Movie Review Dogman

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Spoiler alerts – 2019 Directed by Matteo Garrone The latest movie in the Worldwise Learning Centre International Film Festival is this very recent and very violent Italian crime drama, with a superb central performance by Marcello Fonteas as a character called Marcello who runs a dog grooming parlour in a coastal slum district. Like other small businessmen in the town he is subjected to repeated visits by a local junkie, Simoncino (Simone) played by Edoardo Pesce who gets extremely aggressive if not given money to fuel his cocaine addiction. He virtually wrecks a local gambling parlour and throws its fruit machines around. Though the villagers contemplate hiring someone to kill Simone off, finding the police useless in dealing with him), they never do anything about him. Marcello, himself a drug user, also gets money from helping Simone in petty robberies, in order to pay for diving holidays for his doting daughter (living with his ex-wife) who occasionally visits him, but Simone often short changes him and rips him off. His growing association with Simone makes his friends ignore him. When Simone uses Marcello's shop as an entrance to a neighbouring store, making it obvious to all that Marcello knew about it, Marcello is so scared of Simone that he goes to prison himself for a year rather than tell on the thug, and gets totally sent to Coventry for his action, but after receiving a savage beating from Simone, he sets out for one of the most brutal revenge attacks ever committed to film, only to find it does not make him cool with his old friends as he had hoped. A study of a man utterly destroyed by bullying and petty violence where the animalistic savagery he resorts to try to extricate him from the mess makes him more of a mad dog than the one he calmed and tamed at the film's beginning. While he can control and tame the dogs, his efforts to control Simone through kindness only turn on his own savagery with terrible consequences. Arthur Chappell