If it weren’t for the example of several recent animal documentaries, Stray, the debut feature from director Elizabeth Lo, might be a revelation. The film follows three dogs as they wander through the ancient streets of Istanbul caught up in dog dramas and intermittently bonding with humans. Yet even though the adorable canine stars will instantly attract a certain level of empathy, the narrative, shaped as it is by human forces, only gets one so far.
Lo, who’s also the film’s cinematographer and editor, spent six months following her furry charges, crouching low and using a stabilizer to capture the storied metropolis from a dog’s height. Zeytin, the chief protagonist, guided Lo through the feral city, where a stranger was liable to be ganged up on by a rival pack. The golden mutt also wandered the human city, sometimes precariously resting alongside a busy roadway, behavior that’s sure to cause dog owners more than a little anxiety. Don’t worry – drivers in Istanbul are used to such things; one reason the city’s stray dogs are so plentiful is that, after years of Turkish government efforts to exterminate the creatures, widespread protests led to laws that now make it illegal to euthanize the animals.
Such laws make it possible for the dogs to wander freely throughout the streets, where they can scavenge for food and for the most part go undisturbed. Still, as one of Lo’s key observations makes clear, just because a government protects its wild animal population, that doesn’t mean humans are so well off. Among Zeytin’s human friends are a group of young Syrian refugees who live on the streets, and over the course of the shooting, the boys were arrested for vagrancy, while Zeytin moved on.
Stray is very much a companion piece to the 2016 film Kedi, a document of Istanbul’s thriving feral cat population. The feline stars delivered no more focused narrative than these wandering dogs, but that ambiguity suited the traditionally more mysterious nature of the cat. In press notes, Lo writes that Stray was “an experiment in what would happen if we left a film’s narrative up to dogs,” but that doesn’t seem quite enough. Zeytin briefly forms attachments and then moves on. For a dog lover, that may be enough, but it leaves the film feeling ultimately aimless, despite a closing sequence in which Zeytin mournfully howls along to prayer chants.
Other recent dog-centric films benefit from better focus. While Pariah Dog and The Truffle Hunters get their narrative push from human figures, the remarkable Los Reyes pulled off more something more like an inherently canine arc, quietly observing the friendship of a pair of dogs and managing to keep human concerns in the background. Of course, humans are bound to project storylines onto the lives of beloved pets and transitory strays alike. And fortunately, no animals come to harm during Stray, which can’t be said for the other films mentioned. But, much like its three four-legged familiars, the animals don’t linger around long enough to change your life.
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