a5c7b9f00b The sun beats down. Frank waits for the bus. His ice cream melts. A stranger asks to borrow his phone. Stray dogs roam the streets. A man waits for a bus in the sweltering heat. A woman pulls up to a payphone and, finding it not working, approaches the man to use his phone drawing him into whatever the hell is about to happen.<br/><br/>Balancing contrasting things is a feat that always impresses me when it can be pulled off; I guess that I have seen it not work more often than I have seen it work, so it is obvious to me that it is not easy to do while shooting scene by scene. As a result Stray Dogs is engaging in the way that it captures the feeling of a day, injects a tense situation into it, but yet delivers it with absurdity throughout. The crushing heat of the day comes through the screen really well, and you get the feeling of the impatience and frustration that people develop when the heat is inescapable. Into this we get some sort of standoff between two people, which builds well before spiraling off into absurdity. This absurdity though is just about well managed because it doesn&#39;t totally come from nowhere, and it does fit with the crazy heat and events of the day.<br/><br/>Although I was not totally taken by the ending, the strength in the delivery is what makes it work, because the film has very good control over the absurdity – so it is not a punchline so much an extension of the oddity that had built throughout. Credit to writer/director Farthing-Kohl, because the pacing, the framing and the delivery all come together to produce a scene that is at once absurd but yet also gripping and serious. This is not to say it is a wholly successful film, or that it has no issues, but just that it works well on its own terms – and is strong enough to make the viewer meet the film there.
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