A dog in the dock and another doing red carpet interviews: why has Cannes gone canine crazy?
One of the most eagerly anticipated talents about to grace the red carpet at Cannes this week is tall, blond, leggy and has a seductively husky voice. Par for the course, you might think, at the glitzy, notoriously libidinous film festival on the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur – were it not for that lolling tongue and the fact that the bag in the hands of the entourage is more likely to be a doggydoo than a Birkin or Chanel.
Fawn-maned griffon cross Kodi is the star of French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch’s directorial debut Dog on Trial, a film that feels precision-engineered for Cannes’ 77th edition in more ways than one. Dosch tells me the following origin story about her first feature. Three years ago, while the script was taking shape inside her head, she bumped into the director Justine Triet on the train from Cannes to Paris.
Dosch had been a Triet admirer ever since playing the lead in her 2013 picture Age of Panic, and was excited when the woman two years her senior revealed her future plans. “I am working on a film about a trial,” Triet said. “Me too,” Dosch replied, incredulously. There was a child in it, Triet went on, and someone was blind. “In mine too,” Dosch whispered.
And, added Triet, there was a dog. “I thought, ‘Now I’m fucked,’” Dosch recalls, her devastation clear as she speaks via video call from Paris. “She’s doing my film, the one I wanted to make. And now I have to change my subject.”
Things did not turn out as feared. Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or last year, sweeping the board at the European film awards in the winter