My Great Big Fat Gay Greek Adolescence

Κυνοδοντας (Dogtooth) 2010 Greece (94 minutes) directed and cowritten by Yorgos Lanthimos.

A stereotypical Eastern Mediterranean pater familias and his wife impose the father’s traditional views of sexuality upon their three teenagers—a boy and two girls—by isolating them from the world in a gilded cage.

This predictably becomes a recipe for disaster, as the clueless teens grow more and more desperate and distressed. It seems in general like the same idea as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) but without the big budget, costumes, context and back-story—as much on the movie parents’ part as on that of the filmmakers.

There is a sense in this radically joyless and unfunny film that Sexuality is a thing that comes in a big brown paper bag and, at a certain age, we get bonked over the head with it and covered in shit. Dr. Freud did not think that way, and I am no Freudian, but I don’t either.

Something did not ring true about the kids. Children, especially adolescents, may look and act like autistic spastics to adults—and even feel that way to themselves—but they find ways to relate quite intelligibly to each other in a code adults do not get. Kids have to get around adults before they can become them. Here, they are more like robotic ‘Stepford’ kids gone haywire.

The parents’ strangeness—they clearly come across as strange, though likely well within the range of what passes for ‘normal’—appears to be wrapped up in what feels like an ‘alien’ heterosexuality. This suggests that what this movie is really about are the bitter memories of someone’s gay adolescence upsetting his straight parents’ traditional applecart.

The film would make better sense if one were to imagine the kids as three adult gay men in the bodies of teenagers, along the lines of a My Great Big Fat Gay Greek Adolescence.

It might actually have been effective and even quite funny if these ersatz kids had been given instead the voices of actors or celebrities like John Waters in that Bugs Bunny way that Hollywood sometimes gives babies and young children the voices and knowing adult points of view of well-known character actors or comedians for a ‘comic’ effect.

Or just left alone with their own voices.