"The Power of Dogs", a film produced by Netflix, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 2 and competed in the main competition unit, and finally helped the director win the best director award.
Of course, if it were not for Cannes' rejection of streaming companies, perhaps this focus would have met with moviegoers a few months earlier.
The original title of the film, Netflix gave the Chinese translation of "Inuyama", which is obviously not a literal translation, and viewers who have seen the film should understand that "like a dog roaring like a mountain" is one of the core images that appear in the film.
It must be pointed out that in the Western religious discourse infused with Christian culture, the "dog" as a cultural symbol is very different from the role and meaning of dogs in the field of daily life of Westerners, for example, in the New Testament Philippians there is (3:2) Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers..." Dogs should be guarded against, and evildoers should be guarded against...", which undoubtedly gives the so-called "dogs" a culturally evil connotation.
After watching the film, the author prefers the literal translation of "Canine Power", which is directly related to the film's direct textual connection with the evil forces exerted on each other by the three protagonists, Phil, Pete, and Rose, each of them for various reasons or emotions (subconscious) – this is obviously a story about evil, especially the evil of male power.
The call of the wild and the suppression of desire
In fact, before the film begins, a son's monologue foreshadows the ultimate tragic course of the story, ending with the dramatic sudden death of Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), in which the male protagonist, a single male rancher in his prime, dies of anthrax, an animal-derived transfection commonly found in cattle, which can be transfected to humans by aerosols and dies within 24 to 48 hours of acute sepsis.
And as we follow the clues of the matter, we know that it is Phil's nephew, and Pete carefully planned to commit this murder, just as Pete said at the beginning of the film: after the death of his father (biological father), he hopes that his mother can live happily. It also implies that his son Pete (Curtie Smit-McPhee) will do whatever it takes to protect his mother's "happiness" or "he's not a human being."
As the film progresses, George (Jesse Plemont), who originally introduced Rose (played by Kerstin Dunster) into this core narrative space, appears as a brother who is very different from the protagonist Phil in many ways, and gradually recedes to the background of the film, when the three most important characters are officially revealed, and among these three characters, Phil, Rose and Pitt, two male characters are the focus of the film's narrative organization.
Under the deliberate cut of the trailer and marketing publicity, I believe that there are not a few fans and friends who were once attracted by the so-called "uncle-nephew love", and here we will not talk about whether the film's creator really has the intention of creating a narrative spectacle with "unconventional love relationship", and unveiling the mysteries surrounding the two male characters of Phil and Pitt will undoubtedly provide us with the most direct interpretation path.
Focus first on Phil. The shrewd, ambitious, cowboy rancher Zhou, a western rancher who exudes a typical masculine temperament, has a unique charm that makes people both respected and feared.
This nearly domineering, unruly, wild style creates a peculiar contrast to his de facto well-educated (Yale university alumni), who is proficient in classics, Greek, and Latin, while his brother George, who at first glance is polite and gentlemanly, actually achieves nothing with "big belly".
So where is the source of the contradiction between the pairs shown by Phil? It was Bronco Henry, who had been dead for nearly 20 years and had never appeared in the film but was ubiquitous (the film showed his death in 1904, the story takes place in 1925), who called for the use of "tribulation and patience" to temper men to pass on the masculine power of pure male hormones to young Phil, which deeply affected Phil's personality and sexual orientation.
A male idol who can never catch up with and can never match will not only shape men, but also become a shadow of their lives.
Compared with Henry's light, Phil is always bleak, trying to fit in order to be savage (perfect), but still because of inferiority, he worries that his body is not perfect, he is unwilling and ashamed to show his flesh in front of people, he often sleeps with clothes and rarely shows his skin, does not play with other people, but hides alone in the jungle when he is naked; does not want people to find out his obsession with males, and buries the bodybuilding album full of male flesh in the jungle...
Regarding Phil's feelings for Henry, the director uses a wealth of audiovisual means and pictorial imagery to express them, whether it is repeatedly wiping the saddle, the "Inuyama" that looks up at the right end when writing a letter, representing the call of Henry and the male wild, or the sexual release of the handkerchief embroidered with Henry's name, these details have repeatedly and repeatedly reinforced this complex love that contains both longing and reverence.
Behind the paranoia is often hidden extreme vulnerability, Phil's real personality is completely different from the strong tough guy image in the eyes of others, showing complexity and multiplicity.
Due to the long-term suppression of the subconscious sexual impulse to the male, Phil's personality is deformed: the suppression and torture of Rose at first glance seems to be the maintenance of male territory, in essence, it is completely misogynistic, and only the few shots of his curled up posture when sleeping show the true heart of extreme insecurity;
In the case of no one noticing, the first attention to the paper flowers on the table shows the delicate side of his "heart has a tiger, smells the roses";
As for Phil's attitude towards Pitt, the author believes that the ambiguity between the two in the second half of the film is similar to the substitution of sexual objects or the transfer of sexual objects, which is essentially still a disguised continuation of the relationship between Phil and Henry, And Pete only bears the sustenance of Phil's lingering knot, but this transfer is indirectly invalid due to Pitt's completely different behavioral motivations.
The character, who is opposed to the protagonist Phil, the arrival of his sister-in-law, breaks into the ranch space with his nephew Pete.
If George's gentle cowardice and nothingness form a pair of opposites to Phil's strength, then Pitt's image is a distinct discord with the entire ranch space as soon as he appears: thin, cramped, pale appearance and aura show out of place.
Phil hated him at first sight at the restaurant, calling him "Miss Nancy," and the act of lighting a paper flower made by Pete to light a cigarette certainly reinforced this attitude of near-contempt.
Pete's image is difficult to relate to words like "planned murder" in the first half of the film, but the director still uses the details of the ambush and the subtle internal scheduling of the picture that she is good at to suggest the character's special features from many angles — at least from the appearance of "harmless people and animals".
Detail one, Pete carried the rabbit back to the house, the actual reason is not pity, but to practice vivisection (in line with the character's medical student identity setting), the so-called "want to learn well to practice more" reveals his well-targeted, dare to think and dare to do character;
Detail two, in the woods, Pete approached the trees to check the birds in the trees in the contemptuous and mocking eyes of everyone on both sides, and then retreated the same way, the whole process of his movements seemed to be slow and gentle, but his demeanor was always calm and unaffected, showing the introverted calmness and humiliation of the characters;
The last detail points directly to the psychological root of why Pete hurt the killer. From a psychoanalytic point of view, Pete's characters clearly have a strong Oedipus plot, and because of the death of his biological father, his subconscious impulse to "kill his father and marry his mother" is objectively satisfied, and he becomes more attached to his mother.
At the same time, because of the suppression of the loss of the father's role, the collapse of the authority of the biological father eventually makes Pete's character go to extremes.
In the chat passage between Pete and Phil on their outing together, Phil scoffs at Pitt's father's comments about his son that he is "not kind enough, too aggressive", but agrees with Pete's father that "you have to overcome many obstacles".
When Phil took over and said, "There are indeed many obstacles in front of you...", the director adjusted the camera position from the composition of the original two occupying the center of gravity of the picture frame to Pete's subjective viewpoint shot, suggesting that the biggest obstacle Pitt faced at this time was the uncle Phil who suppressed and tortured his mother.
Male writing by female film authors
Another translation of Jane Campion's name is more familiar to Chinese audiences: Jane Campion, a New Zealand-born, British-educated female director who has become one of the best and most thoughtful female directors in the world of cinema today.
In 1986, she directed her debut short film "Peel" and was shortlisted for the main competition unit of Cannes, in 1990, she was nominated for the First Venice Golden Lion Award for "Angels at The Same Table", and in 1993, "Piano Lesson" turned out to be the first female director in the history of the Cannes Film Festival to win the Palme d'Or.
"The Power of dogs" is Jane Campping's ninth feature film, the last one dating back to 2009's Bright Star. Considering her more than thirty years of professional career, it is obvious that she is not a prolific author, but her works always have a restrained, calm and delicate inner strength, especially the sequence of works represented by "Piano Lessons" shows the pioneering significance of her purely female film creation.
To put it simply, Jian Kangping completely rejects the gazed other position of women in the original world map, and re-establishes a kind of female writing with gentle humanistic care - to promote women's subjective desires and emotional appeals, while rarely maintaining the affirmation and praise of the equal relationship between the sexes.
"The Power of dogs" takes the Western United States in the 1920s as the background environment, and collects typical images such as wastelands, wooden houses, ranches and cowboys; mostly uses large scene lenses, some handheld photography, and the elaborate composition and shooting angle provide a good help for presenting the relationship between the characters and the strength and weakness of power; in terms of color tone, the outdoor is a warm color with low saturation, and the indoor light is as dark as possible, making the space a footnote to the power and character of the character (especially the protagonist Phil).
The new work shows that Jian Kangping not only requires the consciousness of mastering the female subject matter as a woman, but also tries to prove that female film authors can and have the ability to talk about male themes well.
She practices what Laura Murway, a pioneer of feminist film criticism, mentioned in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema that in order to analyze how the unconscious in patrilineal society constitutes a film narrative model, feminist film writers and critics have no other choice but to rely on Freud's psychoanalysis, a tool made by Western patrilineal social culture, to oppose the deep-rooted patriarchal order.
Unlike the delicate female writing of "Piano Lesson", the new work "Canine Power" is undoubtedly a male story, and the only female character Rose's position in the narrative is still hidden, but we can find its unconventionality, the director has no intention of showing the strength of male characters, but profoundly unveils their bluff male disguise step by step, peeling away their inner hidden vulnerability and deformity:
Phil, who longs to be loved and expressed, cannot understand until his death, and eventually becomes the "power of the dog"—the victim of the huge patriarchal order and patriarchal discourse that Bronco Henry and his back represent, which have come from history.