A peculiar joy is had watching the yelping delight two stray dogs derive from the simple actions of a bouncing soccer ball or a hurled tennis ball. Prancing, dancing, they are elated, gamboling across the nail-clicky concrete of Los Reyes, the oldest skatepark in Santiago, Chile, and, in a way, we are too.
In Chilean duo Ivan Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut’s almost inadvertently poetic, profoundly moving “Los Reyes,” the camera veers from the skateboarding youth who cruise sinuous bowls to examine the laidback lives of BFFs (best furballs forever) — Football, the elder, creaky-jointed cur that resembles a mangy male lion, and Chola, the frisky female chocolate Lab mix that occasionally tries to hump a large pillow.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The filmmakers set out to document the skaters but located more compelling subjects in the park’s two permanent residents, who have little direct contact with their human visitors, save for the sporadic ball toss. Shot over two years, the doc can’t totally avoid the skaters, and it shouldn’t. Creatively hiding their identities, it captures them in snippets, mostly arty images of their hands, bodily shadows, long shots of them skating and idle voice-over chatter detailing the troubles and trivialities of their hardscrabble lives, from drugs to home and school dramas.
Dispensing with music, narration and anthropomorphic cutes, this is an astonishingly patient film, relying on the dogs’ alternately mirthful and mournful antics, quizzical gazes, the way they doze unfazed among the rackety-clackety skaters, or a simple shot of Chola standing statue-still in the rain, getting soaked with the patience of a penitent.
Despite their companionship, the mutts are essentially loners and there’s an aching desolation in their struggle-filled lives. Poetry blossoms from extreme close-ups of a long, panting tongue or rapidly fluttering nostrils, flies nipping at their flesh or a pair of scraggly paws at rest.
In this, “Los Reyes” is deceptively shapeless, so willfully hands-off, the 75-minute movie often plays like a lyrical and lovely Terrence Malick fugue. And then scruffy old Football will put something in his mouth, be it a Coke can, a pack of discarded cigarettes or a gigantic rock, and the pensive mood melts again. And so do we.
GNASHING. 
Dogs are fascinating creatures and this documentary sounds like it was wise to give these BFFs its time rather than its initial targets.
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You are right. The dogs — pensive, nonverbal, funny, sad, playful — are infinitely more interesting than the humans, who are kind of, I hate to say, losers. Thanks for the comment, Sean!
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Unrelated to this movie, Sean asked me if I thought our dogs would understand if they became celebrities. And really I thought: dogs already are, pretty much. They walk down a street and everyone smiles at them. Everyone wants to cross over to pet them. Everyone wants to know their name. My dogs just naturally expect to get attention from every single person they meet – and they do. They’re used to attention, to being fawned over, to a life of luxury. It’s a good life.
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Absolutely. Same with my dog. And I am one of those dog-fawners. I have to say hello and pet and gush over every dog I see. In my travels I take pictures of the best street dogs and, especially in Istanbul, hang out with them. In my mind, every dog is a celebrity.
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