Luc Besson is with me Dogman his own Joker staged. He explores how much humiliation someone can endure before they explode. Various ups and downs have to be shown: breaking away from the family, a failed love, the search for a job and belonging in a society that seems to have no place for marginalized people like Douglas. He has been confined to a wheelchair since his childhood abuse. He can only stand up with great effort and thanks to the metal supports on his legs. If he were to run, Douglas is certain that he would die.
Mit Caleb Landry Jones (Nitram), Luc Besson has found an outstanding leading actor to embody all this torment. He shoulders the film with fervent method acting and helps it achieve real highlights. At some point, Douglas joins a drag show after a young performer introduces him to the art of acting, dressing up and applying make-up. Douglas seeks refuge in Shakespeare and in role play, in creating a facade to cover up his own suffering. But that is an old-fashioned, questionable narrative that Luc Besson is using here: crossdressing, drag, and the transgression of gender role models in his film are primarily accompanied by traumatic experiences, abuse, and destruction. It serves the prejudice of simply compensating for psychological wounds using the disguise and transgression of norms and conventions.
That Dogman The reason why it doesn’t break is because both Besson’s directing work and Jones’ acting give this character the greatest possible dignity that the script, with all its violent blows of fate, still allows. When Douglas performs on stage as a drag artist for the first time, it is an unforgettable moment. He appears as Édith Piaf and sings The crowd in the playback. A shimmering black and white figure in the spotlight, only the mouth stands out reddish. Tears in my eyes, legs shaking in pain. Later, Douglas will transform into, among other things, Marilyn Monroe and have a shootout with a gangster cartel.
Luc Besson takes his unintelligent but thrilling genre cinema to the extreme. In colorful lighting atmospheres you can feel what can only be felt. Drastic violence, psychological crises, blood and tears want to provoke violent emotions. The exaggeration of trash alone gives his emotional overpowering strategy a self-confident wink. This is where the dogs come into play, who have accompanied Douglas since his childhood and become his only friends. Dogs are better, fairer creatures, as we should experience again here. The dog whisperer taught them amazing things, and so the trained four-legged friends, who look sweetly into the camera, can do all the work for their master that was physically denied him.
Dogman doesn’t even shy away from the absurdity of letting dogs break into a noble property. Pulp with an announcement! A formulaic, predictable work. But it also reveals a keen eye for the tragicomic and essential, even though its social criticism is shouted to the world on a simple level and with a megaphone.
Although Besson purports to introduce a character with shades of gray who demands discussion, essentially the moral of Dogman but very simple and clear, the point is quickly understood. It’s all about the money, this film angrily states. So the destitute have a bad hand. When financial aid to his dog shelter is cut off, Douglas is also threatened with losing his last meaning in life. The counterattack follows. As much as Luc Besson likes to spin freely: Inside Dogman a sympathetic heart beats for outsiders. Despite all the manipulative tricks and emotional blackmail, you can hardly be angry with it as an entertainment film. The beatification of its protagonist creates its own foolish utopia.
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