Uneven but worthwhile
Hungarian director’s White God tells the surreal tale of a girl and her dog
Kornél Mundruczó knows not of subtlety. The Hungarian director’s brash new feature White God is over the top in all kinds of ways, for better and worse.
His cinematic eye is in evidence from the film’s first frames. A striking overhead shot depicts an elevated roadway running through the middle of a city, empty except for a lone cyclist. Cut to a close-up of the rider, a young teenage girl in a hoody, looking cautiously around.
We then see her from behind, at a distance, passing an empty car with open doors, in the middle of a bridge; and closer, from just beneath her handlebars; followed by an image of her feet, pedalling.
As she passes through part of the city that recalls Old Montreal, we hear barking. She turns her head in time to see an enormous pack of dogs rounding the corner, coming her way. The music swells.
It is to Mundruczó’s credit that he eventually manages to make this unexplained, dreamlike opening sequence make sense within the rest of his increasingly surreal narrative.
As the film settles into a storyline, we are introduced to Lili (Zsofia Psotta), the above-noted 13-year-old, and her beloved dog, Hagen (played alternately by canines Body and Luke).
Lili’s mother is going away on business for a few months, and the girl is being left with her father (Sandor Zsoter), a surly man who works in a slaughterhouse.
Dad isn’t a fan of the dog, and neither is society, it turns out. There is a new ban in effect on mutts, and Lili’s companion fits the description. When her father drops the dog on the side of the road, it seems like this might become a simple story of a girl getting her pup back.
But Hagen ends up on an adventure of his own, getting chased by dogcatchers and roped into the cruel world of illegal dogfighting. (Amores Perros, anyone?)
Mundruczó follows his subject with the same attention one would reserve for a human actor, recalling the surreal twist of last year’s French-U.S. co-production Bird People.
The approach feels forced, at times, like watching a dark version of Lassie or The Littlest Hobo.
Meanwhile, Lili sits through band practice and butts heads with her father.
But though it sags in the middle, the film finds its form in the second half, expanding wildly into a humorous horror/revenge epic calling to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Mundruczó has framed his film as a comment on prejudice (the film’s title is a play on that of Samuel Fuller’s 1982 film White Dog, about a trainer who tries to deprogram a dog trained to kill black people).
It is also an outrageous, uneven but sporadically exhilarating big screen adventure that, appropriately, won the Prix Un Certain Regard at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.