Before I watched Yvan Attal’s “My Dog Stupid” (“Mon Chien Stupide,” 2019) I refused to look at any posters or stills from the movie, stemming from initial casting concerns; could any dog truly deliver the looks and behavior that the title demanded? The stakes were monumental.
Imagine my relief when Henri Mohen (played by Yvan Attal), the struggling writer, husband, and father central to the film, arrives at home to find his drunk wife, Cécile (Charlotte Gainsbourg), toting a shotgun and yelling about something in the garden, which leads them to find one of the most magnificent on-screen dogs I’ve ever seen, barring only the Beast from “The Sandlot” (1993).
In profile, the titular dog, Stupid, looks like an enormous bundle of sopping wet, velvet drapery and has more folds than an origami moon-lander. In all, he is a strangely joyful and irrepressibly virile foil which, through sheer obstinance, winds up the conflict that eventually begins to fragment the Mohen family.
Henri Mohen is a deeply melancholic middle-aged man who struggles to reconcile his own escapist fantasies with the trajectory of his life.
Henri, who had a best-seller 25 years ago, has lived the typical writer’s fantasy well after its expiration date: his once-new Porsche is now an outdated Porsche, his contentious marriage, full of anti-depressants and booze, has aged just as poorly. His four children are a challenging menagerie who seem to be drawn from caricatures of young adults: some are chronically high and date strippers while others are hyper-political vegan eco-terrorists.
Despite being based on a posthumously published John Fante novella, this film resonates with recent trends in French fiction — I’m thinking of Michel Houellebecq’s most recent novel, "Serotonin" — that seek to reckon old, honor-bound pastoral masculinity with an overmedicated and debt-ridden modernity.
Much of what I found enjoyable in this film lies in the sharp rapport of the family and the moments when the characters extend beyond their totemic significance to become people who are truly hurt by Henri’s personal failures.
In all of the film's many fights, and as his children and wife Cécile are emotionally fleshed out (Gainsbourg is particularly excellent here), the audience is shown Henri’s family being torn apart by his inability or unwillingness to understand their lives and emotional needs. This film tracks almost tragically here, and in the segment where Henri reckons with his own personal failures as well as his pervasive writer’s block (which any film about writers is contractually obligated to include) I felt moved almost to tears.
In all, the film comes off as a tragicomedy more than any traditional dog-driven feel-good joint. Certainly engaged in the legacy, whether Attal wants it to be or not, of dog memoir films like “Marley and Me” (2008), “My Dog Stupid” is more a gripping family drama.
Even though the film veers into the Beavis and Butt-head-esque slapstick — usually in scenes where Stupid’s sex drive demands he mount any male person or animal available — the film’s human elements are still impeccably paced, well cast, and full of genuine emotions that come together as a sincere manifesto on masculinity (disregarding a few moments of self-indulgence).
In a time where our souls are still haunted by animal-centric, CGI atrocities like “Cats” (2019) it is refreshing to see a well-composed comedy where an animal plays an even-handed role in the plot without dominating the very real, and very human, emotional core.
Will Anderson is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
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