#29: Heart of a Dog

Release Date: November 19th, 1988

Format: Streaming (YouTube)

Written by: Natalya Bortko

Directed by: Vladamir Bortko

3 Stars

I’m at home sick, so I decided to watch Heart of a Dog. This movie was recommended to me by my Ukrainian student, Heorhii. Typically I don’t trust students’ movie recommendations and brush them aside, but I made an exception here. Heorhii watched Rounders on my recommendation, so it seems only fair (he loved Rounders by the way).

Heart of a Dog couldn’t be a more foreign experience for most American audiences. I found a copy of it on YouTube with typo-riddled English captions, although Heorhii said it’s a pretty good translation otherwise. It’s based on a 100-year-old Russian novel of the same name, and it’s this strange, scientific, political, and sociological parable of sorts. The setting of the movie is Moscow, 1925 - shortly after the revolution - and an esteemed professor and surgeon Dr. Preobrazhensky takes in a stray dog, named Sharik, from the cold. Days later a serial criminal is stabbed in the heart and killed and the doctor performs an experimental surgery, taking the pituitary gland and testicles from the criminal and implanting them into his newly adopted dog. 

What happens next was unexpected, at least to me. I was wholly expecting either a criticism of the Bolshevik revolution or a Frankensteinian-commentary on reckless scientific experimentation or maybe a heartfelt Flower For Algernon-type thing examining the innocence of man’s best friend. 

Instead, it’s really none of those things. Or maybe all of those things, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of answers. This seems to be a movie, or originally novel, in which the writer is surrounded by such societal ignorance and incompetence, they’d rather show all of their characters as assholes and have the viewer (reader) try and conceive of how to fix all of it. 

Dr. Preobrazhensky is an old stubborn asshole, performing a surgery for his own glorification in the name of eugenics. The Bolshevik revolutionaries who take over part of his mansion and want additional rooms seem like assholes. Sharik, the dog, is definitely an asshole, and pretty funny. Shortly after taking on a more human form after his surgery - his fur falls off, he becomes upright, and he learns to play the guitar - he’s brought out in front of an audience of scientists to be observed and he takes the opportunity to grab his guitar and sing and dance and jump on tables. He’s part dog after all, and Dr. Preobrazhensky feigns a heart attack to escape the embarrassment of it all. 

I liked this movie, as bizarre as it was. Thanks Heorhii. I was struck by the time in which this aired on Russian television, in the fall of 1988, at the tailend of the Soviet Empire. 10 years earlier I don’t think the government would have allowed such a thing to air, but by the late ‘80s, why not? Everything is going to hell anyway. And across the Pacific Ocean, Reagan is in the twilight of his second term as Americans are going to the cinema to watch stuff like Ernest Saves Christmas. I’d be depressed too, USSR.