Natural Frequency: on Dog Lady
Even before there is anything discernible on the screen, Dog Lady is evidently a film with the rhythms and sounds of nature at its patient heart. Opening deep in the undergrowth, the apposite snuffling of a canine precedes our introduction to an unnamed woman (played with quiet humanity by co-director Verónica Llinás) stalking the forest with a slingshot. The level of her success is hard to ascertain, but a later scene in which she memorably knocks an abusive youth off his bike with a rock from quite a range would suggest that her aim is true.
As the film’s elliptical stall is set, it becomes all the more difficult to imagine her taking the life of a woodland animal, as she wanders the bucolic environs of the pampas in what can only be assumed is a self-imposed exile, surrounded by the affectionate troupe of dogs that explain the film’s title.
Eschewing the limitations of conventional narrative, Llinás and her co-director, Laura Citarella craft a meditative visual poem that observes the daily routines of this woman without ever feeling the need to enforce plot propulsion. At one point, our lady lights a fire outside her lean-to-cum-shack and amidst the rubbish and debris, the lick of flames slowly strikes up an accord with the chirruping of the forrest’s crickets. This sonic overlay neatly encapsulates the film’s own bewitching power, which gently ensnares its audience with the beautiful sounds of nature. At other times, the camera is happy just to sit back and watch as the woman and her quadraped family traverse their rundown kingdom. There are echoes of Julian Pölsler’s The Wall in this portrait of a silent woman communing with the world around her, and Dog Lady proves to be just as transfixing.
The observational style of the piece extends to the distance added by Soledad Rodriguez’s elegant framing. Contrasting with its compositional splendour, the summertime aesthetic calls to mind Anna and Wilhelm Sasnal’s It Looks Pretty From a Distance in its dry dirtiness, a film which also approached its story of social outcasts through the minutiae of the daily travails of survival.
As the woman goes about her business, collecting detritus to continue building her ramshackle nest, she is imbued with a wonderful resourcefulness and resilience by Llinás, who without any dialogue, has scarcely anything to work with other than her eyes. She flies in the face of the typical cat-lady stereotypes, and there is no cooing, or chattering to her companions, despite their clear affection for each other. She is less master to her dogs than dominant member of the pack, and in her stillness and silent contemplation she is exceptional.
“I walk as if I’m flying; no cage, no steps…” A man that she meets recites this poetry to her, an accurate summation of her own position and mental state. The circumstances that brought her to where she is remain unspoken, just as she is herself is tantalisingly out of reach. A couple of auditory interludes suggest a past spent in the bustle of the city, and sojourns to Buenos Aires to have dinner and watch TV with an old friend (or raid the odd fridge or vegetable patch) happen occasionally. Even when people do speak to her, she remains unmoved, the dogs (Llinás’ own) that swarm around her feet as she walks being the ones who know her best, and that’s just the way she wants it.
This review was originally published on the now defunct Vérité Film Magazine blog as part of their coverage of the New Director/New Films (@NDNF) festival in New York, March 2015.