M, 118 minutes
4 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
Featuring a long-eared black dog that rides a sidecar and a muted performance from a high-profile actor, this distinctive new arthouse film strikes a different note from the many action spectacles from China in recent decades. With its whippet, a wily stray and its outsider protagonist just out of prison, it is rather like their antithesis.
There is little grand or glorious about the desert border town in north-western China where Black Dog is set, nor its troubled anti-hero, the main character on two legs. Shunned by others and distanced from his alcoholic father, Lang (Eddie Peng) finds that though back home his life has fragmented. His hometown is like a ghost town taken over by stray dogs since their owners left. And now that the oil industry that sustained its development has moved on, it is in terminal decline.
One would think that the presence of Peng, the popular Canadian-Taiwanese actor with a filmography of around 30 films, would fill the screen. But his character Lang has been given a past life as a former stunt motorcycle rider, and the member of a once-famous band. The world has moved on, leaving him and from his hometown behind. It might be time to do a Jack Kerouac, and hit the road.
Our emotional engagement with Lang is restricted by an aesthetic dominated by moody long and wide shots of his figure, moving like a speck in the desert landscape or mooching around town like another stray. Peng has more than one cute pooch to compete with here.
Bleak realities rendered beautiful. a film with more than its fair share of striking scenes
As director and co-writer Guan Hu has said in interview, the narrative is located in a particular time and place. The screenplay he worked on with his co-writer, Rui Ge, is set in 2008 when China was getting ready for the Olympics in Beijing and intent on an all-round tidy-up before visitors explored the regions.
Dilapidated and deserted buildings, collapsing infrastructure and idle townsfolk are unlovely in themselves, but the artistry of cinematographer Weizhe Gao renders these bleak realities beautiful. Thanks to his aesthetic sense, this film has more than its fair share of striking scenes.
From the start the look is distinctive. In the opening sequence in the Gobi Desert lensed with a greenish-grey tint, a battered bus makes its way across the frame. The only moving object among sparse tumbleweed, until, without warning, it flips onto its side and a mass of wild dogs from out of nowhere rush towards it. One fears the worst, but like quite a few scenes, a mishap is treated with humour and distance.
Mishaps are treated with humour and a bit of distance
The bus passengers are unharmed, but one amongst them, a young man called Lang who is known to some, wants to complete the journey into town, alone and on foot. Somebody’s money has gone missing. Is Lang behaving shiftily, or is he just intent on being alone? He remains something of an enigma, unknowable until the end.
As the backstory to this prodigal son becomes clear, it is his solitariness, his silences and the suspicion he engenders that are intriguing. After spending ten years in gaol for a serious crime, Lang has paid his dues. Returning to his remote hometown he is, however, not at all welcome. Some, like Butcher Hu (Jia Zhang-Ke), a keeper of venomous snakes and uncle of the young man who died, believe Lang’s punishment too light and threaten revenge.
Lang is assigned a job as one of the dog catchers, rounding up and impounding the stray animals that overrun the town. While he lives the feral life, Lang forms a bond, in the most irregular way, with the titular black dog, a graceful, agile whippet (Xin the dog). Hundreds of dogs were cast as extras here, and one can only wonder how one stunning scene of the animals sitting as still as statues dotting the hills by the side of the road, was possible to achieve.
Sixth-generation filmmaker Guan Hu, now in his fifties, was a new graduate of the Beijing film academy when the eye-wateringly gorgeous work of some of his fifth-generation forebears, like Farewell My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern, were on the big screen. I wonder if we are watching in Black Dog the momentum driving a different direction.
Peng has, btw, since adopted three canine members of the cast, including Xin.
First published in the Canberra Times on 13 December 2024. Jane’s reviews are also published on Rotten Tomatoes