Review: ‘Dogfight’ — A Masterfully Tender and Bittersweet Romance
Nancy Savoca enhances a comedic script with great direction, strong performances and powerful anti-war sentiment
Dogfight is certainly a unique take on romance in cinema. The big screen has, since its infancy, provided audiences with fantastical love stories which almost always see a very traditional masculine hero chase after a slightly more exoticised woman in the name of a huge, majorly intense love affair fuelled by impossibly prolonged and severe passions. They’re fiery, dreamy stories that see the escapism of film at its most apparent (alongside comedic works — it’s no wonder that the RomCom is the most accepted merging of genres, to the point that many consider it a genre of its own).
Dogfight stands out massively from that crowd… but that isn’t to say that it isn’t a romantic film, and it certainly isn’t an unfunny one. Rather, the tenderness with which it approaches its characters and the mundane lens which it applies to their brief adventures together places it in a distinctive space, far closer to the dramatic quality of romantic films like Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy (which, I believe, must have taken some inspiration from director Nancy Savoca’s work here — the similarities in both films’ approach to character and…
