Laetitia Dosch’s ‘Dog on Trial’ delivers what its title promises, but surprises with its tonal swerves and the magnetic presence of its non-human MVP.

By Gut Lodge

Can animals act? Sensible people would say not: Our four-legged friends can’t read a script or construct a character, and if they come across charismatically on screen, that’s simply down to obeying commands, plus the deft touch of an editor. The more whimsically accommodating among us would say those last two points are true of some human actors too; Hitchcock, with his infamous “actors are cattle” quip, suggested as much. Either way, it’s hard to watch Kodi, the ragged, hungry-eyed canine star of “Dog on Trial,” without sensing, whether by sheer good fortune or some mysterious process of empathy, a genuine performance afoot.

Called upon to jump, slump, tremble and even (sort of) sing, with an expressive range spanning untethered aggression and resigned melancholy, the biscuit-colored crossbreed hits every mark required of him by Laetitia Dosch‘s endearingly eccentric directorial debut, and emerges as its most compelling element. On many films, that would seem a slight; in the case of this one, an earnest animal-rights parable in the guise of a broad knockabout farce, it’s surely the intention for this particular dog to have his day. (Rarely has a film seemed so precision-engineered to win the Palme Dog award for best canine performer at Cannes, and sure enough, following “Dog on Trial’s” Un Certain Regard premiere in May, Kodi duly and deservedly took the prize.)

Dosch, the French-Swiss actor who broke through with her delightful star turn in 2017’s “Jeune Femme,” ostensibly plays the lead as Avril, a frazzled, kind-hearted Swiss lawyer with a penchant for hopeless cases, in both the personal and legal sense. This time, unusually, it’s woebegone mongrel Cosmos (Kodi) and his equally hangdog human Dariuch (Belgian actor-comedian François Damiens), who’s facing legal action after Cosmos bit and injured three women. Separate from Dariuch’s debt to the victims, the law states that the dog should be put down. Avril successfully argues that, as an autonomous being, Cosmos should be tried independently, and so “Dog on Trial” proceeds.

This may sound like a premise from a more naïve era of family-friendly Hollywood creature comedies (“Beethoven’s Sixth Amendment,” perhaps), but Dosch’s script, co-written with “My Everything” director Anne-Sophie Bailly, leans hard into the absurdity of the idea while shooting for scathing adult satire. The case escalates fast — as does everything in a frenetic, incident-crammed film, clocking in at just 80 minutes — into a national cause célèbre, inspiring rowdy public demonstrations for and against Cosmos’s right to live, while a procession of professed experts weigh in on the morality and soul of the common mutt. Much of this is witty, as Dosch’s exuberant, up-for-anything direction dips into animation and faux-documentary stylings to convey the barrelling rush of a media circus, while there’s some considered philosophical reflection on animal behavior and ethics amid all the hijinks.

At times, however, “Dog on Trial’s” brash, busy approach leashes its impact. It’s top-heavy with story for such a slender-framed work, as sketchily developed strands involving Avril’s colleagues and her lonely young neighbor jostle for screen time with the more substantial and immediately relevant subplot of the lawyer’s growing attachment to Cosmos’s charming, court-appointed handler Marc (a winning Jean-Pascal Zadi), and the mistreated animal’s gradual softening under his care. Any dog lover will be thoroughly disarmed by this development, and by Kodi’s irresistible enactment of this arc. But they’ll be vulnerable to the next of the film’s emphatic tonal lurches, as its zanier storytelling impulses ran into some sense of duty to the realities of Switzerland’s legal system.

Consider it the shaggy misfit in the litter of recent French-language legal studies, from “Anatomy of a Fall” to “The Goldman Case” — for all its hectic tragicomic slaloming, “Dog on Trial” ultimately takes the shape of a procedural, interested in how justice is determined, and for whom. Dosch is, as ever, an appealingly off-kilter presence before the camera; behind it, she doesn’t have complete control over her film’s wriggling ideas and restless formal execution. Yet there’s something quite suitably untamed about it too. Knowing not all viewers will be on its side, “Dog on Trial” throws its lot in with the animals, barking and clawing and occasionally behaving badly to make its point — and generously throwing the spotlight on its hairier hero to bring that home.

Source: ‘Dog on Trial’ Review: Zany Courtroom Comedy With a Canine Star Turn