Lots of cliches move the emotional gears of this Chinese film, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The titular canine is an extreme outcast in a former mining town fitfully undergoing redevelopment on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The main character, an almost mute ex-con who has returned to the town, finds a job rounding up the numerous strays that get in the way of the redevelopment, and then bonds with a nameless, impossibly skinny black mutt: Two souls who find in each other a kindred spirit by default. Director Guan Hu demonstrates a genuine talent for framing action, though he gets an inordinate amount of assistance from the setting. This gray, disintegrating burg is perhaps the most depressing municipality in a Chinese movie since those communities abandoned to the Three Gorges dam project in Still Life by Jia Zhangke, who appears in Black Dog as the local extralegal fixer. 

Lang (Eddie Peng) isn’t hated by everyone in town; only the butcher who blames him for the death of his nephew, the act that landed him in prison, though from what we learn it was mainly the nephew’s fault. Most residents remember Lang as a once-promising rock musician and stunt motorcyclist who worked in a local circus. With his father dying in a hospital and a sister who moved away, Lang has no family for support but gets by on the goodwill of good people, of which there seem to be many in this blighted place. The black stray has no such support, since he tends to bite people and everyone thinks he has rabies. At first, Lang tries to catch him in order to claim the reward but the stray’s wily intelligence impresses him and after the inevitable capture he grows fond of the animal and even fashions a custom-made motorcycle sidecar for him. Meanwhile, his father asks Lang to help him die in peace as the town is slowly torn down. The animals in the zoo Lang’s father used to manage are set free and join the strays in taking over the ruined neighborhoods while everyone is out in the Gobi Desert watching the solar eclipse. Though it’s a motif that’s eye-rollingly obvious, Guan pulls it off with some incredibly staged tableaux.

Black Dog is the kind of neorealist melodrama that’s constantly preparing you for an epiphany, and while a lot of the devices feel worn—Lang’s extreme reticence adds nothing to the story and feels more like a gimmick for garnering sympathy—the movie’s uniform tone of despair works in the end by not overplaying the sentimentality. One reason is how intensely natural the dogs are. Even in packs they seem more disciplined as actors than the humans. 

In Mandarin. Opens Sept. 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Black Dog home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Seventh Art Pictures (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.