Dogman - Dogs, love and bullets

Everything is already anagrammed in the title and summarized in the opening quote.

The divine incarnated in man's best friend who does not confuse love and hate and who when he loves does so without reservations.

Douglas “DOuG”, which in pronunciation has the same assonance as 'dog', is literally a poor Christ, crucified by a family and a society that do not recognize him and reject him. Marginalized from the real, human world, he is welcomed and saved again and again by a community of four-legged 'children' and a motley crew of drag queens. In disguise and in Shakespeare's words, the lifeline to not be yourself and become whoever you want, because 'if you know how to interpret Shakespeare you can do anything'. In the dressing room mirror, the actor's reflection tells the truth, the character's mask reveals the person and a man in a wheelchair can stand during the performance, learning on stage how to get back on his feet there, down from the stage, at every trip of life.

On stage everything turns upside down: the impossible becomes possible, the last is first, in the darkness of oblivion the footlights come on and the silence of the world turns into thunderous applause. Doug 'Dogman' is Octavio from Amores perros, he is Joker from Phillips, he is Robin Hood. He is a child who grew up in pain and has learned on his own skin to no longer confuse pity with love and to look for love wherever it happens. The pain keeps him standing, the pain moves him, the pain makes him talk to those who share the same wounds. Pain defines him because 'no one exists without a past' and in his past there is only violence. He elevates pain through art, books, music, singing, theatre. The theater which is like religion: a staging which the believer believes to be reality. Thanks to that illusion, art sublimates pain, hides the past, powders scars and everyone can be anyone, especially everyone can be themselves.

Both in meaning and in signifier Dogman is an ode to art in its highest and most sacred manifestation. Sacred in that it is separated from the real, material and concrete level and which, for this reason, allows us to reread the human experience in that spiritual perspective from which man increasingly distances himself and which he increasingly struggles to recognise. Here then the divine intervenes by literally putting its 'paw', opening a breach on the human front so that the instruments of the art of the actor and of the theater can play the right strings of an emotional plan that has been silenced for too long but which only there, in those notes, hides the possibility of escape from how we see ourselves and of salvation in how we are. How true it is that the theater is a mirror of human life, that speculum in which the Athenians 'watched themselves looking' and did so outdoors, under the sky and under the eyes of the gods.

Caleb Landry Jones embodies all this in body and words with a very high evocative and emotional power. Luc Besson's work with the actor (and with the dogs) is something that goes beyond 'simple' directing. Actor and director share a common and painful feeling with the story and the character and the careful and refined construction work allows the spectator to be given a story with a remarkable emotional and empathetic charge: not cinema, but the art of cinema as it should always be done, respecting its being art and not just a product.