Who can forget Harvey Keitel’s full-frontal nudity in The Piano? How daring was Jane Campion’s female gaze in her 1993 feature! Now with her new film, The Power of the Dog, get ready for a well-hung Benedict Cumberbach. Based on Thomas Savage’s novel, The Power of the Dog, the film is shot in New Zealand, a stand in for 1925 Montana; the landscape stars, not that Cumberbach,
Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Clemons don’t do their part with superb performances, as well as Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter, a young, lean, fey boy, not yet at ease with his eye for men. Following a New York Film Festival screening, when asked about the prominent, imposing natural setting, Campion admitted, she found hills sexy.
Westerns do not traditionally exude the hidden passions of this film, whose plot involves two brothers on their family ranch. Cumberbach’s Phil is out and out cruel, to his sister-in-law Rose (Dunst), married to George (Clemons), and mother to Peter, who is visiting on a break from medical school. The Campion tropes, details to arguably feminist arts, in this case, Peter’s cutting paper flowers, Phil’s, braiding strips of raw hide, fashioning a rope —these scenes recall motifs in Campion’s earlier movies. The female gaze—rare among the top filmmakers, men and women alike-- make her films a guilty pleasure.
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