Paul Schrader
Dog Eat Dog

LA RECENSIONE

Exploring the films of a person who until the age of 18 had no permission to watch movies and who experienced periods of depression due to loneliness and alcoholism, such as Paul Joseph Schrader (he has directed 21 films from his first “Blue Collar” in 1978 to his latest ”First Reformed” presented this year at the 74th Venice Film Festival where he has already won the Green Drop Award), a director who became famous to many for the beautiful film “American Gigolo” in '80, but already acclaimed for having written and scripted the film “Taxi Driver” in '76 directed by Martin Scorsese, with whom he later repeated the experience as a screenwriter in three other great films that I presume everyone has seen, “Raging Bull” in '80, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” in '87, and in “Bringing Out the Dead” in '99, well, to keep it short, I found and watched today this “Dog Eat Dog” from 2016 but released in Italy only on July 13 of this year, taken from the homonymous novel by Edward Bunker (an ex-criminal who found a “redemption/recovery” also in writing...) written in '96.

Already from the title, I didn't expect anything good and indeed in the film nothing good ever happens, quite the opposite…

The film opens with a prologue entitled "PURE DOPAMINE" where you are immediately thrust into a “Pulp” atmosphere thanks to Mad Dog (one of the three main characters), a "whacked out" guy played by the great William Dafoe.

It continues with the (let's say) 2nd chapter which is the real beginning “DOG EAT DOG” strangely in black/white, and we find ourselves in a strip club atmosphere, the usual meeting place for the other two protagonists Diesel and the narrating voice Troy played by the equally great Nicolas Cage.

As far as I'm concerned, the events that happen in the film are just punches to the stomach, and it frightens me to think and know that in the world these things can really happen and that out there are disturbed individuals without any scruples, and whose purpose in life is to have and only have, no matter the cost, I just hope that the unbalanced ones do not draw on those facts narrated in the film for their future exploits…

In short, in the end, I was left with a deep nausea that, to be honest, accompanied me from the start.

P.S. I knew I would forget a small detail, but let's recover immediately, in the film Paul Schrader also appears as the Greek, a gangster who hires the protagonists to carry out paid misdeeds.