Lek and the Dogs

Lek and the Dogs opens on a des­o­late land­scape, com­plete­ly emp­ty except for the naked fig­ure we see scram­bling across the ground on all fours. Is he man or beast? At this point in Lek’s life, he doesn’t seem to fit com­fort­ably in either world.

This new film by British mav­er­ick Andrew Kötting is a loose adap­ta­tion of the acclaimed play ​‘Ivan and the Dogs’ by Hat­tie Nay­lor, which was inspired by the true sto­ry of Ivan Mishukov. In 1996, four-year-old Ivan walked out of his fam­i­ly home in Moscow, away from the clutch­es of his mother’s drunk­en and abu­sive boyfriend. He lived on the streets for the next two years, befriend­ing a pack of wild dogs with whom he could scav­enge and sleep. These ani­mals offered him a greater sense of com­pan­ion­ship and pro­tec­tion than he had ever expe­ri­enced with his fam­i­ly, and he would flee with them when­ev­er the police attempt­ed to bring him back to the human world.

Ivan even­tu­al­ly did return to human life, re-learn­ing speech and going on to live a rel­a­tive­ly ordi­nary life, but the pro­tag­o­nist of Kötting’s film has cho­sen to resume his exis­tence with his canine friends, find­ing peo­ple too much to bear. ​“Safe­ty is under the sur­face,” Lek decides, before shar­ing his sto­ry from his dark sub­ter­ranean den, mut­ter­ing into a tape recorder with his bald head loom­ing out of the shad­ows like Mar­lon Brando’s Kurtz.

Lek is played by Xavier Tchili, the French per­for­mance artist who pre­vi­ous­ly appeared as char­ac­ters with the same name in Kötting’s This Filthy Earth and Ivul, and these films now feel like a loose the­mat­ic tril­o­gy about soci­ety, fam­i­ly and our rela­tion­ship with the land­scape. Andrew Kötting is a dif­fi­cult artist to pin down, work­ing pro­lif­i­cal­ly and eclec­ti­cal­ly across a vari­ety of media, but Lek and the Dogs feels like one of his most accom­plished and ful­ly realised works.

It’s a remark­able audio-visu­al expe­ri­ence. While Lek’s solil­o­quy gives the film its spine, Kötting lay­ers mul­ti­ple voiceovers on to the sound­track; a body psy­chother­a­pist and a child psy­chol­o­gist give us an insight into the behav­iour and emo­tion­al make­up of men and dogs, while a record­ing of Lek’s wife – who he aban­doned when she refused to join him under­ground – shades in his brief and unsuc­cess­ful attempt to re-enter society.

Kötting’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Nick Gor­don Smith evokes Tarkovsky’s Stalk­er with his stark images of Lek wan­der­ing through the waste­lands, but it’s the director’s imag­i­na­tive use of archive footage that real­ly impress­es, as he skil­ful­ly uses it to illus­trate Lek’s expe­ri­ences and to cre­ate a vivid por­trait of the bro­ken soci­ety he emerged from. Lek and the Dogs is a dense and chal­leng­ing film, but it’s also a reward­ing one that car­ries a pow­er­ful emo­tion­al charge thanks to Tchili’s spell­bind­ing lead performance.

The film is about the lega­cy of child­hood trau­ma, and how it can scar and warp an entire life, and as played by Tchili, Lek appears to be a gen­uine­ly tor­ment­ed soul; it’s as if each mem­o­ry he retrieves for us is caus­ing him phys­i­cal pain. By the end of the film we under­stand why Lek has cho­sen to live this way, reject­ing his own species and find­ing solace with anoth­er. ​“My dogs have nev­er left me,” he weeps, ​“but humans… they nev­er hear.”