Making this movie dragged me down the slippery slope of sentimentality. I regret it. The little girl who loved her dog and was so sorry she’d lost it was extraneous. I failed at what I had previously managed to avoid… On the other hand I chose not to shoot the crucial scene at the dog pound, the gassing. I didn’t want to witness an atrocity like that.

Georges Franju, in M-M Brumagne, Franju. Impressions et aveux, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne 1977

It is this omission that makes Mon chien the cruelest of all of Franju’s movies, because everything is normal about this journey of a dog condemned to death as soon as its master removes its collar and its name-tag. The very first images betray unease in the heart of bourgeois family life (a house in Paris’ posh 16th arrondissement), with its 1950s artefacts, a car, a highway and a forest for sunny outings, which the camera penetrates in a lengthy tracking shot ending in front of a giant cross. The countryside is not a reassuring place, with its ominous church. “Alas, stray dogs always seek out the protection of human beings”, reports Jacques Prévert’s terse commentary: the dog is as passive as the cattle in Le Sang des bêtes. The viewer is hardly spared anything, except the sight of a gas chamber and a vivisection table. Enunciating their names is enough. The film ends on an empty cage.

Bernard Eisenschitz