By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Starring: Gergely Bánki | Lili Horváth | Lili Monori | Sándor Zsótér | Szabolcs Thuróczy | Zsófia Psotta
Original language title: Fehér isten
Country: hungary
Year: 2015
Running time: 121
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2844798/reference
Bruce says: “One of the great things about watching AMORES PERROS on DVD was the accompanying special feature that explained how dogs were trained so that no harm was actually done to them during the filming. While such technological detail may shatter illusions about the reality of what is on screen it also serves as a healthy reminder that film is artifice. That knowledge is particularly comforting as one views WHITE GOD.
“WHITE GOD opens with an overhead shot of a deserted freeway in Budapest. A lone bicyclist pedals rapidly with purpose. It is a young girl of thirteen named Lili (beautifully portrayed by Zsófia Psotta) and she is on a mission to find her dog. Suddenly, as Lili passes through an intersection, hundreds of dogs turn a corner unexpectedly and begin to follow her and surround her. We come to learn that this is a flash forward.
“Lili’s parents are divorced and she lives with her mother. When her mother gets a chance for a sabbatical in Australia she and her new boyfriend dump Lili at her father’s doorstep. But Lili is not alone; she has her dog Hagan with her. Hagen is a mixed breed dog and will be taxed due to new legislation targeting mutts. Lili’s father has lost his job and interest in everything but the vodka bottle. The fight over Hagen begins immediately and it’s not long before Lili’s father dumps the dog out of the car and races off before Lili can get out of the car to retrieve him.
“Hagen’s and Lili’s stories mirror one another. They both are abandoned and they both have some bitter pills to swallow as they lose their innocence on the roads they travel. Lili has problems at music school where she plays the trumpet. She falls for a boy only to discover he is not interested romantically. Meanwhile Hagen gets picked up by dogcatchers, put in the pound, and rescued by a dog fighting trainer. He is trained to kill and ends up in the ring, seemingly overmatched when paired with a particularly vicious dog.
“It is not exactly a spoiler to mention that Hagen not only escapes the pound the second time around but manages to free about two hundred other dogs in the process. Suddenly we return to the film’s opening scene. This time it is played out to an astonishing end, one which is one of the most magnificent scenes in film history. WHITE GOD is a parable where, at moments, the dogs behave like humans and the humans behave like animals. The musical theme of the film is taken from the Hungarian Rhapsodies by Franz Lizst, who –in the director Kornél Mundruszcó’s words – was a German who wanted to be Hungarian. Mundruszcó uses his music a metaphor: through art comes healing and problem solving, both glaringly abundant in this unique and wonderful film. 5 cats
“(WHITE GOD screened at the 2015 New Directors/New Films jointly sponsored by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.)
Jason says: “I know a lot of people who love horror movies, and they tend to be the same people who care passionately about animal welfare. It’s not that surprising; contrary to popular belief, you need empathy to get the most out of horror rather than become jaded, and I suspect that many genre filmmakers have something like WHITE GOD kicking around their heads as a result. Actually making it is the trick, and most who try don’t manage anything near what Kornél Mundruczó pulls off – a small masterpiece.
“15-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is pretty fond of her dog, Hagen, a sweet mixed-breed that seems to be her best friend, especially now that she’s being sent to stay with her father (Sándor Zsótér) while her mother visits Australia for three months. Unfortunately, Hagen is mixed-breed – a mutt – and in Hungary that requires a license that her father will not pay for, and Lili’s father forces her to abandon Hagen on the side of the road. Lili will search, but while Hagen initially falls in with a friendly-seeming group of strays, but the other people he comes across won’t treat him nearly as kindly as the girl still looking for him.
“There are points when the audience might want to fast-forward through the sequences that focus on Lili; compared to the parts with the dogs, they can seem like just another movie about a bitter kid. Zsófia Psotta is pretty darn good in the role, though, and Sándor Zsótér’s father may not always come across very well, but Mundruczó and his co-writers make their story interesting, more than just a parallel to how her mother seemingly abandons her much like the dogs, even if it often plays out behind the scenes. From the way Lili is clearly the youngest player in her youth orchestra, I suspect that she’s been accelerated enough to become isolated, although there’s never much talk of that or any need to show how her father starts to warm to her.
“Which is fine, because most moviegoers have seen that a lot and it would take time away from Hagen and the other dogs. Mundruczó and the trainers do some extraordinary work here, all the more so because a great many of the dogs, including the ones playing Hagen, were shelter animals (both the opening and closing titles assure us that all found permanent homes). Mundruczó doesn’t ask them to do things that ever seem beyond a dog’s capability, but he and his crew certainly get them moving in the right direction to tell a story, and they certainly seem to communicate with each other, more through heat-twitches and stares than barking (Luke and/or Body, the dogs playing Hagen, also have the sorts of faces that people can read a lot into). For all that, though, they are always still dogs rather than dog-shaped people, animals not truly able to understand the seemingly arbitrary and too-often cruel whims of human beings.
“Some of that mistreatment is fairly graphic – although Mundruczó and the editors are pretty good at letting the viewer fill what he doesn’t show in as opposed to actually showing dogs and people get mangled. It’s great that he doesn’t pull his punches, since it both makes some tough-to-ignore points about animal abuse and makes it very easy to understand just how Hagen becomes what he is by the end. Not in terms of the organization along the dogs that seems to become something fantastical, but the urge to revenge, with tension coming from whether Hagen will see Lili as the person who loved him or the one who abandoned him – and whether he’s even capable of telling the difference any more.
“All of this sets up some quite frankly astonishing bits of action, as Mundruczó and his crew marshal dozens of dogs and either sends them through the city’s back alleys with dog-catchers in pursuit or, later on, turns the tables by having them race through the main streets and buildings in a swarm that makes the residents’ terror thoroughly understandable even though, after all the viewer has seen happen to Hagen, the dogs are due a great deal of his or her sympathy. While the scale of the animal action is the most immediately impressive part, there’s really not a single component of these scenes that is not extremely well-done: Mundruczó establishes the geography of a place very well if more is going to happen there than just dogs running through it, and as before, plays for high stakes but frequently lets the audience imagine the worst. For the finale, he brings things up a notch, as he and editor Dávid Jancsó cut between Hagen and Elli in a way that gives both human and animal stories equal weight, and composer Asher Goldschmidt does a downright fantastic job of blending the chase music in with that of Elli’s concert.
“The whole group keeps the tension up right through the final scenes, which are perhaps just what the audience could expect but are also well-earned, thrilling and happy and sad as the movie fades to black. It’s the movie that I suspect every moviegoer who loves animals and thrillers has wanted to see for a long time, and executed in such a thrilling manner that even those who haven’t been waiting for it will be quite impressed. 5 cats”