghai University
