A reallife couple acts out a failing marriage
What we find in “My Dog Stupid,” available through the Smith Rafael Film Center’s virtual theater on Friday, Aug. 7, is that it isn’t a cuddly animal movie but an uncompromising portrait of a longterm marriage in trouble.
It’s directed and cowritten by the film’s star, Yvan Attal, and it costars Attal’s reallife partner, Charlotte Gainsbourg. This is Attal’s third collaboration with Gainsbourg — the previous two were “My Wife Is an Actress” (2001) and “Happily Ever After” (2004) — and taken together these movies tell the story of how different stages of life conspire, in different ways, to separate couples.
In “My Dog Stupid,” we discover a couple in a middleaged malaise, exhausted and without faith in each other or in anything. Henri (Attal) is a novelist who wrote a great, awardwinning first book 25 years ago, the proceeds of which he used to buy a magnificent house in the countryside. But since then, he has written nothing but garbage, which he blames — not implausibly — on the daily, neverending distraction of having four kids.
Early in the film, he says in voiceover that he’d trade in all four of his kids for a new Porsche, and not only do we believe him, but the movie convinces us that that would actually be a pretty good trade. In his place, we might take that deal ourselves.
Given that, it’s not surprising that Henri is not the most emotionally available of men and that his wife, Cecile (Gainsbourg), seems pretty much done with him. She treats him like she is always vaguely angry or disappointed, not about anything in particular, and not about anything new. It’s rather a nebulous, aggregate disapproval that she expresses, as if she knows, not only that he’s guilty of some
thing, but that everything he says or does — even the most seemingly innocuous thing — either hides a darker purpose or is an unconscious confirmation of some established character flaw.
So Henri is somewhat alone in a full house, and somewhat by design. The kids (three boys and a girl) are all grown up, but not launched, so they’re all living at home, united in their distance from and dependency on Dad.
The title, “My Dog Stupid,” comes from the large old hound that shows up in their front yard one night. Named “Stupid” by Henri (or “Stupide”; the name really does sound better in French), the dog becomes the wedge that Henri uses to free himself of his family members, one at a time.
“My Dog Stupid” presents a refreshingly cold vision of family, a subject usually sentimentalized, both in art and politics, as if the act of saying something honest for once might bring on the collapse of civilization. True, here and there, the film finds its way toward some warm sentiments, but these are earned, not assumed, and they arrive mixed with complications and troubles, as in life.
Ultimately, the most interesting relationship here is between Henri and Cecile — though I almost wrote “Attal and Gainsbourg,” and that might be closer to the truth. Obviously, the movie is not exactly about them, it’s an adaptation of a novella by the American writer John Fante. But there’s something intimate about the film, nonetheless, as if Attal and Gainsbourg were taking aspects of their own relationship and using them to fuel and give dimension to the characters they’re playing.
Often, it’s a little yucky to see reallife couples onscreen playing people in a relationship, but that’s only when the characters are being amorous and hopeful. When things are going to hell — as with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” — or to purgatory, as with Attal and Gainsbourg here, having a reallife couple onscreen is ideal. Nobody knows better which buttons to press than one’s own partner.