Okay, I really wanted to like this movie. I tried. The truth is I hated watching it and I dreaded reviewing it because it seems I am an outlier. This movie is well loved and critically lauded. I am left wondering if I’m a grinch and missing the point completely or if it is so acclaimed because mediocrity is easily rewarded in an arena with little competition. Both can be true.
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants starts out with our lead Juha, a father and husband who suffers a terrible tragedy. His wife drowns in an accident where he tries unsuccessfully to save her. Fast forward a decade and his life is bleak. He is still grief stricken, shown desperately jerking off while huffing his deceased wife's perfume or clothing. He is numb, stuck in grief and monotony. He is completely phoning it in at work, parenting his daughter, and while dating.
His daughter wants a tongue piercing – really she just wants him to pay attention to her, but can’t even successfully rebel because her father is too disassociated to notice or care. He obliges and accompanies her to a tattoo shop. While the daughter is getting the piercing, Juha wanders into a basement dungeon and encounters Mona, the dominatrix. She quickly confronts him for his intrusion, pushing him to the ground, stepping on his hands with a riding crop to his throat. His daughter opens the door with a freshly pierced tongue, Mona has disappeared, and they leave.
It’s clearly the first time Juha has felt anything in ages and he immediately returns for a paid session, during which Mona humiliates and suffocates him. During his asphyxiation he revisits the trauma of his wife’s death. He becomes infatuated with this experience to a point of obsession, upping the ante each time, blurring the lines of masochism and self harm. His life spirals out of control, he sabotages his job and his relationship with his daughter, all to spend more time in his asphyxiated state. His chaotic behavior eventually pushes past Mona’s boundaries and she refuses to see him any more. He becomes desperate and begins stalking her, eventually offering his body for her to abuse as she pleases, in exchange for one more suffocation. I won’t spoil what happens next but I can tell you that Mona is definitely not a trained dentist.
We are supposed to believe she enjoys all of this, and enjoys Juha, so much so that she’s falling for him. But I’m just not buying it, the love story feels forced. He doesn’t even love her!! He just loves getting choked to the point he can revisit his wife in his last memories of her. In reality, Juha and Mona have no chemistry and she is barely a three dimensional person in this movie!
All we know about Mona the Dominatrix is that she is a poodle-owning sadist who moonlights as a physical therapist, and enjoys dancing and watersports (the piss kind, not the jet-ski kind).
There is a counterpoint: perhaps Mona’s two-dimensionality makes this a realistic depiction of sex work after all. Rarely do we get to show our fullness through our work personas. We are but stewards of an experience, and part of the gig is letting men project all their shit onto us, for a price.
Regardless, our dominatrix has zero character development. She and Juha have no chemistry, and Juha himself is not an interesting character at all. The film just dragged on and on and everything felt so obvious from the beginning. Even the body horror felt a bit cheap, like Gaspar Noé for Temu. I appreciate the idea: immoveable grief and finding healing through unconventional love. That’s all very touching and powerful, but I just don’t think the film did it justice, and it bored me to tears. A Letterboxd review sums up my thoughts perfectly: “Boring is not good for a movie involving BDSM”.
This movie reminded me a lot of Barbet Schroeder’s 1976 film Maitresse. It has many flaws but I think it’s worth a watch if you enjoyed Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. It follows a Domina who falls for a lovable idiot with a save-a-ho complex. The cinematography, set design, costumes (by Karl Lagerfeld), BDSM scenes – (which were stage managed by a real Dominatrix and feature her clients who paid to appear in the film), make it a very enjoyable watch.
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