With "Dogman", the director of "Gomorra" gives us a strong film, dense, almost paralyzing

Twenty minutes that you can not hear a fly fly. Besides, they do not fly anymore. They are petrified like spectators. The last twenty minutes of "Dogman" are of an incredible dramatic power. Really unheard of. Mythological

In fact, the film ends as it had begun – very loudly – in the salon of a dog groomer, somewhere in Italy. Marcello is preparing to wash a furious pitbull. So furious that one wonders if the chain that holds him will hold. All frail, Marcello is not afraid, he loves dogs, terrifying as cute. He knows how to take them.

He is afraid of Simoné, a human rottweiller. Shaved skull, sticky yellow training, it tumbles without warning in his shop, demanding his dose of coke. Marcello runs, but asks him to consume elsewhere, because his little girl is with him. Simoné does not want to hear anything, he knows only the strength, he terrorizes the whole neighborhood, a real beast. Everyone has enough to send him behind bars, but everyone also knows that he will return three months later, even more enraged. And as Marcello is the weakest, the most sentimental, the most loyal too; Simoné exploits him as he pleases for his bad moves.

Matteo Garrone was inspired by an authentic event but the story is eternal, mythological. It recalls that of the Minotaur, the terrifying monster who prowls – we hear him come and go on his big bike. The Italian director has an incomparable way to live his decor, a dilapidated neighborhood at the edge of the sea. It never sees a tourist, it's too dirty, but despite appearances, there is an art reign to live in Italian. The small traders all eat together at the trattoria, sometimes talk about Simoné, how to get rid of it.

By what means does Matteo Garrone give such a density to his images? There is the setting, theatrical and yet outdoors. There is light always at the limit of glaucous, cliché and sublime. There are actors who never look like actors, we are among the little people as we say. Marcello (not at all Mastroianni), Marcello Fonte is a cross between Buster Keaton and Totò. He embodies this little man, nice with everyone, whose eyes shine when he sees his girlfriend. It gives it a thickness, a complexity, a universality. He is not a hero to the Theseus, nor an angel under the civil code, but he is a saint when he returns to the scene of a robbery where Simoné locked up a noisy chihuahua in the freezer. The scene is unforgettable, the interpretation also, rewarded at the Cannes Film Festival.

A mbad of brutal muscles

As for Edoardo Pesce – Simoné, it is a mbad of muscles so brutal that even the The screen starts to shake when it appears.

Matteo Garrone finds here his full power of "Gomorra", moreover his ability to raise the tension tétanise a rottweiller in the final sequence. It is in the eyes of this Molossus attending the confrontation between Marcello and Simoné that we read the question: what distinguishes human nature from bestiality? Garrone transforms a news item into a mythological fable about the cult of force, the right of the strongest. This does not lack resonance in Italy, from Mussolini to Salvini

From Matteo Garrone. Scenario : Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Matteo Garrone, Mbadimo Gaudioso. Image : Nicolai Brüel. Decor : Dimitri Capuani. With Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Alida Baldari … 1:42.