One of the most eagerly anticipated talents about to grace the red carpet at Cannes this week is tall, blond, leggy and has a seductively husky voice. Par for the course, you might think, at the glitzy, notoriously libidinous film festival on the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur – were it not for that lolling tongue and the fact that the bag in the hands of the entourage is more likely to be a doggy-doo than a Birkin or Chanel.
Fawn-maned griffon cross Kodi is the star of French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch’s directorial debut Dog on Trial, a film that feels precision-engineered for Cannes’ 77th edition in more ways than one. Dosch tells me the following origin story about her first feature. Three years ago, while the script was taking shape inside her head, she bumped into the director Justine Triet on the train from Cannes to Paris.
Dosch had been a Triet admirer ever since playing the lead in her 2013 picture Age of Panic, and was excited when the woman two years her senior revealed her future plans. “I am working on a film about a trial,” Triet said. “Me too,” Dosch replied, incredulously. There was a child in it, Triet went on, and someone was blind. “In mine too,” Dosch whispered.
And, added Triet, there was a dog. “I thought, ‘Now I’m fucked,’” Dosch recalls, her devastation clear as she speaks via video call from Paris. “She’s doing my film, the one I wanted to make. And now I have to change my subject.”
Things did not turn out as feared. Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or last year, sweeping the board at the European film awards in the winter and taking a screenplay Oscar in the spring. Dosch’s project, meanwhile, has secured a place in Cannes’ coveted Un Certain Regard category this year: Dog on Trial (Le Procès du Chien), in which the 43-year-old actor turned director plays erratic but tenacious young lawyer Avril, is also a courtroom drama, feeding an appetite for judicial sparring in recent francophone cinema.
Unlike in Triet’s arthouse whodunnit, however, the shaggy hound is not just a supporting character but the morally ambiguous individual around whom the action rotates: Kodi plays Cosmos, a loyal companion to the dishevelled and sight-impaired Dariuch. But Cosmos is facing capital punishment for having bitten several people. Avril, played by Dosch herself, has a soft spot for hopeless causes, and takes on the repeat-offending animal, “the first dog to be held responsible for his actions since the middle ages”.
If it feels certain to become an audience favourite at Cannes in 2024, it’s also because there is one overriding theme at the world’s most glamorous and prestigious film festival this year: canines are everywhere. Running alongside Dog on Trial in Un Certain Regard is Black Dog, by Chinese film-maker Guan Hu, telling the story of how the Chinese government decided to purge the Beijing streets of stray dogs in the run-up to the 2008 summer Olympics.
While the prize-winning cast and director of Anatomy of a Fall will be not be present at the festival this year, the border collie that stole the show as trusty guide dog Snoop will take centre stage. The black-and-white human companion, real name Messi, will, over the course of the festival, “host eight one-minute programmes for TV channels France 2 and France 3”, says Messi’s producer Tim Newman. Lent a voice by French comic Raphaël Mezrahi, Messi will meet celebrities on the red carpet and ask “questions with the innocence of a dog”.
The Parisian pooch is returning to the French Riviera as a prize winner, having scooped the top award at last year’s Palm Dog, an awards ceremony for “canine excellence on the big screen” set up by British journalist Toby Rose in 2001. Originally no more than an “English eccentric folly of the four-legged variety”, the Palm Dog has grown in institutional heft and is now a set feature at the British pavilion, with Quentin Tarantino and Tilda Swinton picking up prizes on behalf of their four-legged collaborators in recent years.
Dogs at Cannes have pedigree, of course: Uggie, the energetic parson russell terrier who stole the show in 2011’s The Artist, was subsequently deployed to promote Michel Hazanavicius’s silent film. Still, this year Rose has noted a “huge uptick in dog roles at the festival”, with at least seven very worthy contenders for the top prize. “It’s a sign of the times,” he says, “a very significant marketing move.”
One reason is that the tried-and-tested formula for Cannes success is no longer working so well. The recipe used to have two main ingredients: there was the glamour of the celebrities and models, who walked up the red-carpeted steps outside the Palais des Festivals; and then there was the illicit lustre of the artistically rigorous films they watched within. Full-frontal nudity and unsimulated sex have been a mainstay since the 1970s. From Lars von Trier’s The Idiots to Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, from Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, to Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Cannes launched films that other festivals did not dare touch.
But over the last few months, the libertine ways of France’s film industry have been put under a new form of scrutiny, as actor Judith Godrèche filed criminal complaints against two high-profile directors, alleging they raped her as a teenager, and urging her industry at February’s César awards to “take on our responsibilities” around issues of sexual abuse and harassment. Both men deny the accusations.
Godrèche’s stance follows new abuse allegations about Gérard Depardieu, who in six months will go on trial over the alleged sexual assaults of two women on the set of a film in 2021. The latest accusations in turn triggered industry figures, including Catherine Deneuve, to write an open letter criticising the “Victorian morality” that they said was robbing one of France’s best-known actors of his right to be presumed innocent. Depardieu has denied all the allegations.
Given all this backdrop, you can see why dogs come in so handy: when a country is so bitterly divided over whether some of the most towering figures in its film history are bad people, there’s something healing about animals that everyone can agree are very good boys or girls indeed.
Luckily, for the viewer anyway, sharp-fanged hunting dog Cosmos makes for a terrible choice of emotional support animal. Dosch’s Dog on Trial is loosely based on the real-life story of a French trial centred on a dog that kept on biting strangers (she’s sketchy on the details out of fear of legal repercussions, but the real biter was never charged, only its owner). What fascinated Dosch was that the pooch’s fate seized the imagination of an entire village. “People went crazy,” she says. “There were demonstrations against the fact that the dog was treated by the law as a thing rather than a living being, and there was an appeal to the European court of human rights. It was incredible.”
In her film, the canine’s trial ends up channelling human problems. When defence lawyer Avril argues that the law must respect Cosmos’ wolf-like true nature, it’s also intended as a statement of inter-species solidarity. “The parallel between women and dogs interested me a lot,” she says. “If a dog behaves in an unexpected way, we decide it’s not acceptable and it must be killed.”
Cosmos the dog is male, of course, and the people he bites are exclusively female. In the film, the trial ends up centring on the question of whether an animal can be a misogynist and, if so, whether that misogyny is inherent or socially trained. So the question that imposes itself is whether Cosmos can be a distraction from the big debate hanging over Cannes this year, or the very opposite: a Depardieu figure in a furry disguise.
Dosch laughs. “I don’t think Cosmos the dog really has a problem with women. I think it’s more that he has a problem when someone’s authority is not clear. And the effect that he has on my character Avril, who has a problem affirming herself, is really interesting. I don’t know if it’s a #MeToo film, but I do think it’s a film that talks about women’s place in society.”
In the middle ages, it was fairly common for courts to hold animals to account with laws intended for humans. Dosch cites the case of a sow in eastern France that was condemned to death in 1379 for killing a child, with her sucklings included in the indictment as accomplices. The film-maker reckons, on balance, that it would be absurd to revive this practice. “I would not like this to happen,” she says. “Human justice is for humans.”
• The Cannes film festival runs from 14-25 May
