Eyes of a Blue Dog: A Series of Dreams, Followed by the Hope of Closure

Araik Zulalyn’s Eyes of a Blue Dog, a 10-minute adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s short story of the same name, is a search for an elusive dream world that proclaims so assuredly that it has a tunnel into waking life that not failing to find it feels like lifelong grief. 

The source text is so wrapped up in this dream world that it does not pause to give its characters a name. The adaptation spends a little more time in physical reality but it is clearly the lesser of the two, a grim realm, returning to which is always occasion for mourning. In it, the male protagonist may be dying. In it, he does not remember the dreams which consume his mind, or the cities he visits, repeating the titular phrase over and over as an identifying mark. The woman he loves, whom he shares this dream realm with, will recognise him by it and he her. The litany becomes like tally marks, anointing his face, keeping track of how many dreams he has shared with her. 

Perhaps as a meta commentary, the man is a film crew member. The cramped set seen from within the handheld camera becomes a microcosm of the disorienting dreamlike quality suffused through the language of both the text and the film. Which makes the protagonist’s nosebleed a rather natural follow-up. 

But there is more to his affliction than mere manifestation of an overwhelming unseen life. The camera sees it from beneath, brown like milk tea, and it is obvious the woman in the dream knows more than his diagnosing doctor: something like leukaemia has already made its home in the other hidden realm, the body. This is a feature of the film, resulting in the undoing of the text’s untetheredness, and leads to a narrative that contains closure as a possibility. 

The film also adapts the text with a much more self-possessed version of the protagonist in his dreams than he is in his waking life; his dreams, though still all-consuming, afford him his true life. In this life, he is able to hold his interlocutor’s gaze, speak his mind, and own his desires. He is in the throes of the puzzle, and he does not want an out the way his shifty mannerisms seems to signal on the film set or even in the hospital. 

In this way, the dream world takes on the quality of an inner life: it both takes away the discomfort of reality and adds a lucid self-control that Marquez’s text does not need to award his protagonist. 

Zulalyn’s Eyes of a Blue Dog is absorbing both as standalone and as adaptation open to comparison with the source. It brings the obsessive pull of the call alive to the point that the viewer may feel the urge to repeat it too, but the ‘slipperiness’ of the story is traded for something more comfortable, the hope and fantasy of definitive ends.