If the word of mouth was able to give the shy exit of Case dog an amply deserved resonance, let us assure that its release in physical format will only amplify the phenomenon! Back on this first film promise of an exciting career for its director Jean-Baptiste Durand...
Dog loves
Dog (Anthony Bajon) and Mirales (Raphael Quenard). Pots to life, to death, which seem magnetized by the streets of their small town where they spend time wandering between the square, its narrow alleys and the room where they lock up to use the controllers of a PlayStation... Living in small jobs and deals, this is the arrival of young Elsa (Galatéa Bellugi) and the feelings Dog develops for her that will explode their routine.
The young director Jean-Baptiste Durand willingly proposes to see his first court, He came from Romania (available in DVD supplements) as an entire intent note for its Case dog. He who comes from the same backgrounds as the two protagonists whom he depicts under the lens of his camera – he grew up a few blocks away from the village where the feature film was shot – he fits in his own words in the lineage of Giono, Pagnol or others Dumont. A cinema of territory, anchored in this southern France, far away from the French Riviera, yachts and tourists, but just as crushed by the heat and stubborn stridulations of cicadas.
Bajon & Quenard
And like a Dumont, he enjoys mixing professional actors and perfect strangers, brewing appearances, combining « beautiful and ugly » within a casting that makes the very essence of this Case dog. As many reasons as Anthony Bajon's presence, which had already been seen in a film with a striking regionalism (the Teddy Bukherma brothers), was the perfect choice to embody one of the two pillars of this duo.
On the other side, Raphaël Quenard's deginganded silhouette. A mouth that has already been seen repeatedly in second roles – hilariously hilarious in Cut!, but also present at Mandico or Dupious – but which finally becomes, with his character of Mirales, the main role of a feature film. A strange actor, always out of step and with indelible phrasing combining raw slang and sustained vocabulary, including the beginnings within the industry of snuff movies (see quote from his interview with Kombini (see below) will probably have scored for life.
« We started making improsts, but finally, the movie never came out. But in 2018, I made another film with that same director, Thomas Liegeard, and that's the best pitch you've ever heard. It's called Flash Drive. I did it with a 94-year-old old lady who died during the shooting. »
What a perfect choice to embody this plebeian but cultivated Mirales, a drug dealer manipulating the verb, far from the used clichés to the rope of the prolo cinema. And this « Case dog »It is inevitably he who holds the leash in the dominant/dominated relationship that binds him to Dog, the character of Bajon. Strange friendship relationship, willingly toxic but never Manichaean, enclosing these two lobbies in a carcan of malfeasance and unsaid leading inexorably to venom.
Film of cracks
Unsaid people who cross the film but the director will have the finger to never explain, leaving the viewer to forge his own opinion. And a relationship of total loyalty, certainly violent, but dazed by a humor – never greasy – bandaging the cracks of these two beings literally linked to life, to death.
And in between, that Elsa. Powered through two atoms with strong interactions – in the nuclear sense of the term, to please Nolan – and increasingly imposing as a rival figure against Mirales' unalterable bagou, Elsa is the catalyst of this Case dog. His appearance transforms the film, acts as a mirror to reflect the deep nature of the links between Dog and Mirales.
One cemetery, two funerals
Let's not forget the city itself, the last character to join this trio. A province town, almost deserted, which a band of a little virulent zonards struggle to maintain in a state of brain death. Corset alleys, yellowish lighting, benches dropped on these empty squares, good that to accommodate the dead leaves of the plane trees stinging there as on the field of a cemetery. A cemetery that we will find later in Case dog, materialized in this plain with grass whipped by the wind, where the strange ceremonial of a double burial lets itself be hatched by a sky of lead.
A little gleaming, almost dull description for a film that never is. Powered by the verbal jousts between the two best enemies, by the tension induced by a drug story or by the simple emerging romance between Dog and Elsa, Case dog is a living film that does not allow itself to be locked in any box of genre. A very promising first film for Jean-Baptiste Durand, and no doubt a catalyst for this trio of brilliant young actors. And rejoice! The Yannick Quentin Dupieux once again offered Raphaël Quenard a first role, whose film world finally seemed to have understood the particular strength.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 89 min
Release Date: 05 September 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 2.35
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
[...] Could you recontextualize the starting point of the film? [...]
You made me want Kilian again! 😉