At the Toronto International Film Festival, we don’t find that Dune in the section of the films events awaited with excitement. With The Power of the Dog, adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage (1967), Jane Campion, palmée d’or for her Piano lesson in 1993, delivers one of the big pieces of the season. Venice had served as the launching pad for the film. Here it is on the screens of the Toronto festival. This film interests us all the more because Roger Frappier, from Max Films, co-produced it in Quebec. Besides the New Zealand filmmaker of the series Top of the Lake had not made a feature film since Bright Star, in 2009.
We find his touch in high mode in this inspired western, rich in a solid international distribution. The film will be shown on a few large screens and will win on November 17 the Netflix platform, the web giant more dashing than ever.
Here we are in Montana (transplanted to New Zealand), during the 1920s, as the mighty and fearsome Phil (the charismatic, sharp, exceptional Briton Benedict Cumberbatch) runs the life of a big ranch at the wand. Here he is furious when his brother George, living under his shadow (Jesse Plemons), marries widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Phil, an absolute figure of toxic masculinity, thinks he can detect an intriguing character in her. He will make life difficult for him at home, to the point of reducing his range of action to almost total inactivity. The lady is joined by her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), homosexual soon confronted with the homophobic prejudices of Phil (yet troubled by him), who manipulates him to better isolate the mother.
The power of ambiguity
In this harsh and icy film, the figures of humanity of The Piano Lesson dissolved. The Power of the Dog is less lovable than this webbed and Oscar-winning film, more frontally desperate, but masterfully staged. Each character, with his motives and his secrets, evolves towards his damnation, even if the open denouement refuses to conclude.
The haunting music of Jonny Greenwood, the landscapes of mesas and the life of the estate with its servants, its cowboys, its horses, feed the action. The chiaroscuro scenes inside a ranch laden with hunting trophies, heavy furniture and tall woodwork accentuate the dramatic tensions between the beings. As for the surrounding nature, sometimes captured with the finesse of Terrence Malick’s first films, its beauty brings humans back to their derisory condition, prisoners of the place, the time and the circumstances surrounding their lives. Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner’s camera embraces the sensibility of Jane Campion, who likes to place her heroes and heroines in settings that determine their character and actions. The image is sumptuous and intimate at the same time, the editing fluid.
Kristen Dunst manages to transform from one role to another, here blonde, distraught and almost ordinary physically into a woman who is drowning in alcohol and boredom. But all the performers fade a little in front of the power of the game of Benedict Cumberbatch, who burns everything in his path like a bush fire.
This good film woven of ambiguities leads us into mysterious and sometimes opaque zones which nevertheless leave the spectator distraught. The female roles are played in a minor mode, as unreserved victims in the face of adversity.
The Power of the Dog does not call into question the basis of toxic male empires. The great director shows here the disastrous effects on our societies in a subtle, masterful and perverse way. Jane Campion nonetheless believes in the emergence of a feminine force, celebrated in all forums from one festival to another. It has staged a world of undivided power, ahead of our modernities. The confusion that the film arouses sheds light on the resistance of old fashions in our psyches.
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