"Feher Isten'/ White God

This offbeat Hungarian Cannes entry imagines a canine uprising against cruel humans.

CANNES – Sympathy for the underdog takes on a literal meaning in this lightly dystopian canine thriller from the Hungarian writer-director Kornel Mundruczo, showing in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes. On wet-nosed face value, White God is an urban adventure yarn about a teenage girl searching for her beloved pet dog. Under its furry skin, an angry allegory for political and cultural tensions in contemporary Europe.

Young big-screen newcomer Zsofia Psotta gives a confident, convincingly surly performance as 13-year-old Lili, a solitary only child in contemporary Budapest forced to move in with her ill-tempered father (Sandor Zsoter) when her mother takes a job abroad. But dad has little patience for Lili's best friend, a handsome and unusually smart mongrel named Hagen. With new political laws banning cross-breed dogs coming into force, Hagen cannot stay in the apartment long.The premise of this Hungarian/German/Swedish co-production is solid, even if the execution feels a little slack and the running time too long. Production values are also strong, with some impressive technical elements, notably the highly-trained animal castmembers. Further festival play seems certain, with theatrical interest likely to be niche but with fairly broad appeal based on the universally marketable doggy angle.

 

Cruelly dumped alongside an urban highway, Hagen begins his journey through Budapest's shady underworld. Sold into an illegal dog-fighting ring, he is trained to become a ruthless killing machine before escaping from his savage human captors. In a four-legged twist on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Hagen then masterminds a mass breakout from the city dog pound, leading an army of fellow hounds on a roaring rampage of revenge against mankind. Lassie's come home -- and this time he's boiling mad.

 

According to Mundruczo, White God is intended as a statement of solidarity for marginal and oppressed people. There are certainly strong echoes of Nazi-style ethnic cleansing in his depiction of an intolerant society imposing harsh new laws against mongrels, an increasingly timely theme in the light of recent election gains by Hungary's neo-Nazi party Jobbik. Another anti-racist allusion is coded in the film's title, a play on Sam Fuller's cultish 1982 movie White Dog, about a vicious German Shepherd trained to attack dark-skinned people.

Most shot in jerky hand-held style, with a stridently percussive score pumping up every hint of tension, White God falls somewhere between a superior genre thriller and a Big Statement movie. But much of the overlong human subplot could be safely trimmed or cut, bringing the canine story into sharper focus. Mundruczo's choice to use real dogs over digital effects is commendable, but also dampens potential menace and horror.

This is particularly true in the tame dog-fighting scenes, which should have been grotesque but -- no pun intended -- lack bite. The two lovable mutts who play Hagen are ultimately too cute to be scary, more Paws than Jaws, leading to moments of unintended comedy that undermine the film's serious tone. But these are not fatal flaws in an otherwise admirably unorthodox and sporadically gripping shaggy dog story.

Production company: Proton Cinema
Cast: Zsofia Psotta, Grad Tzahi, Sandor Zsoter, Lili Monori, Lili Horvath
Director: Kornel Mundruczo
Screenwriters: Kornel Mundruczo, Viktoria Petranyi, Kata Weber
Producers: Viktoria Petranyi

...The hand that feeds — and also brutalizes — is righteously bitten in “White God,” a Hungarian revenge fantasy that’s like nothing you’ve seen on screen before. The story is as simple as a parable, a campfire story, a children’s book: A faithful animal, separated from its loving owner, endures, suffers, struggles and resists while trying to transcend its brutal fate. The director, Kornel Mundruczo, has said that he was partly inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s devastating novel “Disgrace,” but the movie also invokes haunting animal classics like “Black Beauty” and “The Call of the Wild.”

That pack in all its barking, panting, tail-wagging glory is the big payoff in “White God,” which features 250 or so dogs that were trained for the movie, not a computer-generated pooch among them. Mr. Mundruczo has said that his movie was shot using the American film industry’s guidelines on the use of animal performers. That’s not entirely reassuring given the abuses that nonetheless occur during productions, as a ghastly 2013 exposé in The Hollywood Reporter affirmed. Still, viewers concerned about the welfare of the dogs, especially in some of the tougher scenes, should pay close attention to the cunning editing and camera angles as well as all those happy tails. Mr. Mundruczo has also produced, smartly, a reassuring behind-the-scenes video that’s available on YouTube.Like Buck, the four-legged hero of “The Call of the Wild,” the dog protagonist in “White God,” Hagen — played with full-bodied expressivity by the canine siblings Bodie and Luke — is a mixed breed. For his closest companion, a solemn-faced 13-year-old named Lili (Zsofia Psotta), Hagen’s ancestry isn’t an issue, but it is one for those state officials who tax dogs that aren’t purebreds. Lili’s father, Daniel (Sandor Zsoter), who has custody of her for a few months, has no interest in paying the tax or keeping the dog, which is how Hagen ends up on the streets of Budapest, initially alone, then in the hands of a cruel master and then with a pack.

All this won’t make viewers out of people who believe that animals should never be used, period. Those who don’t care how we treat animals may wonder what any of this has to do with a movie, much less a review. Yet it is our bonds with other animals, our obligations and our sympathies, that make “White God” more than a gimmick movie. These are questions, Mr. Mundruczo suggests, that also extend to creatures that we, godlike, designate as meat, not pets, to borrow a formulation from Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me.” What are nonhuman animals to us? In Mr. Coetzee’s “Disgrace,” a character who helps out at a shelter in which animals are euthanized says of dogs, “They do us the honor of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things.” In “White God,” the dogs respond with their own kill policy.

In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit. He introduces Lili and Hagen together while they’re sharing the frame and playing a quietly portentous game of tug-of-war. Lili’s mother has gone off on a lengthy trip with her husband, leaving the girl with her father, who Lili demonstrably doesn’t much like. Mr. Mundruczo at first seems to share Lili’s aversion; at the very least, he knows how to stack the story decks: Daniel isn’t just a dour, unsmiling sad sack, he’s also a fallen man who now works as a slaughterhouse inspector. You first meet him in an antiseptic room in which, after workers gut and skin a dead cow, he plunges a gauge in the innards, declaring it fit for consumption.

Unblinkingly gory, this evisceration foreshadows other violence to come. It’s a tough but critical scene because, while Mr. Mundruczo has a sharp sense of humor, evident especially in his use of horror-movie tropes, “White God” isn’t a comedy or a Disney-like anthropomorphized romp. The camera gets down on all fours, metaphorically, and shares Hagen’s point of view, showing you what the world looks like around our knees. Yet Hagen isn’t a wee human in a fuzzy costume; he doesn’t have a digital mouth, talk to other animals or share his thoughts. The radicalness of the movie is that it asserts he doesn’t need to be like a person for you to be on his side. He is a dog, and that’s all he needs to be.

The brutality of the training, which culminates with an ugly fight that’s a frenzy of slamming bodies, ominous growls and bloodied muzzles, isn’t for the weak of heart. But these scenes represent movie sleight of hand at its finest, as do the sequences of Hagen making likeJason Bourne while escaping pound workers, hurtling down alleys, darting around corners, racing across terraces and even bursting through an apartment window into the lap of its understandably surprised inhabitant. In time, Hagen stops running from his oppressors and instead — flanked by a glorious mutt army in a series of soaring, astonishingly choreographed scenes — heads straight at the humans who have done him and his friends lethally, morally, wrong. After years of domination, nature is biting back.