Year: 2024

Runtime: 83 minutes

Directed by: Lætitia Dosch

Written by: Lætitia Dosch, Anne-Sophie Bailly

Starring: Lætitia Dosch, François Damiens, Anabela Moreira, Anne Dorval, Tom Fiszelson, Jean-Pascal Zadi

By Sarah Manvel

There’s a semi-serious prize awarded every year for the best performance by a dog in a film showing at the Cannes Film Festival: the Palme Dog. The title is a pun on the name of the festival’s main prize, the Palme d’Or. Last year it was won by Messi, who played Snoop, the dog at the center of “Anatomy of a Fall,” and who subsequently took the awards circuit by storm over the course of the year. As a result of this, for the first time, the dogs in contention for the Palme Dog were allowed to attend the festival. And the winner was Kodi, the dog at the heart of “Dog on Trial,” a messy Swiss-French movie about the relationship humans have with the non-human world. The movie could not of course exist without a dog at its center, but unfortunately it doesn’t know what bone it has to pick with the world, and as a result belongs only in the doghouse.*

Avril (Ms Dosch, who also co-wrote and directed) is a Swiss lawyer who specialises in hopeless, unprofitable, unwinnable cases. She’s approached by a desperate man called Dariuch (François Damiens cheerfully playing to type), whose dog Cosmos (Kodi) recently bit his flatmate Lorene (Anabela Moreira), permanently scarring her face. As this is the third time Cosmos has bit a human, Swiss law requires him to be put down. Dariuch’s mental health relies on his dog so he is beside himself, not to mention that he can’t afford the fines, or to pay for reconstructive surgery for Lorene. He convinces Avril that Cosmos is a living creature with its own rights, not a possession as dogs are under Swiss law, and that therefore putting Cosmos down would be inhumane. So Avril takes the case. A fancy lawyer named Roseline (Anne Dorval), who’s running for political office, scents an easy career win here by arguing that Cosmos should be put down, not least in how she can stand up for women’s rights by accusing Cosmos of misogyny. 

Avril’s main friend is her twelve-year-old neighbour Joachim (Tom Fiszelson), who’s prone to sneaking into her apartment when his abusive parents are on drunken rampages. The point of this subplot is to show not only how Avril gets overly emotionally invested in other lives, but also that her anger about Cosmos’s treatment is really anger at her own helplessness to do anything practical for Joachim. There’s also a sweet animal behavioural therapist named Marc (Jean-Pascal Zadi also cheerfully playing to type), whose fondness for Cosmos and surprisingly analytical insights about human behaviour provide the more modern comedy. The majority of the plot here is old-fashioned French grotesque, beginning with the voiceover that’s actually Avril’s self-critical commentary. There’s also plenty of slapstick as she attempts to bond with Cosmos, improve her career and stop embarrassing herself in court. But these lighthearted comic stylings also contain a physically abused child and Lorene’s ruined face, not to mention plenty of unpleasant language used thanks to the fact that Lorene is an immigrant. It’s an uncomfortable melange, necessary to pad out the (still quite short) 83-minute runtime. There’s too much foul language and sex stuff for this to be appropriate for the younger teenagers, who would have been the most likely audience, and it’s too insubstantial for it to be very appealing to adults. It’s a doggone shame.* 

*Bark all you like, I’m not apologising for any of these puns.