THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
We remember the first time we saw Laetitia Dosch, it was in The Battle of Solferino (2013), Justine Triet’s first feature film: the filmmaker brilliantly captured her appearance as a young woman ontologically overwhelmed, by the times, by everything she had to do, by the torrent of thoughts that seems to always be there. A little bit over the moon, a little bit anxious, a little bit aware of everything and playing just enough to make it beautiful to watch; if we had to find a model of exquisite clumsiness, it would be Diane Keaton.
Since that role, films, plays and beautiful roles have followed at an undisturbed pace. In 2018, here she is putting on a show, Hurryher very remarkable “attempt at a duet with a horse”: on stage, she is naked and soliloquizing with a majestic white horse. The programme gave direction to her desire as an actress. A desire to play with something more than humans, to tune the game into a true otherness.
Prolonged desire with The trial of the dogHer first feature film, presented at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, is the lucky winner of a (quite predictable) Palm Dog. Inspired by a true story, the story takes place in Lausanne where Dosch is Avril, a lawyer specialising in lost causes. Tired of her failures, she vows to win her next case, which turns out to be the defence of a dog, Cosmos, a repeat offender who bit a woman in the face and, in doing so, must be put down. A decision that her visually impaired master, Dariuch (François Damiens, a very canine actor) rejects.
Desire for chaos
Motivated by this affair and determined to save her client from the death penalty, Avril will give the trial media coverage that will open up a whirlwind of arguments and counterarguments. Poor Cosmos, who had not asked for anything, finds himself treated like any other litigant, the object of all the discursive delirium on both sides. As if this mess were not enough, Laetitia Dosch continues to develop the subplots: a romance with the dog trainer (Jean-Pascal Zadi), a very young neighbour who tries to escape from his violent home, Metoo and ecology inviting themselves into the discussion table: what if Cosmos were a misogynist dog?
In The trial of the dogTwo desires collide: the desire for pedagogy and for clarity, opening up to an important legal-philosophical dissertation. Who is the dog to the man? On the other hand, we feel an equally sincere desire for chaos, to fill the film with out-of-tune characters, with actors who are not used to meeting each other: Damiens, Zadi, the dog, Anne Dorval, brilliantly excessive, like a great lawyer with Trumpian airs. Between chaos and pedagogy, the film gets a little lost, mutates into the judgment of an era that judges everything and anything, where everything is debated, no matter what, where all subjects are entangled and tied in knots.
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