MIFF double feature: The dog doesn't die, the dog dies

Warning: The following post contains spoilers about The Rental and Marona's Fantastic Tale.

I saw my first proper MIFF movie of 2020 on Saturday night, after watching the opening night film on iTunes as discussed here.

It was an instant reminder of the routine of being involved with a film festival. Unlike most films you stream, the movie doesn't start right away. There are nearly two minutes of short ads and thanking different sponsors, during which you cannot fast forward or even expand the player to full screen, which is all I wanted to do. And in fact, I had to start the whole thing over again when I accidentally clicked on the Chromecast button and the words "Failed to cast to Chromecast" appeared at the bottom of the screen even after the movie started. Refreshing was the only way to get rid of it, at which point the whole rigmarole started from the beginning.

With this first non-opening night film of 2020, I managed to continue two MIFF traditions in one fell swoop:

1) For the fifth year in a row, I saw an outsider animation movie at MIFF. Dating back to 2016, the first year I went from a handful of MIFF screenings to close to a dozen per year, I've seen one such movie each year. Those previous choices were Seoul Station (2016), My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2017), Chris the Swiss (2018) and I Lost My Body (2019).

2) The MIFF double feature. And I don't, by that, mean two MIFF movies in one evening, though I have done that plenty. I mean the double feature where I watch one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie, since I never want to get behind on my new theatrical releases just because there's a film festival going on. This year I continued that, even when there are no new theatrical releases.

I just never guessed that both ends of the double feature would prominently feature dogs.

The actual MIFF film, the French language Marona's Fantastic Tale, does of course center on a dog. From just reading the premise on the MIFF website I knew the movie involves this dog seeing her life flash before her eyes as she lies dying by the side of the road after a traffic accident. In fact, the poignant mortality of the dog was what drew me to the movie and let me know it was this year's outsider animation choice for me.

It was The Rental, the new thriller/horror from director Dave Franco, that I didn't expect to be about a dog, or, I should say more accurately, feature a dog prominently. Once I knew there was a dog in it, though, I knew that dog was dead meat.

Well, I like being wrong about things.

(And don't forget, I already gave you a SPOILER ALERT.)

The dog emerges unharmed at the end of The Rental. You can't say the same for his humans. He went missing earlier on, and it was presumed that the psycho killer filming and tormenting our main characters had made him into so much doggie stew.

Well, as a sign of this movie's possible misanthropy -- a misanthropy 2020 has made it easier for us to understand -- this psycho killer spares the dog but not the humans. In fact, most psycho killers probably don't want to kill a poor little doggie. But the killing of a pet is an "easy" escalation favored by screenwriters to show that things are getting more serious, without actually killing off one of your humans ... yet. In The Rental, the dog being missing accomplishes that same escalation, without having to actually show us a dog hanging from a tree or returned on the doorstep inside a bag.

And when the dog comes ambling back in at the end, it was a nice surprise -- one of many in a film I liked quite a lot.

Well, there's no surprise at the end of Marona's Fantastic Tale. The dog, who has been dying the whole movie, does die, or so you assume when the camera pulls back out to satellite view from that Parisian street.

This movie has its own delightful surprises, though, which include the imaginative use of all sorts of 2D animation to tell a subjective story from the perspective of its title character. And though I was pretty sleepy by the end of the second movie -- it's been a while since I watched two in one night, even though neither of them was longer than 90 minutes -- I did really enjoy this one too. (Review will be up on Monday morning.)

More importantly, as I was settling into MIFF proper and starting to feel that MIFF vibe -- even from my own living room -- I decided I didn't need to limit myself to the five free passes I have for this year's festival. I made a shortlist of 11 films from the festival that interest me, and Marona's Fantastic Tale is just the first.

I've got two more weeks to watch many more.