068 REVIEW
Directed by
J.-P. VALKEAPÄÄ
Starring
PEKKA STRANG
KRISTA KOSONEN
ILONA HUHTA
Released
20 MARCH
ANTICIPATION.
Fifty shades: darker.
ENJOYMENT.
Simultaneously squirm-
inducing and sweet.
IN RETROSPECT.
The feel-good feel-bad movie of
the year.
hrilling Finnish feature Dogs Don’t Wear
Pants, from director J-P Valkeapää, is
a drama about trauma and recovering
from great loss, set in the world of BDSM. It also
has plentiful body horror, deadpan dark humour
and plotting beats reminiscent of a romantic
comedy – think Sleepless in Seattle, except instead
of a meet-cute atop the Empire State Building, and
Tom Hanks’ widower had just wanted someone to
strangle him.
The film’s visually arresting prologue establishes
pain of a non-physical kind. Juha (Pekka Strang)
loses his wife through horrible circumstances, as she
drowns while entangled in a fishing net he’s left out in
the water next to where they’re staying. Unable to save
her and nearly perishing himself, he’s forced to raise
their young child alone. Cut to years later and Juha’s
prolonged emotional paralysis is useful for his job as a
surgeon, where blood and guts – as explicitly shown –
don’t bother him, but is a problem for developing
meaningful new relationships. Now 16-year-old
daughter Elli (Ilona Huhta) tries to set him up with
her music teacher, but the only sexual satisfaction
Juha seems interested in is a masturbation ritual
involving his late wife’s clothes and perfume.
He’s also numb to putting up any traditional
parental resistance to Elli’s wishes for a tongue
piercing. Accompanying her to the piercing parlour,
he wanders off during the session to find that
the building also hosts the lair of a professional
dominatrix, Mona (Krista Kosonen), who assaults
him upon his intrusion. With his thumbnail smashed
in and mid-suffocation, Juha has an apparent out-of-body reunion with his lost love, visualised as a naked
swim in the water forever associated with her demise.
Beyond just the otherworldly emotional
enlightenment of this experience, Juha develops
a taste for BDSM, particularly asphyxiation. He
enters into proper paid sessions with Mona: he
is her ‘dog ’, with the film’s title coming from her
demand that he strip off. Partaking in increasingly
extreme acts and ceremonies as their engagements
continue, his search for pain and pleasure leads to
an unexpected bond between dog and master that
confuses both parties.
Despite its aforementioned dark comedy and
swerves into body horror (that thumb wound does not
get prettier), Dogs Don’t Wear Pants stands out as a
rare fiction film to not sensationalise, pathologise or
mock kink and those who participate in such activities.
It is a sex-positive narrative through and through.
There is authenticity in its production and costume
design’s paraphernalia, but also in what Valkeapää
and cinematographer Pietari Peltola make their visual
focus in the key scenes between Juha and Mona.
The striking eyes and faces of Strang and,
particularly, Kosonen are what the camera hones in
on, rather than their respectively nude or leather-clad
bodies. It’s all about conveying the empathetic nature
that’s vital to this psychological experience between
the characters, whereby the elaborate costumes,
settings and, well, fluids are just there to make the
fantasy – which the film goes some way to normalising- more tangible. A genuinely touching final sequence
only strengthens the portrait of finding hope through
the hellish. JOSH SLATER-WILLIAMS
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants
T