White God, Continued

White God acknowledges and illustrates in detail the loving home Hagen must leave when Lili is forced to live with her father for three months. Before dropping Lili off at the slaughterhouse where dad works inspecting freshly slaughtered beef, Lili and her family share a picnic. Hagen seems joyful as he plays what New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis calls “a quietly portentous game of tug-of-war” with Lili. His tail wags as he adeptly catches and retrieves the toy. And the close relationship between the two continues even in Lili’s father’s cramped apartment, where she attempts to feed Hagen meat scraps from the table. Los Angeles reviewer Robert Abele calls Hagen “her true bestie, a lovable reddish-brown mutt.” Despite dad’s refusal to allow Hagen to sleep in Lili’s room, she preserves their bond by soothing Hagen with her trumpet in the bathroom where he’s trapped.

White God also shows the horrific conditions and experiences Hagen faces in the streets of Budapest. Although Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald suggests the first half of the film “plays like a spinoff of Babe: Pig in the City or a Disney movie about a lost pet fending for itself,” it also illustrates how Hagen’s former relationship with Lili transfers to other species. He sleeps under a bridge and searches for food and water, but he also seeks community, connecting with other dogs around the city. With a small canine companion, Hagen discovers a pack of dogs in a wet empty lot.

As a group, their intelligence seems to grow. Hagen and his companion dog “escape [] from a cleaver-wielding butcher tired of mongrels hanging outside his shop” (Abele). When animal control arrives, Hagen leads the dogcatchers away from the lot, so the other dogs can escape. Hagen and his pack adopt behaviors Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Professors Ferdowsian and Merskin suggest parallel those of humans, including “avoidance behaviors” when they evade the dogcatchers who not only plan to force them into kennels at a crowded dog pound, but also seek to euthanize them as they routinely do in American animal shelters according to documentaries like One Nation Under Dog, City of Dogs, and Out of the Pit.

Hagen’s newfound freedom turns into a vengeful battle when a homeless man (János Derzsi) saves him from the officials but sells him to a dogfight coordinator to train. As Rodriguez declares, “Anyone who wasn’t able to sit through Amores Perros should take heed: What comes next isn’t easy to watch.” The trainer’s horrific tactics line up with those documented in Out of the Pit. First, he feeds Hagen sleeping pills and offers him protein injected with steroids when he awakens. Wearing a mask, the trainer beats Hagen while chained and builds his strength on a treadmill. He even sharpens his teeth. Drugged up on steroids, Hagen kills his dog opponent in his first fight. According to Abele’s review,

These scenes bond us to Hagen’s plight with unrelenting primacy. Filmed with the jagged energy of a Paul Greengrass nail-biter, they make clear that few films have ever so explicitly shown the daily threat to life for a creature left to fend for itself in a society that dismisses it as a beast designed for subjugation, abuse, and/or extermination.

Having maintained some connection to his canine comrades, however, Hagen finds a way to escape this abuse. He runs away back to the vacant lot where he finds his former little dog friend. When animal control captures and cages them, however, the dogs’ fates there depend on their responses to vicious shelter officials. When Hagen tries to attack a woman attempting to pet him, he is sentenced to death. Seemingly aware of his doom, Hagen again breaks out, freeing other caged dogs and stampeding over the woman who would have killed him and his pack, in a scene taken straight from the slave revolt in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). As Abele suggests, Hagen’s breakout is also a “reminder that the iconography of freedom and uprising needn’t only belong to humans.”

Despite the horrors he experiences, Hagen still searches for Lili, leading his gang of dogs into the concert hall where she is performing with her band. When she discovers Hagen and the pack’s entrance into the hall, Lili leads them away on the borrowed bicycle that opens the film. Instead of ending here, though, White God continues, showing the dogs knocking her down as they run on. Abele calls the scene “dreamlike…until scores of dogs careen around a corner, their bodies in full, magnificent motion.” With only her knee skinned, however, she gets back on her bike. Hagen makes no attempt to deliberately hurt his former companion, beginning to highlight the power of love