Film reviews: The Truth | Dogs Don't Wear Pants

The Truth ****

Dogs Don't Wear Pants ***

Working for the first time outside his native Japan, modern filmmaking master Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Our Little Sister) returns once more to the theme of families and the dysfunctions that bind them in The Truth, a delectable spin on the French bourgeois comedy that out-Frenches the French. Zeroing in on a veteran movie star called Fabienne Dangeville (played with mischievous glee by Catherine Deneuve), the film revolves around the personal fall-out from the imminent publication of her memoir, which threatens to exacerbate her already fractious relationship with her long-suffering daughter Lumir (an ultra-chic Juliette Binoche) who’s visiting from New York with her actor husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). What’s brilliant here – aside from that cast – is that Kore-eda doesn’t default to serious drama to unpick their dynamic.

Building the film around the production of a sci-fi movie that Fabienne is in the process of making, he draws parallels instead between the absurdity of film production and the absurdity of family life, finding rich humour in the way the illusory nature of both has a habit of revealing what really matters.

As meet-cutes go, the one that occurs in Finnish oddity Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, between a widowed heart surgeon called Juha (Pekka Strang) and a dominatrix called Mona (Krista Kosonen), takes some beating. Setting the off-kilter tone with a dreamy prologue in which the film’s protagonist, Juha, almost dies trying to save his drowning wife while on holiday with their young daughter, director JP Valkeapää ramps up the strangeness by having the disconnected Juha stumble into the neon-red lair of the aforementioned Mona while accompanying his now-teenage daughter Elli (Ilona Huhta) on a birthday outing to get her a tongue stud from the body piercing parlour that operates upstairs. Alarm bells should already be ringing at the inappropriateness of Juha’s parenting choices here, but things get worse upon snooping around Mona’s dungeon and discovering very quickly that her talents for auto-erotic asphyxiation can bring him closer to his dead wife, whom he sees during this first oxygen-deprived moment of reverie floating towards him in a watery limbo.

Thenceforth the film proceeds like an artier, kinkier riff on the 1990 Brat Pack horror film Flatliners, with Juha submitting dog-like to Mona’s high-heeled, whip-wielding ways in an effort to coerce her into pushing him ever-closer to death. The psychological explanation for Juha’s new-found obsession doesn’t go much deeper than its rather obvious connection to his suppressed grief, which is a little disappointing – as is the film’s disinterest in exploring Juha’s increasingly strained relationship with his daughter, a plot-line the film quickly jettisons before resolving it far too neatly. Instead, Valkeapää focuses mostly on the downward spiralling Juha’s obsession with Mona, whose own sadistic proclivities the film takes gruesome pleasure in depicting, perhaps as a way of appealing to a certain strain of masochistic arthouse movie lover who gets off on the sensorial punishment doled out by filmmakers such as Gasper Noe, Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. For all the film’s fingernail-and-teeth-pulling unpleasantness, though, Valkeapää isn’t quite in that league and while there’s no denying the film is visually striking and features committed performances from Kosonen and Strang (the latter in danger of being typecast following this and his lead turn in the 2017 biopic Tom of Finland), its third-act shift into a weirdly upbeat black comedy about a middle-aged man finding his BDSM-themed bliss feels a little unearned. ■

Both films available on-demand from 20 March via Curzon Home Cinema