Year of the Dogs Review

Year of the Dogs

Director: Michael Cordell.

Starring: Footscray Football Club, Pat and Jenny Hodgson.

What makes a good documentary? Is it just that you manage to capture some exciting event on film? Is it just being in the right place at the right time? Or is there more to it than that?

Just like films that contain characters which have no similarity to persons, living or dead, documentaries need to be well crafted stories. While there is the idea that a documentary simply shows us the facts, the director gets to choose which bits to include and which to leave out, what to emphasise, how to juxtapose things. All of this has an effect on the final movie. As a result, making a documentary is just as difficult a task as making a feature film, if not more so.

Year of the Dogs, at the very least, is an interesting hour and a half. It follows the Footscray AFL club through their 1996 season. Because of financial troubles and the fact that they haven't won a premiership since 1954, the club is facing the prospect of a merger. To keep their club in tact, the pressure is on to have a good season. Parallel to following the club, the camera follows Pat and Jenny Hodgson, a mother and her daughter who are dedicated Footscray fans: they attend all the training sessions as well as go to all the home games and travel around Victoria for some of the away games.

Following the fortunes of these people gives some very funny moments. Unfortunately some of these laughs are at the expense of the club and the fans. The audience all laughed when Pat Hodgson was in tears over one of the clubs decisions. And when the team kicked off the season after much rah-rah talk to lose by 87 points, again we laughed. It was never nasty, however, since we were all stilling hoping that Footscray would pull it out.

In spite of this, Year of the Dogs is not a great documentary. It follows the Dogs for the 1996 season but there seems no reason to choose that length of time, nor that year: it's just chosen because that's when they had the camera and that's when they were filming. This results in the film being less than satisfying.

At times, the narrative was confused. After the first two games of the season, it was often hard to tell where abouts in the season we were. On a more microscopic level, often in the game highlights, it was hard to tell where we were. At one stage, we were supposedly in the first quarter of the game between North Melbourne and Footscray when the game announcer said something about the margin now being 99 points. Yet when we were shown the scores at quarter time it was 7.6 to 1.1. Little things like this made it hard to keep a track of what was going on.

Finally, the main problem is that we are never really privy to any inside information. What really makes a great documentary is the way people open up for the cameras and reveal things that make you wonder how the interviewer got them to say that. A classic case of this is the documentary Rats in the Ranks. Watching that film made you feel like you were inside the world of the council elections. Watching Year of the Dogs, I simply felt like I was at a press conference. The players were reasonably guarded in their comments, the cameras were only allowed in to certain meetings and there were no amazing insights. What this boils down to is that Year of the Dogs is an interesting enough afternoon's entertainment but not a brilliant documentary.

Rating: CR