“The Trial of the Dog” and “The Snow Leopard” Move Humans

Two films this week tell, each time with elements of fantasy, stories inspired by an animal. The distance between Lætitia Dosch’s wacky comedy and Pema Tseden’s fable may be as great as the one that separates, geographically but not only, Switzerland from Tibet under Chinese domination, the animal presence, taken very seriously by the two filmmakers, organizes the story.

Neither is a film about an animal, the stakes of the Dog Trial like Snow Leopard are entirely human. But the presence here of a pet dog, there of a wild feline, polarizes the story, shifts behaviors, works from the inside the relationships between the biped characters. These presences reveal and modify their ways of being in the world, their relationship to authority, to the environment, etc.

In this, precisely because they are not animal films and by claiming their fictional character full of narrative and visual artifices, the concomitance of their releases testifies to slow but real and profound shifts in the way in which others than humans can be considered and participate in ways of telling stories, including for fun or dreaming.

“The Trial of the Dog” by Laetitia Dosch

Absurd? Yes, but no. The starting point of the screenplay of Lætitia Dosch’s first film – a lawyer with a history of lost causes who defends the dog of a marginal man who bit a Portuguese cleaning lady, herself defended by a far-right politician – has all the hallmarks of a predicted dead end.

We can see the scenario coming, at once improbable, too convoluted and intended to serve as a pretext for gags a dozen. What is good, really good, is that it will be all that, and that it will do much more and much better than what we could have expected.

There is a treetop adventure course aspect to the way in which Lætitia Dosch, who is also one of the two main actors in the role of the lawyer, the other being the dog Kodi in the role of Cosmos, progresses within her film. With the support of a behaviorist (the excellent Jean-Pascal Zadi) and a host of eccentric experts supposed to shed light on the Cosmos case, it is indeed the question of looks and representations that is brought into play throughout the film.

The possibility – legal but not only – of judging a dog as a person refers to the vast work actually undertaken throughout the world to chip away at the impenetrable barrier between humans and non-humans on which extractivism and the environmental catastrophe that is killing everyone, humans and non-humans, are based.

It is a great contemporary adventure, where lawyers and artists, scientists, farmers and lovers of animals or trees play their scores, far from always being in tune, but which resonate in multiple and, overall, desirable ways.

Reconsidering the absolute exclusion of non-humans from questions of justice is an important, but not unique, dimension of the first film of this actress noted for having also conceived and directed a memorable play in which she shared the stage with a horse, Hate.

In The Trial of the Dogbeyond this first subject and the comic situations, the animal presence gradually conquers its most significant place: to be a trigger for much more diverse questions that do not exclude animals, but do not focus only on them to the detriment of other beings, human or not.

To activate this process, the film mobilizes two resources, which inspire different reactions. The first is laughter, with a well-relieved journey through its multiple registers, from wild burlesque to tongue-in-cheek irony. It is extremely convincing, not only because it is funny, but because this humor activates a whole bunch of unexpected, half-hidden springs, which allow the entire film to deploy its questioning.

When Cosmos imposes itself on Me Avril Lucciane (Lætitia Dosch). | The Jokers Films

The second method, the only regret that inspires The Trial of the Dogis to have chosen a quadruped that is so obviously nice, cute, attractive and seductive. Above all, to film it in an openly racy manner, an accumulation of canine expressions ready to ensure the unconditional affection of any spectator. Animals, “wild” or “pets”, do not need to be shown as nicer and less stupid than most humans (according to human criteria) to call for other ways of looking, thinking and acting.

Certainly, the film makes it easier for itself to gain public attention by showing Cosmos in this light, but it weakens its message of the full reality and complexity of real animals—and even just “real dogs,” most of whom are less formatted to please.

Marc, the behaviorist (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Cosmos, the dog, put on a show. | The Jokers Films

This reservation about an otherwise enjoyable and welcome film can possibly be reversed, considering The Trial of the Dog
like a Trojan horse, if one dares say, to introduce itself into the cloying and definitively harmful genre to desirable ways of living with the living that are dog-dog films, the eternal Lassie, Belle, Beethoven, Marley, Benji, Skip and company.

Cinema has begun to explore new and meaningful relationships with what American philosopher Donna Haraway calls “companion species”: Wendy
et Lucy de Kelly Reichardt (2008), Heart of a Dog by Laurie Anderson (2015), The Kings by Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff (2018), or even Farewell to language
by Jean-Luc Godard (2014) offer fine examples of this. Between these judicious and radical proposals and the silly nonsense that capitalizes on the backs of animals and good feelings, Lætitia Dosch tries a sidetrack. She is probably right.

“The Snow Leopard” by Pema Tseden

Is this absurd? Yes, but it happened. At least the initial situation: on the very high plateaus of what the Chinese government now forbids to be called Tibet, it happened that a snow leopard entered a pen full of sheep and rams, feasted there and, satisfied, fell asleep.

In the morning, the furious shepherd had to face the loss of his animals, his own fury against the predator, but also the strict ban on harming an ultra-protected species (snow leopards, not sheep), a regulation vigorously applied by the “local” but Chinese police, when the shepherds themselves are Tibetan, despite the truly predatory centralism of Beijing.

This is the situation when, at the beginning of the film, a TV crew of the nickel-plated feet type arrives to film this bizarre affair. On the way, its members are greeted by the one who is in fact the central figure of Pema Tseden’s film, a young monk, the younger brother of the shepherd who is as peaceful and smiling as his elder is eruptive. This monk, also a photographer, maintains a special relationship with the leopard (the one in the enclosure? Or mountain leopards in general? We will never know.)

This relationship acts here and now, but also in the past and still in dreams. Because the eighth and last film of the formidable filmmaker of Jinpa, a Tibetan tale (2018) and Balloon (2019), who died prematurely on May 8, 2023, shortly after making it, is entirely woven from these relationships between states of the world, ways of existing, seeing, thinking that coexist and refract each other, with effects in the concrete lives of people, as in their mental state and their ability not to live their lives too badly.

Very different lives, those of shepherds of several generations, of a woman reduced to silence in the sheepfold, of television people, of another woman at the end of social networks, of cops and civil servants, of construction workers, of animals of various species…

In the extremely isolated location where it takes place, The Snow Leopard invents a very inhabited cosmos, which unfolds thanks to different vision devices, including the mystical relationship of the monk to nature and the use of the camera by television people.

Unpredictable, phantasmagorical, comical, realistic or dreamlike, the situations intertwine with each other, around and inside the enclosure surrounded by humans. But they also proliferate in the past and on the mountain where the cub of what is in fact a leopard is, in the multiplicity of types of images, including those on phone screens.

The Leopard and the Monk: under the eye of witnesses with very diverse interests, an intense encounter between two beings linked by mysterious relationships. | ED Distribution

These games of influence, seduction, control, affection, domination and compassion intertwine to develop a composite and decentralized perception of reality. But all of them only happen because one evening the leopard entered the enclosure.

This one, the real animal, but also its (digital) image and its symbolism, live their real and mythological life. Without being instrumentalized by humans, the wild animal with unpredictable behavior becomes the revealer of a tangle of relationships to power, tradition, money, friendship, nature, loyalty to its ideals, which this deliberately unstabilized fable deploys, crossed by multiple currents. Untamable like a big mountain feline.