White God:
Canines turn the tables on masters with an uprising on Budapest streets
For the admittedly small group of cinemagoers who have ever watched All Dogs Go to Heaven and thought, “needs more Planet of the Apes” (or vice versa), Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó has your ticket.
White God, with a cast of 250 canine first-time actors, features a dog uprising in the streets of Hungary that should do for cynophobics what Hitchcock’s The Birds did for ornithophobia.
It starts, as these things often do, with a quote from Rilke and a simple problem. Lili, played by 13-year-old Zsófia Psotta, another first-time (human) actor, is being left with her dad for three months while her mom goes travelling with her new husband.
Dad isn’t very good with kids or animals, except dead ones. He’s a meat inspector, and when we first meet him he’s surrounded by dead cows.
He grumpily agrees to look after Lili, but draws the line at her dog, Hagen, whom he conspires to leave on the street. Girl and dog are left to fend for themselves without the company of each other. Is it any wonder they start misbehaving?
For Lili, this amounts to the usual teenaged tactics of surliness, talking back and staying out late. But Hagen (whose story this is) finds that life without Lili goes from bad to worse. Captured on the street, he is sold as a guard dog to a restaurant owner, then turned into a dog fighter.
Every time he gets loose (often in the company of another, Benji-like stray), Hagen finds himself the target of dogcatchers, enforcing the city’s no-mutt-left-outside policy. In one scene, this pits six guys in two trucks against a pair of dogs. Budapest must have a huge problem with strays or a bottomless budget for animal control, or both.
The film’s two-hour running time is a little long. Lili’s more straightforward teen-angst story could afford to be trimmed a bit — ironically, it’s the shaggiest part of this dog tale.
But she is also our window into Hagen’s adventure, as when she comes across an attack by her best friend and pronounces, with science-fiction gravitas: “They weren’t after the meat!”
Mundruczó won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for White God. His previous films Delta (2008) and Tender Son (2010) have played in competition, but none has had the popular appeal of this one.
You could write a paper about the film’s lightly veiled themes of slavery, racism and man’s inhumanity to man and beast alike.
Or you could just watch the pooches turn the tables on their masters.
And the director puts his all into the film: pounding music with a perfect beat for running paws; cinematography that includes a dog’s-eye view of events; and an opening scene that evokes a zombie apocalypse, with a pack of dogs tearing through the empty city centre.
Hagen, played by canine siblings Body and Luke, at times looks a little too friendly for the tone of the film, but clever editing solves most of that. It’s all, dare I say, quite fetching.