Argentine director Ana Katz on the set of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
By Alonso Aguilar
Since its premiere at Sundance and the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2021, Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet / El perro que no calla has been praised for its innovative use of ellipsis and intoxicatingly-melancholic atmosphere. In contrast with the breezy atmospheres and summery color palettes of her previous films like Florianópolis Dream / Sueño Florianópolis (2018) and My Friend from the Park / Mi amiga del parque (2015), The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet immediately stands out for its digital monochrome and a pervasive aura of desolation.
Katz’s characteristic humorous lens is not lost, however, as she still creates her portraits of contemporary life adrift through playful vignettes of her protagonist stumbling through society’s expectations. What feels different now is a darker hue in her sensibilities, a more open dialogue with nostalgia that permeates Sebastián’s (Daniel Katz) aimless journey through young adulthood.
In this conversation, Cinema Tropical spoke with Ana Katz about contemporary masculinities, economic frustrations in Latin America, and how to portray a sense of ‘adriftness’ through cinematic language.
Even if many aspects from The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet can be found in the rest of your works, there are some important changes that go beyond merely switching to black and white. This is your first male protagonist in almost a decade, and tonally, the film delves into a more frontal melancholic tone in comparison to your latest films, where the feeling felt as if it loomed in the background. Do you interpret these decisions as a natural evolution in your work? Or was it more spontaneous?
There are really many gestures that I don't imagine. I didn't mark them on a path, or a trajectory, but they express something that I feel strongly at the moment. For example, in Florianópolis Dream, everything is dreamy and summery, but there’s this melancholy in the background that you mention. In The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, sadness is more in the forefront. There are still optimistic moments and sweeter details, but everything came from a constant transformation of things. One of the most important aspects for me was a sense of the vitality of time within the film.
To work in black and white wasn’t really a decision, it just came as something that fit the story. The tone was something I felt I needed to express, and the same thing happened with Daniel Katz as the lead. He also wanted to work on this film as a personal emotional experiment, if you will. So that also determines how everything comes to be. I believe that each artistic expression needs a different framework depending on the aim and the emotions guiding it.
I immediately felt that The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet was going to be a film of moments, where the ellipsis occupies a very transcendent place, almost as the co-protagonist that joins this man’s drama on a very human scale.
The personal nature of the process can be felt in how palpable the film’s emotional core is, but I also find it curious how the film is also somewhat of a generational portrait. Our protagonist wanders from odd job to odd job, feeling adrift amidst an interconnected world, and in many ways that’s the experience of many young people existing in Latin America’s neoliberal context.
I very much agree with you, I also felt that. I was trying to portray a type of man who tends to be rejected by the system. This is a man who cares about his plants, and who holds onto his dog as an emotional anchor. In some reviews he was read as careful, affectionate, and sensitive, and in others as submissive and apathetic, because he did not act as requested by the neoliberal system.
This type of man never has a lot of space, it seems to me. He’s the type of man that sometimes chooses to stay a little to the side, but not because they don't have much to share, but because the rules are very clear for boys.
Before, you mentioned the importance of ellipsis within the film. This fragmented narrative, where we begin to see vignettes of different scenes of life, which in the end I think is where you end up sort of capturing the film’s emotional core. Given that structure, what was the process like of constructing it in the editing room? Of knowing the resonance of each sequence within the film’s very brief length?
The process was very particular because the construction of the film had a lot of trial and error. The script was clear, but the montage had to find that sensitivity and that emotion that’s not mathematical, that in many cases can only be achieved by trying and trying and trying until it appears as if it were an illusion. And like a magician, the important part is that the illusion holds weight, if the spectators see the trick behind it, it doesn’t really work. We tried to make more intuitive feelings palpable.
An element that complements these intuitive feelings, and that also works like a sort of transition between vignettes, are the drawings that occasionally pop-up. When did you reach the decision to incorporate them?
For me those drawings were very important since they generate a direct pathway to Sebastián’s soul. They helped me express certain things that words and images couldn’t. I never imagined them as elaborate or professional animation. During the filming process I discovered that there is something to children’s drawings that evoke a particular feeling, almost as a tool for purer emotions.
The dog’s death is a good example of a sequence that can be done in a thousand different ways, but none worked for me. There are things like that which cannot be reproduced directly while stile keeping the same organic feeling. Of course you can do it, but then you’re dialoguing with the conventions of how death is filmed, and I didn’t want to depend on those.
Mariela Rípodas, who is the art director, had an incredible sensitivity for the feeling I was aiming for, and it turned out great.
Going back to this organic and intimate feeling you were seeking: did that make you rethink any aesthetic decision? Like your relationship with space and bodies within the frames, for example?
For me the work of the team and the actors had a very important authorial quota because they were not only a tool for the director to express, but they provided their own point of view as well. The art director, the different cinematographers, Daniel's performance, the other actors… the truth is that they were all active participants in the creation. That's why many times the feeling I had was very similar to that of a documentary.
We’ve talked a lot about the melancholic aura that permeates The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, but there’s still your characteristic comedic moments, although perhaps in darker hue. Was it a challenge to strike that balance in a more directly dramatic work?
I didn’t really worry very much about that. I feel that I live with that humor, that it’s a part of me for better or worse. Many times, from the outside, friends, viewers, and critics point out this humor you mention, but it’s never something that I am looking at when I rehearse. I never change a dialogue to make it more or less funny. It’s not something I deal with, because I think humor in my work has to do with language, in a way that dances around certain elements.
Humor is always there. It can make you cry, or it can make you laugh. It is, rather, more of a lens through which I see the world, not necessarily in the form of a joke or such.
I also think that the way your characters inhabit each space and exist in the world may perhaps help solidify that humorous lens you mention. And talking about your characters, you’ve mentioned how you’re always interested in these people being adrift, these wandering souls searching for a place where they can fit in, while sometimes struggling with expressing what they feel inside. How do you see Sebastián within your filmography?
It is true that I am interested in those moments in life where certainties are disorganized. I think that the case of this film is a little different, because I think that Sebastián does not appear in a crisis, but what is in crisis is the world around him. In a way he’s a soldier lost in a colossal battle, trying to do whatever he can. There’s something about adaptation and constant re-adaptation which interests me a lot, because even if it’s not an internal conflict, it’s something that hits you in the head every time you wake up. Like, “yeah, I have a job, but then this happens to me, and then I have a bill to pay, and…”It’s difficult sometimes, and I find that it’s something interesting to explore and build a narrative around.
We totally see different expressions of what we are talking about in this neoliberal world you mention, this hostile environment towards people like Sebastián, or like all young people in general. Something that caught my attention is how these apocalyptic feelings are, for the most part, presented without the need for hyperbole (and even the pandemic sequence is now totally assimilated in our current context).
It truly is. I think there is a bright and alluring side to the pandemic, that’s also scary and very grim, but it also turns into the everyday, even within the social, economic and personal crisis. What surprises me a bit is how realities keep transforming, but the impression is of a sustained and constant lack of accountability from the system. So it becomes deafening, coming out and already feeling defeated. I think that’s the reason I’ve become more and more interested in retracting yourself, in seeing your battles in the little things, like watering a plant.
Yes, because in a certain way it’s like an element that in many other films would be taken as the climatic moment, as the breaking point people expect, and you framed it more accurately: just something that happened, people assimilated it, and continued with their life. You immediately come back to Sebastián’s life again, in this new post-pandemic context. When did you feel it was appropriate to end Sebastián’s arc, since it lacks the common ups and downs, and traverses a more elliptical and episodic collection of experiences?
I think I found it when Sebastián started what many see as a “right path” of stability, which doesn’t really mean much enthusiasm for him. He stumbles around for most of the film, and eventually becomes a single guy with an apartment, a baby, a balcony, a nanny, a dog, and a job to go to. That’s a feeling we discussed a lot with our co-scriptwriter Gonzalo Delgado. The moment when you ask yourself what does it all mean, ending that stage of constant ‘adriftness’? There is good, perhaps, in that economic stability and being able to organize yourself, but it’s also slightly frustrating as you feel tamed. I think it is not very clear that Sebastián’s newfound stability augurs a light at the end of the tunnel, and for me the final song is what brings that emotional closure. It was written by a great friend of mine who passed away, and who I dedicated the film to, and he sings about everything being okay, one thing at a time. You brush your teeth, you water your plants… and I believe in some of that. In going one step at a time. In doing a little less and slowing down. To me there’s hope in embracing those small moments and establishing a deeper connection with what’s around us.
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is currently streaming on MUBI.
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Alonso Aguilar is a cultural journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He does editorial labor in Krinégrafo: Cine y Crítica and his writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Film International, photogénie, Cinema Year Zero, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine, La Nación and Revista Correspondencias.
