Capturing grief is not always the easiest thing to do on screen, but in Bianca Lucas’ debut feature film, Love Dog, the sense of loss that pervades every inch of the frame and minute of the running time is strikingly authentic. Filmed in the American south across the course of the pandemic and through various states of lockdown, this elliptical and deeply moving drama belies its indie budget and skeletal crew. While it may have occasional rough edges, the effect of these is to accentuate the film’s rawness and amplify the power and poignancy of its portrait of a man consumed by an emotional torrent. After picking up a special mention in Locarno, the film screens in the Kinoscope section of Sarajevo Film Festival, where Lucas also curates the European shorts programme.
Set in and around Natchez, Mississippi, the film follows John (John Dicks) as he returns from a stint working on an oil rig to find that his girlfriend, Charlotte, has committed suicide. In an unfamiliar house, John is lumbered with the now orphaned dog, Sam, and besides sporadic interactions with friend TJ (TJ Tarver) and a local woman he gives a ride to, Bec (Becca Begnaud), he spends much of the time alone, roiling in self-pity and unable to see or think far beyond himself.
Particularly in its early scenes, the world of the film is highly internalised. DP Jozefina Gocman hues close to Dicks, often constructing frames to include his body in the foreground as if the audience is hunkered in his perspective – looking over his shoulder from the backseat of a pick-up truck, for instance. Lucas and Gocman utilise a variety of close-ups, slightly off-kilter compositions, and selective focus to leave the audience ill at ease and with a heightened awareness of their proximity to John. You are being asked to share in, empathise with, and understand his viewpoint, even when his behaviour may challenge how much you like him as a person.
How the film deals with the memories that come flooding, unbidden, into the mind’s eye also places you squarely inside John’s head. The flashbacks that pepper the film are not dialogue scenes that seek to unpack the nature of life before Charlotte’s suicide, they are fragments and flashes, steeped more in mundanity than import. The way that the rain runs down the window will remind John of shower water running down Charlotte’s naked torso; a certain quality of light will prompt a recurring impression of her rolling over in bed with morning hair; a brief instance of contact with Sam brings back thoughts of her skin. The fact that Sam acts as a conduit for memories of his former owner makes the relationship John has with him fraught. John bubbles with rage about having been left behind: “You think you’re dead?” he spits, “you’re not dead, I’m dead – you’re a murderer.”
There are a couple of different ways that the wider world comes encroaching into what is otherwise a quite hermetically sealed existence for John. The first is through a local radio station that takes readers’ letters and turns them into country songs. Although the actual songs are not heard John usually switches the radio off before they begin, the letters detailing a variety of hardships and heartbreaks are included. Whether they can be said to be representative of the country or not, they form John’s exposure to it, and they create an almost overwhelming sense of collective pain and struggle. “We’re a nation with PTSD,” someone intones at one point.
This sense is then echoed and embellished by John’s forays onto a Russian roulette-style social media platform on which he connects at random with various people – the film spends more time on the conversations he ends up engaging in about the state of the world than any more personal, private connections. These moments have two impacts. The first is to show John’s comparative comfort in engaging in abstract philosophical discourse about ‘the way things are going’ with strangers when compared to his ill ease in any real dialogues that might end up broaching the anger and suffering that he is desperately trying to batten down. The second is, like with the radio show, to universalise John’s suffering – in this instance by creating clear parallels between John’s individual sadness and broader societal anguish, not least that felt in the time of the pandemic, which is what necessitated this isolated approximation of social interaction in the first place.
While John’s slow trudge through the grieving process – or, as it might in fact be, his attempts to defer it – may sound like interminably heavy fare, such a process of course morphs and changes. If a substantial amount of Love Dog does observe John indulging his own solipsism, the film doesn’t fall into the same trap and, eventually, there comes a point where a corner is turned. The broad narrative progression here is undeniably familiar ground but it is the intimacy with which the audience has experienced all the elements of John’s grief, and thus the force with which they experience the subsequent catharsis, that makes the film so memorable. After being entwined with this character and their struggle, even the merest hint of the sun’s rays bursting through the clouds proves heart-wrenching and profound.
Director: Bianca Lucas
Screenplay: Bianca Lucas, John Dicks
Cast: John Dicks, TJ Tarver, Becca Begnaud, Corinne Bordelon, Brooke Keel Bullock, Ernie Schaeffer
Producers: Bianca Lucas, Joaquín del Paso
Cinematography: Jozefina Gocman
Editing: Omar Guzman, Greg Karpinski
Sound: Thomas Becka
Production companies: Love Dogs (Poland), Carcava Cine (Mexico), Manosanta Studios, Film Exchange (US)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In English
84 mins
