Dobermann
France 1997
Reviewed by Andy Richards
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
During infant Yann LePentrec's christening, one of his uncles decides to give him a pistol. A Dobermann pinscher bursts into the church, surprising the uncle. The gun flies through the air, and lands in Yann's pram. Years later, Yann (aka 'Le Dob' or 'The Dobermann') and his mute girlfriend Nat hold up a security van. After, Yann rounds up his gang - 'Mosquito', 'Pitbull', 'Padre', Nat's brothers Léo and Manu, and transvestite gang apprentice Olivier/Sonia. Together they successfully rob a series of banks on the same street using their underworld connections to set up 'ghost' robberies to distract the police, several of whom they kill.
Chief Inspector Sauveur Christini visits Olivier's house and exposes Olivier's transvestism to his family. Christini terrorises them until Olivier agrees to lead the police to Dobermann's gang. Christini takes Olivier's child hostage, to ensure his co-operation. At the 'Joe Hell' club where the gang are relaxing, the police try to pick them off one by one, but things go wrong when Olivier's wife arrives to reclaim her child and Christini shoots her in the back. After a gun battle Nat and Pitbull are captured. Yann, hiding in the club, sees Christini brutalising Nat on the CCTV system. Enraged, he rescues Nat and kills Christini by holding his head on the road in front of a speeding car. Olivier is spared for his betrayal, but a symbolic funeral is held for 'Sonia'. Yann and Nat drive off together.
Review
Jan Kounen's film opens with an impressively outrageous computer-animation sequence, in which an anthropomorphised Dobermann growls menacingly before urinating over the credits. This image then morphs into that of the real dog that materialises portentously at Yann's christening during the prologue. This elision between the 'real' and 'cartoon' worlds is central to the film's dominant aesthetic, which strives very hard to render its characters as pure icons with the broadest of brush strokes. Kounen borrows his pallette from Sergio Leone's Westerns (such as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, 1966), whose semi-mythic warriors seemed pathologically driven to up the ante on each other in their battles for supremacy. In these terms, Vincent Cassel's Yann is the 'good' to Tchéky Karyo's 'bad' Christini - not because Yann possesses any developed sense of morality, but at least he doesn't shoot women in the back.
Indeed, few films display such an explicitly animalistic view of human behaviour (territorial, patriarchal aggression in particular), alongside concomitant attitudes to women and gays that are deliberately baiting in their wanton crassness. Dobermann's amoral, dog-eat-dog world isn't the expression of a serious, considered vision. It seems nothing more than a statement of fashion, a spurious extension of the film's paramount concern with 'style'. And while the breathless kineticism and jaded sense of romance may be drawn directly from Stone's Natural Born Killers (the laserdisc of which is displayed prominently in Yann's hideout), and the characterisation from Trainspotting (referenced through a poster), unlike those films Dobermann seems devoid of satirical or sociological intent. Instead, it is in love with its own attempts at modern mythmaking and the erotic, extravagant charge of its images - whether Monica Bellucci's Nat calmly blowing up a bank doorway with a huge rocket launcher, or Olivier's infant son sitting bewildered atop his mother's bloody corpse.
Like Tarantino, Kounen enjoys pushing ultraviolence into the realms of comic excess: a cop stands in the middle of the street, struggling unsuccessfully to remove a primed grenade from his crash helmet. Excruciatingly, Yann dispatches Christini by forcing his head on to the road before a speeding car. Damagingly, Kounen achieves stylistic excess by sacrificing relevancy to the real world (something that didn't matter in Leone's pre-civilised wilderness). The Paris of this film is, to all intents, as abstracted as that of Luc Besson's Subway. Indeed this is the Bessonian cinéma du look at its most defiantly shallow. It's unengaging - despite its visual adrenaline - precisely because it is so cynically unengaged itself. At one point a character wipes his arse with a copy of Cahiers du cinéma, but the gesture constitutes modish irreverence rather than any form of active subversion. Like his animated man-dog, Kounen's Dobermann postures and snarls loudly enough, but its bark remains rather more impressive than its bite.
Credits
- Producers
- Frédérique Dumas
- Éric Névé
- Screenplay/Adaptation/Dialogue
- Joël Houssin
- With the participation of Jan Kounen
- Based on the series
- Le Dobermann
- by Joël Houssin
- Director of Photography
- Michel Amathieu
- Editor
- Bénédicte Brunet
- Production Designer
- Michel Barthélémy
- Music
- Schyzomaniac:
- François Roy
- Jean-Jacques Hertz
- Philippe Mallier
- Featuring Brune
- ©Le Studio Canal+/PolyGram Audiovisuel/France 3 Cinéma/Noé Productions/;La Chauve-Souris
- Production Companies
- La Chauve-Souris & Noé Productions present a co-production of Le Studio Canal+/PolyGram Audiovisuel/France 3 Cinéma/Comstock/La Chauve-Souris/Noé Productions and Tawak Pictures
- With the participation of Canal+/Sofinergie 4/Sofygram/Canal+ Écriture
- With the participation of Centre National de la Cinématographie
- Executive Producer
- Marc Baschet
- Production Associate
- Ken Nakagawa
- Production Manager
- Emmanuel Jacquelin
- Unit Production Managers
- Michel Gilabert
- Laurent Sivot
- Location Manager
- Pierre Grippon
- Post-production Supervisor
- Patrick Rouxel
- Assistant Directors
- James Canal
- Thierry Leroch
- Sebastien Deux
- Script Supervisor
- Olivia Bruynoghe
- Casting Director
- Pierre-Jacques Bénichou
- Camera Operator
- Sophie Cadet
- Steadicam Operator
- Jean-Michel David
- Digital Special Effects
- Mac Guff Ligne
- Visual Effects Supervisor
- Rodolph Chabrier
- Pyrotechnics
- Georges Demétrau
- Graphics
- Le Village
- Associate Editor
- Eric Carlier
- Storyboards
- Fab
- Sculptor
- François Paturange
- Costume Designer
- Chattoune & Fab
- Costume Supervisor
- Chattoune
- Wardrobe
- Sandrine Langen
- Key Make-up
- Nicolas Degennes
- Special Make-up Effects
- Jean-Christophe Spadaccini
- Denis Gastou
- Pascal Molina
- Key Hairstylist
- José-Lucas Casas
- Hairstylist
- Lucio Inzerillo
- Main Titles
- Jan Kounen
- Titles/Opticals
- Arane
- Vocals
- Brune
- Jean-Marc Pessin
- Choir
- Choeurs d'Hommes de la Capella du Musée du Kremlin de Moscou
- Directed by
- Guennady Dmitryak
- Harmonica Solos
- Jean-Jacques Milteau
- Orchestra Recordist
- Paul Hulme
- Music Director
- Rick Wentworth
- Recordists
- Jean-Philippe Bonichon
- David Felgeirolles
- Thierry Rogen
- Soundtrack
- "Dobermann (Bienvenue dans le chaos)" by Schyzomaniac, performed by Brune, Gaze; "Voices of Lust" by Schyzomaniac, performed by Brune; "Voodoo People" by Liam Howlett, performed by The Prodigy, live guitars by Lance Riddler
- Sound Design
- Richard Shorr
- Sound Mixer
- Philippe Lecocq
- Recorders
- Éric Chevallier
- Pascal Von Hatten
- Sound Re-recording
- Dominique Hennequin
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Richard Shorr
- Sound Editor
- Jean-Paul Hurier
- Digital Sound Editor
- Philippe Amouroux
- Sound Effects
- Jean-Pierre Lelong
- Supervising Sound Effects
- Manuel Goncalves De Sousa
- Sound Effects Recordist
- Jacques Thomas-Gérard
- Effects Editor
- Alice Moine
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Jean-Pierre Houel
- Post-synchronization
- Tri Track Sync
- Catherine Leygonie
- Post-synchronization Editor
- Catherine Trouillet
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Philippe GuÉgan
- Armourer
- Christophe Maratier
- Animal Handlers
- André Noël
- Dominique Vanhoe
- Cast
- Vincent Cassel
- Yann LePentrec, 'Le Dob'
- Monica Bellucci
- Nathalie, 'Nat the Gypsy'
- Tchéky Karyo
- Chief Inspector ;Sauveur Christini
- Antoine Basler
- Jean-Claude Ayache, 'Mosquito'
- Dominique Bettenfeld
- Elie Frossard, 'Padre'
- Romain Duris
- Manu
- François Levantal
- Léo
- Stéphane Metzger
- Olivier Brachet, 'Sonia'
- Chick Ortéga
- Jacky Sueur, 'Pitbull'
- Ivan Merat-Barboff
- Inspector David Silverberg
- Patrick Rocca
- Commissioner Loic Clodarec
- Pascal Demolon
- Inspector Lefèvre/Emmanuelle
- Marc Duret
- Inspector Baumann
- Florence Thomassin
- Florence
- Jean Lescot
- Sonia's father
- Roland Amstutz
- old Uncle Joe
- Arnaud Arbessier
- young Uncle Joe
- Jo Camacho
- Dob's father
- Jean François Catton
- bank director
- Rodolph Freytt
- security guard
- Attica Guedj
- Sonia's mother
- Marcel Le Guilloux
- the priest
- Laura Mañá
- Victoria
- Bruno Richard
- assistant bank director
- Francia Seguy
- bank customer
- Virginie Arnaud
- prostitute
- Marc Baschet
- bum
- Afif Ben Badra
- pimp
- Lucie Bizart
- Dobermann as a baby
- Frédéric Camus
- barman
- Marc Caro
- machine-gunned cop
- Elle Chocho
- Joe Hell transvestite
- Anthéa Cintract
- dancer
- Gilles Conseil
- Rainer G, motorcyclist
- David Defever
- 'Baldy', antigang cop
- Franck Del
- drag queen
- Julie Dossavi
- dancer
- Valérie Druguet
- Joe Hell dancer
- Niels Dubost
- policeman
- Frédérique Dumas
- union customer
- Ernest Evrard
- Joe Hell DJ
Roger Faillu- man with poodle
- Annie Girard
- Dob's godmother
- Philippe Guégan
- running security guard
- Pierre Heitz
- Jack, antigang cop
- Jan Kounen
- Roquette, yuppie
- Caroline Lallemant
- bank woman 2
- Patrick Lambert
- 'Beard', antigang cop
- Alexis Luce
- Sylvain Maury
- Joe Hell transvestites
- Soria Mouffakir
- female witness
- Michel Moyon
- policeman
- Éric Névé
- union customer
- Gaspar Noé
- Kasmir, sausage seller
- XXX
- Amnesty International
- Roulian
- drag queen
- Paul Scortesia called Pôl
- taxi-driver
- Lucine Thomas
- Sonia's baby
- Carméla Valente
- Dob's mother
- Xitron
- drag queen
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Metro Tartan Distributors
- 9,279 feet
- 103 minutes 6 seconds
- Dolby SR digital/Digital DTS sound
- In Colour
- Anamorphic [Panavision]
- Subtitles