DN:FILM Los Reyes
A peculiar joy is had watching the yelping delight two stray dogs get from the simple actions of a bouncing soccer ball or a hurled tennis ball. Prancing, dancing, they are elated, gamboling across the nail-clicking concrete of Los Reyes, the oldest skatepark in Santiago, Chile, and, in a way, we are too. In Chilean duo Ivan Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut's almost inadvertently poetic, profoundly moving LOS REYES, the camera veers from the skateboarding youth who cruise sinuous bowls to probe the laidback lives of BFFs (best furballs forever) Football, the elder, creaky-jointed cur that resembles a mangy male lion, and Chola, the frisky female chocolate Lab mix that occasionally tries to hump a large pillow.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The filmmakers set out to document the skaters but located more compelling subjects in the park’s two permanent residents, who have little direct contact with their human visitors, save for the sporadic ball toss. Shot over two years, the doc can’t totally avoid the skaters, as it shouldn’t. Creatively hiding their identities, it captures them in snippets, mostly arty images of their hands, long shots of them skating and idle voice-over chatter detailing the troubles and trivialities of their hardscrabble lives.
Dispensing with music, narration and anthropomorphic cutes, this is an astonishingly patient film, relying on the dogs’ alternately mirthful and mournful antics, quizzical gazes, the way they doze unfazed among the rackety-clackety skaters, or a simple shot of Chola standing statue-still in the rain, getting soaked with the patience of a penitent. Despite their companionship, the mutts are essentially loners and there’s an aching forlornness in their struggle-filled lives. Poetry blossoms from extreme close-ups of a long, panting tongue or rapidly fluttering nostrils, or just a scraggly paw at rest. In this, “Los Reyes” is deceptively shapeless, so willfully hands-off, the 75-minute movie often plays like a lyrical and lovely Malickian fugue. And then scruffy old Football will put something in his mouth, be it a Coke can, a pack of discarded cigarettes or a gigantic rock, and the pensive mood melts again, and so do we.
In select theaters.