‘White Dog’: Hamburg Review

Dir: Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. Canada. 2022. 95min.

Los Angeles, 1969. Against the backdrop of the civil rights protests in the US following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, the writer and French consul to LA, Romain Gary (Denis Ménochet) and his wife, the actress Jean Seberg (Kacey Rohl) attempt to reconcile their white privilege with their support for the cause. At the same time, Gary finds and adopts a stray dog which, it turns out, has been trained to attack Black people. Its rehabilitation becomes symbolic for Gary, who invests in the beast his hopes that American society’s cultural conditioning can be undone, that institutional and instinctive racism can be dismantled. This factually-based drama by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is well-meaning, but rather too disjointed to work as a coherent commentary on American racial politics or of the minefield of allyship for a celebrity whose fame immediately overshadows the cause that they support. 

A film which views the civil rights movement largely through the lens of two famous white people

White Dog is the fourth fiction feature from novelist and filmmaker Barbeau-Lavalette, whose 2012 film Inch’Allah won several prizes at Berlin. The film is based on the book by Gary, which details his real life encounter with the “white dog”, an animal which has been selectively trained to target Black people. It’s a story which has already been adapted once, as Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982). Meanwhile, Seberg’s relationship with activism (and her subsequent targeting by the FBI), has also been explored recently, in the drama Seberg, starring Kristen Stewart. The picture seems to be pulled between these two elements, switching abruptly between the African American dog trainer who has agreed to deprogramme the animal, and the marriage and family life of Seberg and Gary, which is strained by her fervent activism. It’s a little unwieldy in its approach, making its points emphatically but at the expense of rounding out the characters. 

Always a magnetic screen presence, Ménochet is one of the more successful elements of the film, however White Dog barely skims the surface of the complex and confounding character that Gary actually was. He, like Seberg, is portrayed as well-intentioned and genuine in his desire for an end to racial inequality, but misguided in his approach. The same could be said of the film, with some scenes – a slow motion chase of a Black schoolgirl by two white racists, accompanied by an acapella dinner jazz version of ’Strange Fruit’ for example – striking a note of jarring discord. 

There are some scenes which are more successful: Seberg, marching against segregation in schools in Alabama, is pulled out of the crowd by a television journalist eager to get the words of the white movie star on the Black struggle. Jean obliges, expressing solidarity with the Black Panthers. In her mind, she did the right thing. But as Gary points out, “You make it about you.” A fellow protestor puts it more directly. “We don’t have much Jean. Leave us our fight.” It’s a wrenching moment, but the potency is rather undermined by the fact that it takes place in a film which views the civil rights movement largely through the lens of two famous white people.