MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Baxter’: Dog Saga Definitely Not From Disney Mold

“Baxter” (at the Nuart) is just about the most provocative and disturbing movie imaginable about a pet dog and his various human masters. In a decidedly distinctive feature debut French filmmaker Jerome Boivin invites us to question our assumptions about nature, human as well as canine. Anthropomorphizing animals is usually a sentimental business, the traditional province of Disney, but this is emphatically not a film for highly emotional dog lovers or for young children.

Who has not wondered just how much animals comprehend about human behavior? Boivin and his co-writer Jacques Audiard, in adapting Ken Greenhall’s “Hell Hound,” answer this question by endowing Baxter, who narrates the film, with a human capacity for thought but not for love or fear. We see everything from Baxter’s point of view, which while revealing, also makes us realize that we understand more than he does. This film, which has a strong dose of the bleakly amusing nastiness so characteristic of the French, flatters neither beast nor human, especially not humans. Indeed, Baxter curses his dog’s need for human companionship, and with reason.

When we first meet Baxter he has become the companion of an elderly woman (Lise Delamare). He is keenly disappointed at such a dull, shapeless existence, and Boivin keeps us guessing as to whether Baxter has actually taken matters into his own paws to escape her. While we’re left contemplating the often cruel plight of the aged, Baxter moves on to a neighboring young couple, already the object of Baxter’s voyeurism. They too adore Baxter, and he in turn likes them because they’re active and play with him. But how will it be for Baxter once the couple starts a family?

When Baxter ends up with a young boy (Francois Driancourt) nearby he thinks he is set for life, for the boy gives him commands, and he responds to discipline. But there’s a dark side to this ordinary-looking youth, and Baxter’s succumbing to a spaniel in heat do not bode well for either dog or master, to put it mildly. “Baxter” (Times-rated Mature for highly complex and sophisticated adult themes) is deliberately flat, affectless in the manner of Terence Malick’s “Badlands.” Like that film, it leaves us thinking for a long while afterward about what it all means--or most chillingly, whether it means anything at all.