Dogman: An Excellent “Work-in-Progress”

Luc Besson experienced a stroke of luck with "Léon: The Professional", while "The Big Blue" and "The Fifth Element" stand as inspired creations that highlighted his creative talent during peak periods.

In his post-50s era, Luc Besson's creative output, exemplified by "Dogman," reflects his current level of creativity. Despite containing well-crafted sentences, the film lacks coherent chapters and struggles to maintain its charm due to a disjointed and illogical plot, despite its high-end intentions.

Overall, the film exhibits both discernible strengths and weaknesses, teetering between providing light entertainment and delving into humanistic concerns. It adeptly maneuvers the balance between the spectacle of an intriguing and exaggerated genre film and a precise visual language, making it appealing to a broad commercial audience.

Besson really wanted to tell a story well, but he has gradually lost control and coordination over the storytelling.

1. Luc Besson is Always Interested in Creating Miracles

The story of "Dogman" is based on a true news that Luc Besson came across many years ago: a father cruelly locked his 10-year-old child and a dog in a cage for years. When the police eventually discovered the child, he could only move on all fours, had lost his ability to speak, and did not understand the civilized norms of human society.

Clearly, Luc Besson retained the cruel and twisted aspects of this story but completely rewrote the tragic ending, guiding it towards a fairy tale story that transcends conventional logic.

Luc Besson is clearly interested in a story that is not a brutal realist tale but a story that is full of limitless interpretations, with various commercial and narrative possibilities, satisfying his storytelling interests in religious allegories.

In this narrative, the father and older brother serve as symbols of beneficiaries under patriarchal authority influenced by religious culture. In contrast, Douglas embodies an individual who has experienced abandonment, violence, and marginalization for resisting patriarchal authority. The film goes beyond portraying him simply living with dogs; it deliberately employs his brother putting up banners to convey that Douglas has become a marginalized character, abandoned in a sense, even by God.

However, cleverly, the mirror symmetry of the banners also creates a religious-cultural double entendre. Namely, the comparison between "god man" and "dog man". In this scene, Douglas, from a perspective completely contrary to his father and brother, deviating from the divine, completes a new interpretation of religion for the first time. Therefore, "dog man" can also be understood as Douglas's unique understanding of God.

After this mocking game between the brothers, Douglas begins to show his ability to communicate with dogs as a miracle. When the father approaches the cage with a gun, all the dogs howl in sync with Douglas's emotions, and then Douglas completes a symbolic martyrdom ritual in a highly symbolic manner, performing his first miracle, communicating with the dogs, and summoning the police.

Being abandoned by his father and brother, Douglas chooses to bond with dogs in his way of life, seeing them as companions willing to live and die with him. And when he realizes that his love for Salma was nothing but a dream, the film once again escalates the miracles to a more exaggerated dimension - overnight, Douglas escapes from the animal shelter with all the dogs and officially enters the days where he is seen as the dog god by street residents and gangsters, completely living with dogs.

The reason of calling it a "miracle" is because Luc Besson clearly does not want to explain in a very realistic way on how Douglas is able to communicate with dogs and command them. Instead, after crucial plots, he directly showcases Douglas's ability and its evolution.

Rather than being a film about the emotional relationship between dogs and humans, it portrays the conflicts and contrasts between dogs and humans in terms of values and emotional patterns.

For Douglas, the sense of identity he derives from the dogs is clearly much stronger than what he gets from humans. These dogs are more like extensions of his senses, his substitute legs, and derivatives of his will.

The two scenes of outsmarting the gangsters even present this fusion of man and dog as a miracle in an exaggerated way. Douglas demonstrates his ability to communicate with dogs through the phone and conspires with them in a dimly lit fighting ring, deploying strategies to deal with the gangsters. When these miracles have developed to a completely unreal stage and have become a form of superpower, it signifies that the film's second half has completely entered the realm of a superhero film.

However, at the core of the story, Luc Besson sets up a character that is completely outside the American heroism model - a character who, whether a hero or an anti-hero, consciously or unconsciously becomes a guide or practitioner of a certain ideology. But Douglas's personality and life point to a complete void.

His miracles and superpowers are completely used for self-preservation and satisfying his psychological needs, to the point where even car theft is seen as mere entertainment, a game. The lack of purpose is the most interesting aspect of this character and also the most successful aspect of Luc Besson's portrayal of him.

Unlike superheroes or anti-heroes, Douglas is constantly alienating himself from the external world and refusing to confront it. For him, there may not be much difference between being a drag queen and being a superhero who defeats the mafia; both are role-playing games built on his own magical talents. And as the psychologist says in the beginning, role-playing is always a way to cover up and avoid certain problems like lack of love.

In the end of the story, he seems to find a false, dreamlike understanding and acceptance of love in the psychologist. Whether the psychologist's actions are out of duty or personal care, it is likely that they are the rare, if not the only, listeners Douglas has had in his long life.

This is also the tragedy of this character - the understanding and empathy he sought in his confession were ultimately achieved in a very special and distorted relationship.

However, regardless of the circumstances, he completes this confession and even realizes, perhaps for the first time, his ability to love and be a giver of love. When Douglas points out to the doctor that both are people wrapped in pain, the film follows with a well-designed plot twist, revealing that the doctor indeed has many family traumas.

So, after this catharsis and communication, Douglas chooses a completely anti-heroic and anti-religious way to end it all. The moment he publicly displays a miracle in the film, instead of describing to the doctor how incredible he is, is precisely the moment he chooses to embrace death.

In the final moment, he becomes Jesus on the cross, performing miracles with light and shadow, and then leaves the world amid the support of countless followers (dogs) - this act fundamentally denies the false believers such as father and brother, not God.

In the name of God, you judge and abandon me, so in the name of God, I perform miracles and become God, denying the foundation of your faith. Only after completely relinquishing any desire or expectation for life does Douglas dare to choose to seriously seek revenge and resist against father and brother, negating the tragic fate they imposed upon him by taking his own life.

2. An Inauthentic Narrator

However, the flaws and shortcomings of "Dogman" have basically been revealed in the above analysis - to tell this story well, Luc Besson's script is written too deliberately. LGBT issues, marginalized individuals, disabled people, victims of domestic violence... Douglas' identity issues are undoubtedly highly modern and current, but Luc Besson chooses to tell this story in an extremely classical narrative mode: the narrator and protagonist sit in front of the audience and recount their life experiences.

Before "Dogman", it had probably been a long time since a commercial film director used such a retro way to tell a story. Luc Besson did not even design too many twists and embellishments for this "fireside chat" narrative structure but tried to make this narrative structure serve its most basic function - to attract the audience into the story.

This is also the biggest problem of this film: the story is strong, but the character development is weak. The advancement of many key plot points in the film is almost entirely driven by staged and spectacular scenes.

For example, the scenes of Douglas being abused by his father and brother are reduced to fragmented key moments - Douglas seeing his father and brother abusing the dog, protecting the dog and being discovered by his father, being locked in a cage, betrayed by his brother, his father shooting and disabling him, him sending the dog to find the police to arrest his father and brother, and finally escaping.

It's evident for the audience to observe a substantial gap in the characterization and motivations of the characters in these episodic plot points. The father and brother remain almost symbolic characters throughout, leaving one uncertain about the reasons behind the father's cruelty and the brother's lack of mercy. Consequently, viewers find themselves navigating the fast-paced plot of the film and passively accepting the symbolic character design.

Similar treatment is also evident in the scenes of the mob chasing Douglas and the emotional scenes between Douglas and Selma. Apart from Douglas, the supporting characters in these scenes can only be described as fleeting. The audience doesn't even have time to sort out the underlying logic behind many of their actions and behaviors before their attention is captured by another fast-paced action or love story set by Luc Besson.

This weak dimension of supporting character development is closely related to the narrative strategy chosen by Luc Besson. If we carefully recall the entire film, we will find that the stories of these supporting characters are almost all told by Douglas to the psychologist.

The psychologist is the only character in the film who is presented from a third-person perspective independent of Douglas' point of view. As the second protagonist of the film, her life, family, and pain are portrayed much more richly compared to other characters.

So, we can further simplify the entire story as a duet between Douglas and the psychologist, where all the other characters in the film are essentially Douglas' perception and imagination. The stories of the father, brother, Selma, the mob boss, and others that we, as the audience, know about are all presented through Douglas' subjective interpretation.

In other words, in the interviews between Douglas and the psychologist, these various stories - which make up the main components of the film and the main parts of the dialogue between Douglas and the psychologist - can be seen as unreliable narratives in the conversation between a patient and a psychologist.

Therefore, the so-called miracles mentioned earlier, strictly speaking, are only truly presented once, when the dogs save Douglas from the detention center and reach the church. Only this collaboration between humans and dogs is not part of those "unreliable narratives" but is presented from a third-party objective perspective.

One of the main reasons why many viewers consider this film to be like "Joker" is probably because "Joker" also uses similar narrative tricks. The doctors at Arkham Asylum attempt to uncover the truth of the story from the Joker's mouth. But when the truth can only be revealed through the words of this complex character, it means that we can no longer grasp and pursue the true story.

The only difference is that due to the Joker's character traits, symbolic significance, and his familiarity in popular culture, more viewers naturally reject or at least question the stories he tells. However, Luc Besson tries hard to make the audience believe in advance that what Douglas says is not false.

By gradually shedding the disguise in front of the psychologist, reaching reconciliation, and confirming mutual understanding, the plot of performing miracles once again immediately conveys the plea, "please believe me, what I say is not false." This defensive undertone pervades the film, with particular emphasis when Douglas, portraying a drag queen, sings and unexpectedly switches to the original soundtrack.

The suddenness of this sound manipulation can only be rationalized by the notion that "all of this is part of Douglas' narrative and fantasy." Presenting the objective reality of the song and dance section with the original soundtrack is undoubtedly a clumsy and superficial audiovisual processing error. We have grounds to believe that Luc Besson would not commit such a fundamental mistake. It is more fitting to interpret it as Douglas imagining the former beauty of his performance within his narration.

Although the story is incredibly beautiful and full of fairy tale elements, the defense meaning, and strong subjective storytelling mixed in the fairy tale atmosphere once again disguise the true intention of the film.

In the film, Douglas gradually removes his disguise in front of the psychologist. However, outside the film, Luc Besson, as the storyteller, still chooses to tightly restrict the main body of the story to this subjective narrative, avoiding the intervention of a true perspective and presenting the story in a different way.

Perhaps the inability to truly face oneself, the repeated hesitation between genre film and personal expression, and relying on spectacular plots to cover up logical loopholes in the plot have long blurred the boundary between sincerity and skill. This is the real inner presentation of Luc Besson, who has experienced the ups and downs for many years after the “Me Too” movement.