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Dog Food

By Kimberly Chun

It’s a dog’s life — for nearly all the characters in Filipino director Carlos Siguion-Reyna’s Dog Food (Carne de Perro). Depicting everything from incest to police brutality, the award-winning auteur seems to take pride in gritty realism on screen. In fact, Siguion-Reyna seems so eager to outrage the viewer, and up the ick-factor, of Dog Food that he tumbles into the completely unbelievable. Fortunately, it’s the unlikely friendship between a canine butcher and teenage dog-lover that resonates, rather than the shock tactics.

For the middle-aged, grim Teban (Dante Rivero) who lives in an urban shanty neighborhood in the Philippines, dog meat is a delicacy, and the film opens with the dog butcher trading money for a pitifully whiny dog. When he gets back to his shabby home and kills the dog, splattering blood across his face, he’s spied by Lily (Alessandra de Rossi) who nearly jumps out of her passing rickshaw in anger: She’s afraid the same thing will happen to her beloved dog.

She’s right to be afraid — thanks to her terminally dysfunctional family. Her father Tomas (Ricky Davao) is depressed after his dismissal from the police force, and her stepmother Sonia (Glydel Mercado) is a self-absorbed, pregnant housewife, more interested in her future offspring than her stepdaughter. Together, Lily’s parents decide to have Teban kill Lily’s old dog and serve him for Tomas’ birthday party. Lily flies into a rage and throws stones at the shocked butcher.

But the dog-killer turns out to have a heart after all. At the birthday party, as Tomas feasts on dog and serves his police buddies, Teban returns Lily’s old pet. A friendship forms between the two, as the girl tries to convince Teban to take up a new career. Meanwhile, Teban finds his business evaporating as animal welfare ordinances forbidding dog meat are enforced, and he discovers seamy sides to his remaining customers when one of them, a strip bar owner, propositions Lily.

Things go straight to the dogs when Tomas grows jealous of the closeness between Lily and Teban. At that point, the light, almost black-humored tone of Dog Food turns serious and melodramatic, and Siguion-Reyna dispatches with any remaining subtlety and goes for sheer sensation. The film’s credibility and civic-minded intentions fly out the window in the last 15 minutes, when the dogs finally have their day and chow down on their own kind of adobe. But the director’s careful development of Teban and Lily’s relationship and the outstanding work by Rivero remain in the viewer’s mind long after the leftovers are gone.