DogLeg: Dilly Dali-ing Around

MOVIE INFO:

Amateur director Alan loses his beloved’s dog the morning of an important shoot. A film critic offers some candid observations on a series of incomplete shorts that Alan has spent his own money making. Alan grows desperate for the day to be over as the pursuit of the lost dog and the chaos of filming start to blend.Content collapsed.

REVIEW:

In Dogleg, writer-director Al Warren and his writing partner Michael Bible second collaboration, takes a sharply bending route from a concrete cinema reality. The film has rhythm but no control, just a desire for it that may never have existed. It’s meta. And you either love the organized chaos or hate it. I sort of admired it technically but got bored with its layered human recalcitrance.

Warren plays Alan Warner, a struggling director whose girlfriend Julia (Angela Trimbur) leaves him to take care of her dog, Roo, during the weekend. The evening after, he’s schedule to shoot scenes for his five years in the making personal film. In between he attends a gender reveal party, bringing Roo along. Scared by the gender canon going off, Roo takes off. The rest of film is both a search for the dog mixed with attempts to shoot his film on schedule.

Dogleg constantly intterupts its narrative to show Warner’s short absurdist films which he hopes to cobble into some sort of cohesive movie. The sort of plot that emerges is all about the loss of control or destroying the mirage that control is possible. The shorts are dull little affairs, improvised by the cast. It’s about twenty minutes of my life I wish I had back. But I can’t control that :).

Alan can’t find his dog . He can’t ride a hoverboard. He can’t make his girlfriend proud of him. He lives in a world where things happen to him and his loved ones whether he wants them to or not. The overlapping and interlocking realities- the events of the film and the films within this film- are more song, tone poems.

Dogleg is a film that leans away from you. It uses time, or absolute boredom as others viewers would define it, as a technique. The people here don’t have the patience to be bored or the patience to be patient. It’s a movie of absence about absence- the impossibility of knowing existence rationally.

On screen, Warner has no idea where to find Roo. He has no idea on how he’s going to make a film that makes sense. He reminds the viewer with a wry smile and laugh that the sum of all we know is that we know nothing. And like Mr Rodger says, “that is fine.”

Dogleg gets a 3.0/5 or a B. It’s streaming on Mubi.