Black Dog review - a drifter in China

We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.

But the dusty badlands where the Eastwoodian protagonist touches down in Black Dog is in the north-west of China in 2008, and this is a Chinese film from director Guan Hu, maker of patriotic action movies like The Eight Hundred (2020). So how far will his new film go in showing a backwater of his modernising country as a bad-ass dead zone? The answer is: only part of the way, which means that the handsomely made picture only engages us part of the time.

The lean, mean and super-laconic Lang (played by the Taiwanese-Canadian Eddie Peng) returns to his family home in a desolate low-rise town half-pancaked under the ashen sands of the Gobi Desert, a municipality of slag heaps, train hooters, left-behind bungee jumps, and the endless howls and whelps of hundreds of abandoned canines. It’s as if Battersea Dogs Home has been emptied onto Timbuktu.

Lang hasn’t returned to do much beyond the usual bout of outsider-ish existentialism and checking back with his ailing, estranged pa. He’s just been released from gaol for the alleged killing of a local, whose family runs a “snake-rearing” business and might be keen to toast Lang’s arrival in his own blood. The film is superbly shot in a wide format by Guan and cinematographer Gao Weizhe; from the memorable opening image, when an army of dogs manages to upend a small bus, the duo show that widescreen is about filling the frame from back to front, not just left to right.

More or less the only large gleaming building in town is the police station, and it’s here that Lang is fixed up with a dog-catching job. The surfeit of strays is putting off investors in the emptying town, and “we need a good business environment”, Lang is told. So begins the film’s main point of interest – Lang’s touching relationship with a particularly wild mutt he manages to tame (or perhaps, in time-honoured fashion, it’s the other way round).

The weird-looking dog of the title is said to be a Jack Russell-greyhound cross. To me, it looked like a charcoal whippet with a dose of Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars. The animal won an award in the unofficial “Palm Dog” section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, while the movie itself won in Un Certain Regard. (The film is not to be confused with a recent British feature of the same name.)

In a town where Orwellian loudspeakers constantly tell people what to do, Lang’s hanging onto the hound as a pet is an anti-authority play, for sure. But half-measures fill the film. Lang is half a drifter in what’s left of a dogville half-roiled by simmering conflicts, half-reconciliations and semi-alarming earth tremors, occasionally backed by the cracked laments of Pink Floyd on the soundtrack.

There’s little sign of corruption among the cops or civic leaders, and the snake-rearing crime heavy (named Butcher Hu) wouldn’t last long in an episode of TV’s Fargo: he turns out to be as much a pussycat as the half-docile tiger in the town’s half-abandoned zoo. Getting back to the dogs, the credits list more than 80 named canine contributors along with a truckload of their supervisors, including the pooches’ own make-up artists, drivers and a stylist (presumably for the lead).

Guan is clearly a director with a good mix of technique and commitment, plus a healthy eye for the oddball. He’s interested in the stresses of rural depopulation, but doesn’t want to scold his society for too many deeper flaws: his film is strong on bark and less so on bite. At the close, locals cheer the Beijing Olympics and a low, blood-orange sun suddenly illuminates the blue-grey desert at the edge of town. The proud red star is clearly rising, not setting.

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