Only the lonely
From 11A
The game is short-lived. And we see them, isolated in the frame, each aware of the other’s presence, but struggling to be together. In the one true erotic moment of the film, a cigarette break towards the end, two characters share a cigarette. One lights it, and smokes, puts it in the mouth of the other. Breathe in. release. Smokes it. But even here, never together. They never appear together in the sequence. So we close-up on a face. Too close, forehead and chin cut off. Solitude. But a hand without a body interrupts the frame with a cigarette. Smoke envelopes the frame. We cut to the other party. Gazing back. Formerly disembodied hand finds its limbs. Smokes. Each reacts to the other, but the camera never grants us that union. It’s nice not to be lonely, but things aren’t nice here.
And “The Power of Dog” makes that discomfort manifest. Campion needles at us. In the way she structures her screenplay, and the way she directs her technical team. Jonny Greenwood’s score encourages anxiety and trepidation. Peter Sciberras’s editing deliberately evokes something effortful. Slowly, but slowly, labouring and lingering on moments. Pay attention it tells you. Why? It’ll make sense by the end, and it does. Wegner’s camera moves across spaces slowly, punishingly. What will we see? And how will it be framed? It’s an empathically deliberate mode for Campion, who has never been as explicit as this before with her thematic concerns. Family. Masculinity. Identity deconstructed. What better than a Western to explore this by? The American genre come home to lay bare the isolation of America. Man against man. But also man against nature. Human nature. But also Mother Nature. Flora and fauna. Remember, the cows were the first things we saw. But, significantly. They are not the first thing we hear.
The film disarmingly encourages us to forget our beginning in a way. Visually, we begin with the cows and then the brothers. They establish the visuals of this world. The first image after the “I” of the first chapter appears. But for a few brief seconds, before that first image, we hear before we see. As the credits roll, and the restless music accelerates, the film opens with a voice, “When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her.” It’s a trick because it sets up something the film immediately abandons. Narration does not return substantively in “The Power of the Dog”, but more significantly there’s a liminal temporality to that opening confession. The timestamp, Montana 1925, appears moments after, rather than before. And so the voice, we will soon learn it’s Peter, seems to float in time. Between past and future and present. A promise, but also threat. But to whom? And from what vantage point?
That will also be answered. “The Power of the Dog” leaves no room for ambiguity. It is an equation. Just like the number four has a finite list of subsets (an equation can find a definitive answer), “The Power of the Dog” is an equation and it will work everything out. Methodical. Deliberate. Decisive. Striking. Pulverising. Campion is harnessing her gifts, but also her team, for something exacting. Like the plan revealed in hindsight by a member of the quartet, this is all feels incredibly worked out. If that worked feeling is a bit too overzealous for Campion, it is to the benefit of these themes and these characters. “The Power of the Dog” resonates with clarity and exactitude. The emotional wallops here are stunning, and lasting. It’s excellent filmmaking.
“How nice it is not to be alone.” We end with an embrace, and a voyeur looking on. Superficially, it’s a look of content and yet we think, is it? At what cost? How nice it is not to be alone. But we are alone, though. And what niceness is there to find in the bleak terrains of this ambivalent world?
The Power of the Dog is playing on Netflix