You might not get the dog you want, but you always get the dog you need. That old dog-lover’s adage applies peculiarly well to Chinese director Guan Hu ‘s “ Black Dog .” A far smaller-scale project than his recent blockbusters “The Eight Hundred” and “The Sacrifice,” Guan’s latest — an Un Certain Regard standout at Cannes this year — nonetheless has the grandly cinematic vision to lend an intimate tale a gloriously epic, allegorical edge.
Set in a dying town on the fringes of the Gobi desert, “Black Dog” has elements of the genre western, like taciturn loner antihero Lang (a fantastic Eddie Peng ), who returns to his eroded hometown himself hollowed out by repressed guilt for the incident that caused his recent imprisonment. But, dipped in the caustic soda of social commentary and steeped in the fatalistic mood of a place barely chugging by on borrowed time, the film also cleaves to the tradition of film noir, in which desperate, often criminal protagonists struggle to escape their seemingly foreordained fates. But in a variation that offsets the darkness of, say, Diao Yinan’s “The Wild Goose Lake” or Wei Shujun’s “Only the River Flows,” the femme fatale here is more a chien fatal .
Lang has a human love interest — Grape (Tong Liya), a free-spirited performer with a touring circus troupe — but his mild dalliance with her runs nowhere near as deep as the kindred-spirit bond between him and the titular hound. A striking opening setpiece.
