"Le chien de Monsieur Michel" ("Mr. Michel's Dog") marks director Jean-Jacques Beineix first adventure behind camera as a director after working as assistant director in
many other films in the 1970's. Here, he creates a fun and quite relevant for our times short film about a poor hungry man (Yves Afonso) who pretends to own a dog in his small
apartment in order to get scraps from the butcher and other treats from his neighbors. The man goes to extreme lenghts to prove that he has a dog (when in fact he has none) to
the point of imitating loud barks to scare everybody but at the same time all those people in seeing the so famous animal, of which he has to improvise and give excuses about
the animal's behavior.
The absurdity of everything makes everything look and seem funny with some cool twists and other ones that are quite predictable (the very ending I knew way beforehand,
but I accepted, it's totally valid). But as I said, there is a relevance to life and some moments felt quite believable. I just wonder if people ever tried what he did exactly
on his first contact with the butcher. In a time where famine is a constant in plenty of people's lives with countless economical crisis happening, unemployment everywhere, rampant inflation that
affect the cost of living around the globe even for the simpler things of basic needs like food and shelter, people tend to resort to desperate means, and this character isn't
completely off-mark even though the film doesn't properly address those issues since it doesn't show him as having a job neither being charged by his landlady for his payment.
So we wonder what the hell is going with him or maybe he's just a freeloader who likes to save money for other things - but again, the movie does not take this route so we
wonder. I won't consider those latter facts as inconsistencies or flaws since I don't believe movies have to explain everything, and in this particular case it just adds a
feeling of mystery and curiosity towards the main character, who keeps on living in his erratic ways yet surviving through it all.
Beineix makes a very interesting debut here with a film filled with humor, plenty of good moments that brings genuine laughter in audiences, and he plays everything with
simplicity, it's all good and safe, very far away from his more complex and artistic feature films such as "Diva" and "Betty Blue" as part of the cinema du look. But part of his
visual care for details can be evidenced here as well. His sense of humor changed drastically over the years since he never returned to the comedy format and from what I've seen
here he could be a very fine comedy director, not only because of his script and direction but also the great use of actors. 10/10.
