I was – to put it mildly – ecstatic when I heard TLA had picked up Lasse Spang Olsen’s In China They Eat Dogs and its sequel – Old Men In New Cars – for a domestic release. These are two very talked up films by quite possibly my favorite screenwriter in the world, Anders Tomas Jensen. The only one who can really give Jensen a run for his money in my book is Charlie Kauffman. And maybe the Coens on a good day. Thus, my anticipation, to say nothing of my expectations, were very high when I finally got the chance to pop this thing into the player. Were my expectations met? Not quite, no, but when you set the bar as high as I did for this particular film you can come up just a little bit short and still be mighty impressive. A lesser Jensen film is, after all, still a Jensen film.
But enough of that, what are we actually dealing with here? In China They Eat Dogs is typically hard to define. It is at once a blacker than pitch comedy, a cerebral cautionary tale on absolute morality, a dig at the American action film and a rousing good action flick in its own right.
Dejan Cukic stars as Arvid, a quiet bank teller who loves things to be well ordered and always plays it safe. His one quirk of personality is his overwhelming desire to do what’s right, a quirk that draws the wrath of his terminally bored girlfriend Hanne when he gives eight hundred kroner to charity without telling her, an act that launches her into a fierce tirade against Arvid and his boring little life. Did the argument have an effect? Perhaps, because later in the day when a thief attempts to rob the bank Arvid works at he knocks the would-be thief unconscious with a squash racket and becomes a hero, a hero given two weeks vacation as a reward. But to no avail: by the time he returns home Hanne has gone having taken all of their furniture with her, spray painted “Fuck You Arvid” on their living room wall, and covered every available surface with half eaten bagels.
This definitely qualifies as a bad day. You have an argument, become a hero, and can’t even parlay your new found hero-hood into make up points with your lady. But it gets worse when a distraught young woman bursts into Arvid’s empty and defaced apartment and beats him about the head and shoulders, berating him for stopping the robber who she claims was her husband desperate for money to fund fertility treatments so that they can have a baby. Arvid now has a crisis. He believes in doing the right thing. I mean he REALLY believes in doing the right thing. And he thought he had by stopping the bank robbery. But now he’s not so sure. Why DID he have to stop the robbery? Why didn’t he let the robber go?
And here’s where the film really gets rolling: Arvid decides he needs to make things up to the woman and the way to do it is to perform a bank robbery of his own to fund the fertility treatments and then break her husband out of jail. But, good guy that he is, Arvid has not a clue how to go about doing this and so he enlists the aid of his completely amoral, borderline psychotic, ex-con, estranged brother Harald (Kim Bodnia) who in turn bullies two cooks (one of whom is played by Nicholaj Lie Kaas) and a dishwasher in the restaurant he owns into rounding out the gang. They pull the robbery off, yes, but not without much violence, an absolutely over the top car crash and dishwasher Vuk breaking both arms. Arvid, understandably, is appalled.
The action element of the film is clear enough: In China is loaded with more gunplay, explosions (Harald keeps C4 in the restaurant freezer), and car chases then you’re ever likely to see again in a Scandanavian film. The more subtle stuff happens in the interplay of the two brothers. Arvid and Harald sit on the opposite poles of moral certainty, Arvid wanting to do what’s right at all costs and Harald believing that there is no right or wrong whatsoever – that the best course in life is to simply avoid doing what you don’t do well while doing whatever is necessary to get what you want. Both of these two spread a path of wholesale destruction behind them thanks to their moral certainty – an appropriate comment on the current American political climate – a path that becomes continually broader and bloodier as things progress and Arvid eventually becomes disillusioned and swings over to Harald’s way of thinking. A closing sequence that I can’t get into without dropping major spoilers makes the film’s belief in the absurdity of the Moral Right crystal clear.
Jensen’s script is frequently laugh out loud funny – “You just shot an entire rock band. I’ve always wanted to do that.” – but it is hampered somewhat by budget limits and one major character flaw, that flaw being Arvid. Hanne is right. For much of the film Arvid IS a very boring man. His character doesn’t really get hopping until the middle of the picture. The real star of the film is Harald, who steals absolutely every scene he is in and who was wisely made the central character in the sequel, but having this film structured around Arvid limits Harald’s screen time somewhat. The budget limits mostly affect such matters as cinematography – the film is shot on DV with largely natural lighting – and scale – as big as things are they could be bigger – but those issues are largely secondary.
As seems to be the norm with TLA releases the extras are minimal but they have done a solid job with the film itself. While the image is a bit soft in spots that is due to the DV source, not the transfer itself. In China They Eat Dogs may not be as biting or soulful as Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, not as strong a character study as Mifune and not as gleefully absurd as The Green Butchers but it does contain trademark Jensen moments of all of those things. It may be a rental rather than a purchase, but In China is certainly worth a look.