The first thing you need to know is that Rita, the cute-as-a-button titular star of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, doesn’t utter a woof during the entire running time. It’s just one of the ways that Argentinian writer-director Ana Katz slyly wrongfoots us in her seemingly slight but deceptively wise sixth feature. Made over several years (with five cinematographers), it’s a black-and-white, minimalist, ambiguous affair whose lack of clarity might frustrate, but it’s a movie that is scarily prescient (it was made pre-pandemic) and delivers a mindful treatise on how to deal with what life throws at you.
It builds a world out of small moments that is as beguiling as it is profound.
The opening scene sets Katz’s absurdist, zero-degree humour from the get-go. After pruning a tree watched by his dog, Sebastián (Daniel Katz, the director’s brother) — known as Seba — is confronted in a rainy courtyard by a neighbour complaining about the whining mutt. One by one, neighbours join the discussion, umbrellas jostling for position to pile on the pooch. Seba’s solution is to take the dog to his office job but his employers, who employ a no-pets policy, decide to fire him, fearing that a dog would be a slippery slope to “an office full of hens and everyone pole-dancing”. He begins a series of temp jobs — house-sitting a farm, joining a vegetable-growing collective, becoming a carer for a dying man — and meets a woman, Adela (Julieta Zylberberg), at his mother’s wedding, whom he eventually marries. Then an asteroid hits Earth, which renders the air above four feet toxic, forcing everyone to wear ’50s-style astronaut bubble helmets or walk like a crab in an uncomfortable crouch to stay safe.
The asteroid hit, as with other major events in the film, are presented in simple pencil sketches (Seba is a designer) which play into the film’s idiosyncratic, handcrafted feel. It’s a film that has an interesting, loopy conception of time — seemingly aimless dialogue scenes are played out in full, then years pass in the blink of an eye — and, in its own gentle, unhurried way, does a remarkable thing of encapsulating all human life (lbirths, deaths, love, family, jobs) in just 73 minutes. Daniel Katz makes Seba a likeable if low-energy hero; it’s hard to think of a 2021 protagonist who is as kind — he’s often seen tending plants, the elderly, the ill and, of course, a dog. As a film it might lack dramatic oomph, but it builds a world out of small moments that is as beguiling as it is profound.