The critically acclaimed Chinese-language film Black Dog, currently showing in Australian cinemas, tells the story of a man and a dog, a common subject in English-language movies but less so in Chinese. Writer-director Guan Hu attributes his inspiration for the film partly to an interest in the nature of communication between humans and animals sparked by the time he spent living with five dogs during the Covid pandemic.
The film had its premiere at last year’s Cannes festival, where it won not only the year’s Un Certain Regard award but also — for the black dog, a Jack Russell–greyhound female called Xiaoxin — the 2024 Palm Dog Grand Jury Prize. (Cannes has had awards for canine actors since 2001.) Xiaoxin plays a male dog, an abandoned greyhound who haunts ruined apartment buildings of Chixia, a derelict town in northwest China.
The central human in the story is Lang Yonghui, an ex-felon who has been released from jail after ten years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. He is played by Eddie Peng, a Taiwanese-Canadian actor with a huge fan base on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Thin-faced, head shaven, taciturn, Peng’s character in Black Dog is a far cry from the pretty boy of Tomorrow, the 2002 drama series that first brought him fame.
The film is set in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. The simple storyline has Lang returning home to Chixia, where once, as a local celebrity, he played in a popular band and was otherwise famed as a stunt motorcyclist. Now he is a prisoner on parole, forced to report weekly to the local police, his movements restricted to the town limits. The family home stands empty in a street lined with residences marked for demolition. His mother is dead. His father, alcoholic and ailing, is living at the town’s neglected and mostly deserted zoo. His sister has long gone. The relatives of the man in whose death he was implicated are out for revenge, and he has a series of violent encounters with them.
In this town there are few obvious ways to make a living. Lang is assigned a job with a dog patrol unit, newly formed to rid the town of strays. He has already encountered the black dog by chance but now he becomes caught up in the effort to catch and destroy it. From the moment the dog bites him it is clear that the two will develop a symbiotic relationship: either both will die of rabies or neither has rabies and both will survive. An initially antagonistic relationship between the two evolves into one of mutual dependence. The dog sticks by the man. When the dog gets lost, the man stops at nothing in his efforts to find him.
Many stories are at their heart about looking for something. At one level, this is a story about a man finding that something is worth looking for.
Responses to Black Dog in China have been mixed. On the Douban ratings site it scores a middling 6.9. One reviewer has attempted to establish its credentials as wholesome fare for a Chinese audience by highlighting the truly obscure theme of a father’s love. Another begins with a careful explanation to readers that the film has to be understood within the framework of the international film festival system. Some viewers regard the Cannes award as evidence that the filmmakers are pandering to foreign tastes.
In the West, where the reception has been noticeably warmer, diverse readings of the film show that it defies any easy categorisation. In English-language media it has been described variously as a melancholic crime drama, “disarmingly funny,” a classic story of redemption and an absurdist commentary on Chinese society.
Guan Hu himself says the film is about the fate of people in times of change, or more simply, about life. Like life, the film is complex. If there were only one dog in it the story, it might have been just another movie about a man and a dog following a predictable narrative arc towards a happy or bitter-sweet ending. But the English title of the film is misleading. The Chinese title, Gouzhen, literally means “dogs arrayed,” or “dogs in formation,” by which the director meant dogs (or people?) trapped in a fixed array.
Dogs first appear in this movie as if in battle array, hundreds of them, poised on hillocks along the road leading to the town. They are pariahs, and it is tempting to see them as a means for Guan to talk about outsiders in Chinese society. Thus the roundup of strays in the town echoes the social cleansing undertaken in Beijing in preparation for the Olympics. The seizure of a small child’s pet dog, unlicensed because her family cannot cover the cost, evokes China’s draconian one-child policy, with its forced abortions and heavy fines for unlicensed births. If the line between the humans and the dogs in the film is one between species, it also seems to be one between insiders and outsiders.
The film is otherwise rich in symbolism. Lang’s surname is a homonym for “wolf” (lang). There is an actual wolf in the story, once caged in the zoo but now running wild in the hills. Lang’s father, the zoo attendant, released it from captivity when he could no longer feed it. Rural poverty, the breakdown of family relations, and social marginalisation are all referenced.
Lang also has a nickname, Erlang, which is the name of a god in Chinese mythology. Erlang is notable for his combat skills, sense of justice and constant companion, a black dog. The Erlang of the film has all these traits, and they are mostly in evidence outside Chixia’s formally regulated society — as when he exacts vengeance for the brutal assault on his old neighbour — and even outside of Chixia itself. More than once he breaches the town limits.
The fact that Lang rarely speaks in the movie is attributed by some commentators to the fact that he is Taiwanese and would find it difficult to sustain a northwest accent. But his silence, too, is surely symbolic. With this feature, Guan seems on the one hand to be tapping into the strong, silent type of the Western movie genre. On the other hand, Lang’s silence throws into relief the noise of the government announcements that blare over loudspeakers in the town, filling the available public sound space.
Having decked out his main character with so many signifiers and setting him in such an unpromising location in such an auspicious year, Guan could hardly avoid his film being, for good or ill, a commentary on Chinese society. As a commentary, it is intensely androcentric. Xinjiang actress Tong Liya provides the story with what passes for a romantic interest, playing a performing dance artist called Putao — “yet another negative female character who has no need to exist in the film at all,” in the words of cultural critic Dai Jinhua. Putao has a canine counterpart in the form of a brown greyhound who wanders in towards the end of the film. It is unclear why the black dog itself, played by a female dog, had to be male.
Visually, the film is bleakly beautiful. It opens with a long, wide shot of low-lying, sparsely vegetated hills under a pale, patchy sky. The landscape is horizontally bifurcated by a narrow road on which soon appears an old bus rattling its way towards Chixia until it is thrown off balance by the tsunami of dogs descending from the hillside.
The desolate townscape looks like a homage to the renowned director Jia Zhangke, who makes a surprise appearance in this film as the boss of the dog patrol. Jia’s film about a drifting generation in the polluted city of Datong, Unknown Pleasure, was submitted to the 2002 Cannes film festival. Questioned at that time about his thematic fusion of the city’s decaying built environment and its human population, he explained: “At first it was the bleak and lonely buildings that attracted me. When I saw the streets filled with lonely, directionless people, I became interested in them.” The cinematography of Black Dog is true to this vision. •
