Note: This review was originally published back in September 2015 as part of our coverage for the Toronto International Film Festival.
Heart of a Dog, the latest offering from multimedia artist, musician, and filmmaker Laurie Anderson, begins with an animated dream. Anderson, in lilting voiceover, describes a subconscious state that she enters and a specific dream she returns to: She has given birth to her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle, and although she feels great joy at the experience, she also feels an underlying sadness. She has, she realizes, orchestrated the whole procedure and forced her beloved pet into her body in order to perform this ritual, and poor Lolabelle didn’t take the experience well.
It’s a perfect primer on what’s to come in the documentary: unapologetically odd, often sweet, and tinged with an underlying sadness. It’s ostensibly flighty at first blush, but there’s so much depth and emotion lying just under the surface.
From there, Anderson begins to weave together the disparate threads of her lyrical film essay. She details the personal, with the death of her mother, which left her feeling ambivalent at best; her relationship with Lolabelle, which brought her great joy; and the death of Lolabelle, which left her heartbroken. She touches on the universal, making observations on the loss of innocence and encroaching paranoia that New York faced after 9/11. And she weaves the two together with a mix of existential philosophy, lessons from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anecdotes about the multitalented Lolabelle’s adventures as a painter and musician.
It’s a lot of esthetic balls to have in the air at once and while Anderson never actually drops one, some of her cinematic juggling is more graceful than others. The Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard quotes sometimes feel a bit too tenuously connected to the greater narrative and themes, and the 9/11 reflections veer toward the heavy-handed – the comparison between a hawk attack that Lolabelle suffered and the planes hitting the Twin Towers would have been just as, if not more, powerful with a lighter touch – but more often than not, Heart of a Dog finds the perfect balance between the two extremes, coalescing into a thoughtful freeform meditation on loss.
Of course, it’s hard to watch Laurie Anderson tackle this subject matter without thinking about her most recent and devastating loss: her longtime partner, Lou Reed, who passed away in October 2013. Although she touches on the Velvet Underground singer in only the most oblique ways in the film itself, it’s clear that he’s never far from her mind. As a result, he isn’t far from the viewer’s mind, either. And when he does finally make an appearance in the film, in two fleeting scenes and on the soundtrack, it makes for one of the most subtle and beautiful moments of catharsis that has ever appeared on screen.
“The spirit of Lou is very present in the film,” Anderson recently said in an interview about Heart. “I wanted to do something that was a homage to my husband but also respected part of his personality. In particular, I wanted the film to reflect his great energy.”
We should all be so lucky as to be celebrated in such a way. Although it’s a cliché to say, it’s also completely and genuinely true that Anderson has put her heart and soul into this film. And any viewer who is willing to invest their time and emotions in it will be richly, if heartbreakingly, rewarded.
Trailer:
