Kill James Bond! - S3E27.5: Dogtooth [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Join us, dear listener, as we embark on what will surely not be the only Yorgos Lanthimos movie November makes us watch. A totally normal greek factory worker hides a secret: His three adult children are being raised in a one-house The Village situation. ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. They deserve to survive.https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

a large cloth used to keep sunlight out of a room. For example, I am going to get up and draw the podcast. NKBKBNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN because you pay for it, and we're very grateful for you doing so. Example, you are now listening to this bonus episode. I've wanted to do this for a while. We're talking about Dogtooth. That's right, baby. Dogtooth is, I think, one of my favorite films. It's once again, you're gonna get hit with a film that Nova is enthusiastic about, I'm afraid.

It's what I'm here for, honestly. Yeah! It was really good, I really liked it. It's one of my favorite films, it's a film about being transgender. Yes. Actually it's a film about a bunch of things, because it's a Yorgos Lanthimos film, and Yorgos Lanthimos doesn't like being too definitive about his films, if you read him being interviewed about any of them, he's like, I don't like to say that it's an allegory, I don't like

to say it's like, about this exactly, and I think one of the things we're gonna get into when we talk about Dogtooth is about kind of like, slightly swerving the intended meaning of something, or the precise definition of something. But it is definitely about being transgender. And the reason why we're doing all these bits to start with is because Dogtooth begins with a series of kind of... Do you remember, like, if you're of an age for this, language learning tapes?

ALICE Yes. No. ALICE Of course not. Okay, so, it's kind of like a podcast, but like, say you're in your French class or whatever, you would just listen to a cassette tape of somebody speaking in French, and they would have a bunch of sentences designed to aid language learning that would be very very elementary, right? And... NICOLAS It's what, like, Duolingo was before it was

the Owl. You'd get, like, a tape and it would play and it would be like, NICOLAS Schat, le chat s'attend le bat. Like, but in French, obviously. And it would, like, teach you the language. ALICE Exactly. You shouldn't play it anymore. Yeah. But in French, obviously. Exactly. And they would teach you the language. You shouldn't say it anymore. Yes.

Yeah, and so we start with one of these tapes with new vocabulary, and we've mentioned before about the Vofremdung's effect, right? This technique of alienating you from the thing that you're watching. You want some fucking Vofremdung's effect, we come out of the gate with some of it, because all of the words that we learn are wrong. Yep. Yes. We get definitions of sea and motorway and excursion, and they're all wrong.

They're all wrong. Excursion is defined as a particularly strong material, and the example sentence is like, the chandelier fell off the ceiling, but was not damaged because it was made of excursion. Yes. Like, what the fuck is happening? My favorite, and I think the most poetic, is when they define carbine. A carbine is a beautiful white bird. And there is something slightly poetic about it, it feels like a metaphor that's not connecting,

you know? And we have three young people in a bathroom, just listening to these tapes. They don't have names, as far as I know. Not in the script. There's two girls and a boy, I called them, uh, son, eldest, and middle. I believe that that is what the movie even calls them at some points. I was waiting to hear a name to start taking the notes of it, and I believe that they are just referred to as, like, eldest, youngest, and son.

ALICE Yeah, they're never referred to by name, in this. RILEY They are not given names, they don't have names. SONIA Also, we may as well just start this straight away, if there's like camera shit, there's directorial, there's cinema happening in this, because eldest is not seen in this scene, it's like POV, you are eldest. And the camera is just on youngest.

As she suggests that they play a game in the bathroom, the three of them, these three siblings, of running their fingers under the hot tap for as long as they can stand it, and then taking it out. Yes. From this we gain two things. A, these definitions are wrong, which means that someone doesn't want these kids to know what these words actually mean. And B, fuck are they bored.

Holy shit are they bored. ALICE Absolutely. And they're just kind of inventing games for each other. And then just to throw you off a bit more, we go to a completely different scene, where a woman wearing a blindfold is being driven in a Mercedes. She's wearing a security uniform. Interesting that the security thing on her shoulder is in English, by the way, because this is a Greek film, all the dialogue's in Greek, that's why I don't need drugs for it.

But she's being driven somewhere, with a blindfold on, so she can't see where she's going. And the guy driving the car is asking her about whether she likes the music that's on the radio, which is really obnoxious, kind of sentimental, like Greek singer, and... ALICE Again, we get like, some cinema is happening, some director is in the scene, because the camera is just one angle, it's just on... The lady's name is Christina. It's just on the back three quarter view of her head from the backseat the entire time. We don't even see the man yet.

It's all on her. And I've written something down here, which kind of tells us a little bit about the style of acting that we're seeing. I don't know where this quote comes from, but I've always found it to be quite useful. And it's just because they call action doesn't mean you have to do anything. And that is frequently what's happening in this movie is that the camera will just sit and just look at a person and that we won't get any cuts, we will get any shots and the person will just sit and just look at a person and that we won't get any cuts, we won't get any shots, and the person will just do nothing. That is, a lot of the acting is just that.

This is a directorial and acting style with which I really vibe. I love this shit. Yeah, me too. I love this shit. As I understand it, our boy Yorgos likes to do this a lot. This is the first film of his that I've seen. Probably won't be the last. It's my two, yeah.

But apparently he does this a lot and he likes to work with people who aren't like very trained actors. There's an interview that you linked us to them where he talks about like he doesn't like seeing actors who've clearly developed a plan and that he likes to cast, so like one of the actors in this is just like a singer, she's never acted before. The younger sister, married Sony, RIP. Yeah, and they don't like to do a lot of prep, they don't like to do a lot of rehearsals, it's just like, just get in there and vibe

it. It's very devised theatre. ALICE Yes. SONIA Which is a style of working, and a style of acting. Which, it's not one that I do a lot of, so I'm quite intrigued by this style and by the kind of quite good results that it gets. I think it relies on very good casting.

ALICE Yes. But it's very instinctive. So we see the man who's driving her, as he gets out of the Mercedes to unlock a gate over the road, this kind of older, alarmingly bald, kind of paunchy man. SONIA This is dad. ALICE Yes. And he drives her to this very secluded house, and the gate closes behind her, it's like, high fences, high walls, it's not overlooked by anything. And do you remember the bit in Audition, where the dad is kind of setting

up his son to, like, have sex? He's like, I'm just gonna take the dog for a 30-45 minute walk around the block kind of thing. We kind of carry that a step further here. RILEY Yeah, he just, he sort of, we get the shot of him like, him and Christine coming into the room with the sun. The sun is sat there. I would call him excited. He's sort of like, he's just sitting there waiting basically, and then they come in.

ALICE Not effusively, I would say. he's exercising as well, he's doing the like... On pins, maybe, would be a better way of putting it than excited. He's clearly waiting for it to occur. This is a scheduled appointment, it's not a surprise. I love the, again, cinema shots, is that the camera is, again, one shot, one angle, we don't move, and the camera is framed such that as Christina and Dad walk into the room their heads are cut off, and then the son stands up to greet them and his head is cut off too.

It's very impersonal. There's like, not a lot of humanity here. And again, with their heads framed out, like Dad leaves the room... ALICE The cheap joke about the kind of violence of cinema, of photography, right? I shoot people and sometimes I cut their heads off, right? RILEY Yeah. Um, so, dad leaves the room, and Christina and the son just undress, get completely naked.

She fluffs him, she gets him hard, and then they fuck. Like, I wouldn't even use the word fuck, like, fuck to me denotes a degree of passion and intensity and desire. ALICE They have sex. Like... ZOE Intercourse, I think, would be the word that I would use. RILEY Clinically, I believe, yeah.

ALICE Clinical is an excellent word for this, especially since all of the siblings we've seen have mostly been wearing white so far. RILEY I was gonna get into the white, yeah. Like all of the buildings are as well, like the internals are all white. Yeah. It's very very sterile, very clinical. I should also say about the sex scenes, because there are a few sex scenes in this, and all of them, to the best of my knowledge, are unsimulated.

Which is to say that the actors are, like, doing the sex themselves, right, there's no prosthesis involved, there's no camera trickery. There certainly doesn't appear to be a prosthesis involved. ALICE Yeah. It's either extremely well disguised or this is real, and it's like, I don't think you can do that. That's your... ALICE No, I mean, this is interesting because, because Jorgers Lenthalmus in his later career has been one of the kind of biggest adopters of

intimacy coordinators. Like, he's talked a lot about how on Poor Things it was kind of like an important part of the process. This being 2009, right, before intimacy coordinators were invented, it's just, I think, something that follows from this devised theatre thing, right, of being very instinctual, and that's... it's very high risk, let's say? Yes. Yes, it is. I think in this instance it comes off. I think it's successful.

So to speak. Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for the actors, right, but as a kind of viewer of it, I think it works, right? Whoa there, cowboy. That's quite enough of that. If you wanna listen to the rest of this podcast, you're going to have to cross my palm with silver. That's right, this is real, this is the economy we live in. If you want to hear the full episode dog-tooth, you have to go to patreon.com slash killjamesbond or one word

and sign up today for as little as £5 a month. I used to do a bit where I would try to think of something that costs £5, but like, you know, what is that? That's one Tesco meal deal, basically. I'll see you there.