(GRE - 2009)
Starring Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis and Anna Kalaitzidou, Kynodontas was nominated to the Oscar of Best Foreign Film of the Year and the director Giogos Lanthimos won Cannes' Un Certain Regard Award, as well as many other prizes and nominations.
When I got to watch this film, I didn't know at all what it was about. I had heard positive comments about it, but never read a synopsis or heard anything about its plot. It was interesting to discover, moment by moment, the purpose of the film and its method. A pleasant surprise, actually.
The action develops slowly at the start, letting you get used to the most common scenery - the house of a family with three grown up "children" (even though the youngest of all seems to be at least 20 years old, they're all treaten as if they were 7, and I don't think there's a better way to call them), their father and their mother. There are no names - we can see one referring to another only as "mom", "dad", "the older", "the younger". It's a house with generous windows, many rooms and a big garden, but the feeling of emptyness and enclosuring is always present. Huge walls separate the family from the outside world, to which only the father has access. The biggest enclosuring factor, though, isn't the physical one, but the psychologic.
Afraid of letting their children be contaminated by "bad" influences, the parents aprision them inside the house, giving them a distorted education (exchanging the meaning of some "strong" words for some others which have nothing to do with reality, for example) and a sense of resignation, applying harsh punishments and lying at many times, making them believe their life is wonderful and there's nothing important outside the walls. To pass the time, the father gives them little tasks or games they must play in order to get stickers and the possibility of deciding what will be the night's entreteinment. As time goes by, children start to create themselves games (as shown in the first scene of the film).
This environment doesn't allow any kind of sexual malice be developed in the children's minds, and the father keeps to himself the right to control the only male brother's activities when it comes to sex - and for that, the calls a "babysitter" (Christina, the only character who has an actual name) from time to time. There's no other relationship between them but a mechanic one, until when Christina decides to blackmail the older sister for sexual favours.
In one of his final lessons, the father asks what is the proper time to leave home - and that's when we get to know the reason of the film's title. I won't tell it for now (as I consider it to be a huge spoiler), but the fact is that the older sister is decided to leave the house and will get to the extremes if necessary - and we all know it will be.
With a perhaps simple cinematography (but not so simple deals with morality and family values), Kynodontas certainly achieves its goals. There are shocking scenes, violence and plenty of nudity, but what is more important is the way it focuses on the influence of the environment and home education in our way of seeing and dealing with life. A good film, which follows its purpose until the very ending - it's almost impossible to feel disappointed by it.
