Man’s Best Client
Actor Laetitia Dosch makes her directorial debut with the year’s oddest legal thriller.
Dog on Trial
Director: Laetitia Dosch • Writers: Laetitia Dosch, Anne-Sophie Bailly
Starring: Laetitia Dosch, François Damiens, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Kodi
France / Switzerland • 1hr 21mins
Opens Hong Kong April 3 • IIB
Grade: B-
Are Hong Kong distributors trolling us? A week after we got the Ayuko Tsukahara-fest we’re getting all the house pets all the time. Once you’ve finished up with the stellar, animated Flow, about a cat surviving an environmental apocalypse, you can go across the corridor (probably) to check out Dog on Trial (Le Procès du chien), about, erm, a dog on trial. It’s every bit as daffy as it sounds, but director-writer-star Laetitia Dosch has somehow crammed a meditation on modern women’s rights and the rapid creation of radicalised, social media-powered interest mobs into a super-slight, almost gossamer dramedy that, at its core, is about animal rights and what exactly the way we treat them says about us. There is a dog star, Kodi, who won the Palm Dog at Cannes last year and yes, the Palm Dog is a thing. Other winners have included Lucy from Wendy and Lucy, Dug from Up, Bob from The Lobster, Messi from Anatomy of a Fall and Xin from Black Dog. Sure, why not? If that’s not enough Dog on Trial is billed as a Swiss co-production, proving the Swiss do more than help the ultra-rich dodge taxes and avoid passing wealth on to heirs of Jews murdered in Nazi death camps. So… diversification.
How does anyone say no?
Avril Lucciani (Dosch) is a not-very-successful lawyer in Geneva? Lugano? Freiburg? Somewhere in Switzerland, whose tendency to take on hopeless causes and cases gets her in trouble with her boss when we meet her. Win cases and get paid or she’s fired. So when a partially blind man, Dariuch Michovski (François Damiens) comes to her asking for help with his dog Cosmos (Kodi), she looks at the raggedy griffon cross and can’t help but say yes. Cosmos’s life is literally on the line, as according to Swiss law, a pooch caught biting three times gets the big needle, and Dariuch has just been fined for Cosmos biting a migrant worker, Lorene Furtado (Anabela Moreira), on the face. Cosmos is going to the gallows. Avril decides she’ll challenge the sentence by challenging Swiss precedent that posits dogs as objects, not sentient beings afforded the right to exist; Avril is defending the first dog in a court of law since the Middle Ages. Helping her case is a sweet-natured animal trainer, Marc (Jean-Pascal Zadi), who tries to explain Cosmos’s behaviour to the court – and winds up painting him as a misogynist. Woops. Facing off against Avril is the frothing Roseline Bruckenheimer (Xavier Dolan regular Anne Dorval), a prosecutor with political aspirations who stokes public discourse to a fever pitch.
Dosch supposedly based the story on a handful of actual court cases from the past few years where dog owners were held accountable for their pets’ crimes and misdemeanours, one of which went all the way to the Court of Human Rights. Despite the lean running time (bless you, Ms Dosch), Dog on Trial has some fat that could be trimmed in favour of more procedural detail. This is ultimately a courtroom thriller with an unconventional defendant, so let’s see more of how Cosmos’s case comes together or falls apart; let’s see more of how Avril likens Cosmos’s plight to that of women; let’s dive into our inconsistent regard for animals; let’s see more of how easily we fall into tribes these days and happily accept hills to die on. You know what we don’t need? A subplot about an abused neighbour boy who escapes to Avril’s flat whenever he can. Other than showing us Avril is a good person – a fact that’s already established – the relationship does nothing for the story. Also? Romance with Marc. Sure, he’s a nice guy, good with dogs. And? Dog on Trial doesn’t need to be longer, just choosier, especially when Dosch the writer-director is relying on story, rather than filmmaking creativity, to carry the day.