Been bullied? This film is especially for you. Been bullied and, yet, somehow gained from it, too? This film is perfect for you. Been bullied, somehow gained from it and also felt for your tormentor? This film is especially perfect for you.
Sit down and marvel at Marcello Fonte as he climbs through a back window to get into your heart. Small and boney, with a body built of straw and twigs, Fonte pushes his toothpick arms into the sleeves of a worn out and bruised up character also named Marcello – a financially strapped father who owns a dog grooming shop called, “Dogman.” It sits, among other small shops, like a decaying tooth in the rotted out mouth of a seaside village in the south of modern day Italy.
Based on a real guy named Pietro De Negri, Dogman’s Marcello is divorced but still dedicated to his young daughter, Alida (Alida Baldari Calabria). He is also in an abusive friendship with a brute of a thug named Simone (Edoardo Pesce).
As the first few minutes unfold, Simone is busy bullying Marcello into being the driver for a break-in job he and another friend are eager to pull. Initially, Marcello refuses. Simone, though, built like a bear made of brick, is not someone who takes no for an answer. Wisely, Marcello reconsiders – the boys hop in his truck and off they go.
The scene is a bit of misdirection. At first, we feel for Marcello – he’s being forced by Simone to participate in a crime of which he wants no part. After the deed is done, though, Marcello asks for his cut. With that, our view of him changes – he’s bullied, yes, but he’s also benefiting from that bullying. The same brutal Simone who terrorizes Marcello also puts money into Marcello’s pockets.
But, wait, writer Ugo Chiti and writer/director Matteo Garrone are not finished. During the drive back, Simone’s equally awful partner laughs about how he had to shove a yapping Chihuahua in the freezer so it wouldn’t alert the neighbours. At great risk to himself, Marcello returns to the burgled home to save the dog’s life. Quietly moving, the scene establishes Marcello as a somewhat morally corrupt, though, essentially good hearted person.
After cashing in his small take, Marcello uses the money to treat himself and Alida to a day of scuba diving. In the water, far away from Simone and the dreary drip, drip, drip of his life, Marcello finds peace. And, with his daughter by his side, he is finally able to be his best self. In a better world, he’d be that way everywhere and everyday.
Though Simone terrorizes Marcello the most, the rest of the shop owners, on the strip, have had enough of his nonsense, too. The owner of a video lottery shop proposes that they hire some guys to get rid of him.
The first time we see Marcello, he’s in the back room of his shop, trying to bathe a big, angry bull of a dog. Though the monster of a canine is chained to the back wall and sits in a large industrial sized stainless steel sink, Marcello approaches him with great caution. Using a mop with a soapy-wet cloth hanging on its end, he manages to bathe the dog without getting close enough to risk losing a finger or worse.
In the end, Marcello’s gentleness wins over his furry customer. Garrone concludes the scene with a shot of Marcello using a hair dryer to dry the area just underneath the dog’s mouth. Clearly delighting in the warm air blowing up under his lower jaw and rippling up the sides of his mouth, the dog, once ready to tear Marcello apart, is now putty in his hands.
Though it passes quickly, this introductory scene is a wonderful example of visual storytelling. It establishes the basic gentleness and decency of our lead character while also revealing his fatal flaw – one that will come back to haunt him when the stakes could not be higher.
It does all this while also setting up the central metaphor that informs the basic dynamic between Marcello and Simone. Though, more accurately, what the scene does is set up the way Marcello would like to think of the relationship and, more crucially, the direction he would like to think that the relationship could go in. It’s compact, efficient and poetic cinema – lovely.
A bleak study of a decent man trying to survive in a cruel world, “Dogman” sticks Marcello in a no-win situation. Though he gets along with his fellow shop owners, he is also a friend of their main pain in the ass. Funny thing is, though, Simone is also Marcello’s biggest pain in the ass. He bullies him and refuses to pay for drugs he pretty much rips out of Marcello’s hands. If Marcello resists or complains at all, Simone is quick to use his tremendous size advantage to get Marcello to back down.
Incredibly, Marcello also counts Simone as a friend. He also looks up to him. Why? Simone simply doesn’t give a fuck. He does what he wants to do – period. You don’t like it – tough. He doesn’t knock on the door – he kicks it in. A part of Marcello admires that force of personality. A part of him also benefits from it – financially and otherwise. The other wrinkle in the relationship revolves around Marcello’s seemingly fruitless attempt to get Simone to love him back. It is a lost cause, but Marcello is a bit of a champion of lost causes – as the touching opening scene wonderfully illustrates.
Garrone has brought the same kind of extraordinary feel for rotted out neighbourhoods that informed “Gomorrah” (2008) here to “Dogman.” It’s all there – the crimes, the familial dysfunction and the drug use. Though not as bleak as that previous film that put Garrone on the map, the desperation of its citizens – most acutely expressed in Marcello’s struggle to make it through everyday – is present.
That is not to say that “Dogman” is a total downer – it’s not. And that’s a credit to the conception of the Marcello character and to the talents of the actor portraying him.
Marcello Fonte pulls us in to him. He makes us love him despite his many flaws. That face – so fragile, so kind, so innocent – holds the full content of his life’s struggle within its bony, sunken and bruised surface. He thoroughly convinces whether begging Simone to stop, gently caring for his furry clientele or, in the final moments of the film when everything begins to unravel. Fonte manages the miraculous feat of breaking through the artifice of the art form to bring us a man we cannot imagine doesn’t exist. No wonder he won Best Actor at Cannes in 2018.
In the end, “Dogman” takes us to a place beyond the grim surfaces of poverty, petty crime and senseless violence. That place is a deeply depressing one where actions taken too late to right a crisis only lead to further isolation and hopelessness.
A ruthless irony visits Marcello in the final moments of “Dogman” and, really, his story could not have ended up any other way. That is because Marcello is unlike anyone else in this dying town – he still cares, he still has hope. Wisely or unwisely, everyone else has, long ago, discarded such silly fantasy like a used up rag.
Maybe Marcello should’ve as well. But, then, we wouldn’t love him as much.
