Dogs’ Dialogue alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen.

In this hilarious film, the repetitions of certain cliché phrases in the off-screen commentary (e.g. in hospital and prison alike, ‘A moment later, as she/he arranges a bed, the young woman’s/man’s hands stray under a sheet ... Their union is swift’) lend an additional circularity to Ruiz’s reductio ad absurdum, run-on melodramatic plot. The principle of overload then infects the stills which illustrate the ‘climactic’ episode, the killing of Odile: alternate shots show her assailant grasping either a knife or a bottle, as if to overdetermine further an already ludicrously overdetermined chronicle of woe.

While the barking dogs and location shots are clearly less integrated, they are useful for precisely that reason: as breathing spaces in the cancerous narrative proliferation, hence as moments of relative sanity and repose.

Virtually all Ruiz’s films have certain academic aspects – effects that seem studied rather than stumbled upon. The most studied element here is the deliberate naivety of the narrative voice (ably conveyed by Michael Graham’s dry, deadpan delivery in English, substituting for Robert Darmel in the French version), a parodic exposition of the rhetoric of melodrama which accommodates all possible forms of crisis within its measured, monotonous cadences – an anonymous register of outrages that seems to take excess as a matter of course.

In contrast to this consistency is the more lackadaisical progress of the plot itself, which blithely leaps from Monique as schoolgirl to Monique as young woman without even a hint of ellipsis, calmly glides past the almost total lack of motivation for Henri’s murder of Alice, and no less casually heaps one improbable repetition on another to impose the desired circularity on the tortured careers of Monique and Henri.

The net result of these combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props. The disturbing lack of individuality and identity which derives from these attitudes, turning all the characters into mere aspects of a playful, arbitrary schema, seems merely the logical outcome of Ruiz’s scepticism about the homogeneity of his own authorship. With characters and auteur all assigned such a mockingly nihilist function, the dialogue that ensues might well signify no more than the barking of dogs.