Can animals act? Smart individuals would say not: Our four-legged associates can’t learn a script or assemble a personality, and if they arrive throughout charismatically on display screen, that’s merely all the way down to obeying instructions, plus the deft contact of an editor. The extra whimsically accommodating amongst us would say these final two factors are true of some human actors too; Hitchcock, along with his notorious “actors are cattle” quip, advised as a lot. Both manner, it’s laborious to look at Kodi, the ragged, hungry-eyed canine star of “Canine on Trial,” with out sensing, whether or not by sheer luck or some mysterious strategy of empathy, a real efficiency afoot.

Known as upon to leap, droop, tremble and even (form of) sing, with an expressive vary spanning untethered aggression and resigned melancholy, the biscuit-colored crossbreed hits each mark required of him by Laetitia Dosch‘s endearingly eccentric directorial debut, and emerges as its most compelling factor. On many movies, that would appear a slight; within the case of this one, an earnest animal-rights parable within the guise of a broad knockabout farce, it’s absolutely the intention for this specific canine to have his day. (Hardly ever has a movie appeared so precision-engineered to win the Palme Canine award for greatest canine performer at Cannes, and positive sufficient, following “Canine on Trial’s” Un Sure Regard premiere in Might, Kodi duly and deservedly took the prize.)

Dosch, the French-Swiss actor who broke by means of together with her pleasant star flip in 2017’s “Jeune Femme,” ostensibly performs the lead as Avril, a frazzled, kind-hearted Swiss lawyer with a penchant for hopeless circumstances, in each the private and authorized sense. This time, unusually, it’s woebegone mongrel Cosmos (Kodi) and his equally hangdog human Dariuch (Belgian actor-comedian François Damiens), who’s dealing with authorized motion after Cosmos bit and injured three girls. Separate from Dariuch’s debt to the victims, the legislation states that the canine needs to be put down. Avril efficiently argues that, as an autonomous being, Cosmos needs to be tried independently, and so “Canine on Trial” proceeds.

This will sound like a premise from a extra naïve period of family-friendly Hollywood creature comedies (“Beethoven’s Sixth Modification,” maybe), however Dosch’s script, co-written with “My Every little thing” director Anne-Sophie Bailly, leans laborious into the absurdity of the concept whereas capturing for scathing grownup satire. The case escalates quick — as does the whole lot in a frenetic, incident-crammed movie, clocking in at simply 80 minutes — right into a nationwide trigger célèbre, inspiring rowdy public demonstrations for and in opposition to Cosmos’s proper to reside, whereas a procession of professed consultants weigh in on the morality and soul of the frequent mutt. A lot of that is witty, as Dosch’s exuberant, up-for-anything route dips into animation and faux-documentary stylings to convey the barrelling rush of a media circus, whereas there’s some thought-about philosophical reflection on animal conduct and ethics amid all of the hijinks.

At instances, nonetheless, “Canine on Trial’s” brash, busy strategy leashes its impression. It’s top-heavy with story for such a slender-framed work, as sketchily developed strands involving Avril’s colleagues and her lonely younger neighbor jostle for display screen time with the extra substantial and instantly related subplot of the lawyer’s rising attachment to Cosmos’s charming, court-appointed handler Marc (a profitable Jean-Pascal Zadi), and the mistreated animal’s gradual softening underneath his care. Any canine lover will likely be completely disarmed by this improvement, and by Kodi’s irresistible enactment of this arc. However they’ll be susceptible to the subsequent of the movie’s emphatic tonal lurches, as its zanier storytelling impulses bumped into some sense of responsibility to the realities of Switzerland’s authorized system.

Contemplate it the shaggy misfit within the litter of latest French-language authorized research, from “Anatomy of a Fall” to “The Goldman Case” — for all its hectic tragicomic slaloming, “Canine on Trial” finally takes the form of a procedural, fascinated with how justice is decided, and for whom. Dosch is, as ever, an appealingly off-kilter presence earlier than the digicam; behind it, she doesn’t have full management over her movie’s wriggling concepts and stressed formal execution. But there’s one thing fairly suitably untamed about it too. Understanding not all viewers will likely be on its aspect, “Canine on Trial” throws its lot in with the animals, barking and clawing and sometimes behaving badly to make its level — and generously throwing the highlight on its hairier hero to carry that house.