English Title: Dogs Don’t Wear Pants Original Title: Koirat eivät käytä housuja Year: 2019 Genre: Drama, Romance Country: Finland, Latvia Language: Finnish Director/Screenwriter: J-P Valeapää based on the original story by Juhana Lumme Music: Michal Nejtek Cinematography: Pietari Peltola Editing: Mervi Junkkonen Cast: Pekka Strang Krista Kosonen Ilona Huhta Jani Volanen Oona Airola Ester Geislerová Iiris Anttila Rating: 6.2/10
Surgeon Juha (Strang) lost his wife in the drowning, and 5 years later, raising their daughter Elli (Huhta) all by himself, he is still disengaged with the world around him, when Elli introduces her teacher Satu (Airola) to him, he remains disinterested. Chancing upon a dominatrix named Mona (Kosonen) and the experience of being choked by her jolts Juha out of his detachment, but how far will he go to explore the BDSM fetish? In his third feature DOGS DON’T WEAR PANTS, Finnish filmmaker J-P Valeapää patiently titillates us down this rabbit hole, but he errs on the side of using BDSM purely as a pain-inducing therapy, and forgets to tell audience, that pleasure is the ultimate elixir. What takes the lion’s share of the story is Juha’s drab life, his home is as antiseptic as his working place, the communication between him and Elli is occluded, he prefers a BDSM session over Elli’s band performance in the school, which says a lot about what a parent he is, and we aren’t informed if his wife’s decease is an accident or not, is there marital strife in the play? Meanwhile, the fascinating Mona is utilized solely as an enigma, is playing dominatrix a side hustle for fast cash or stems from her id? It could be both but the answer is moot. Again, there is no pleasure in their role play, Juha only wants to experience the feeling of suffocation to re-live that drowning tragedy, to meet his dead wife again, underwater and breathless, not the frisson of ASMR or orgasm. And a po-faced Mona is a pro doing her routines with as less emotional attachment as possible, she doesn’t seem to enjoy what she does, not for a minute, if anything, only some unspecified disturbance are looming beneath her spandex get-up. So, if the story sounds perversely erotic, Valeapää’s execution is rather somber, un-sexy and queasy (fingernail-pulling and tooth-pulling are far from the nexus of BDSM), and when Mona’s professional facade predictably cracks, we are not any the wiser. The two leads are merely serviceable, an angular Strang acts as if he is habitually sedated, his pallid complexion has no charisma to spare, and Kosonen makes a far more resounding splash, benefiting from Mona’s stupendous physical transformation, however her side of untold story would have been infinitely more interesting than Juha’s tired jeremiad. If, for most of the time, the film is a drag, at least Valeapää suffixes some positive vibes in the end, when Juha finally cracks a smile to embrace his kink, it should be a beginning rather than a finish, but that’s all she wrote, and DOGS DON’T WEAR PANTS fails BDSM epically. referential entries: Peter Strickland’s THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014, 8.0/10); Aki Kaurismäki’s LE HAVRE (2011, 8.3/10).
Cinema Omnivore 