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Brotherhood
of the Wolf
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There are some epic films that never quite take grip in the viewer’s imagination. Landscapes stream by, battles spill a river of blood, sinister groups scheme behind closed doors, but the entire spectacle remains at a frosty distance. Brotherhood of the Wolf is a sophisticated, expensively mounted French film that is easy to admire but hard to get involved in. It starts well. A woman is seized and battered to death against rocks like a rag doll by an unseen beast. The rest of the story’s 142 minutes plod through the search-and-destroy counter-response to this trauma – only one of many such killings across the land – as well as its subsequent political ramifications. Central characters include two driven hunters, Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) with his enigmatic, Iroquois sidekick, Mani (Mark Dacascos), and the magnificent Sylvia (Monica Bellucci), a behind-the-scenes operator. Director Christophe Gans is someone who, in an American context, would be called a movie brat. An amateur filmmaker and fan-critic at a precocious age, Gans cultivated an appreciation for ambitious directors working within the genres of the fantastique such as David Cronenberg. His first feature, Crying Freeman (1995) was a live-action version of a famous Japanese anime, co-scripted with a critic from Cahiers du cinéma magazine. So Gans is steeped in cinema. But in Brotherhood of the Wolf the result is not a barrage of specific quotes from or homages to other people’s films, but a layering of diverse styles. The combination is indeed striking: the gory, artificial effects of Italian horror cinema meet the obsessive period recreation of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), martial arts choreography (by the renowned Philip Kwok) meets a picaresque story of manhood won and lost that is reminiscent of classic American Westerns. And that dimly glimpsed wolf-beast recalls the apparitions from Jacques Tourneur’s stylish British horror film Curse of the Demon (1958). In a peculiar but effective bit of casting, Gans uses the teenage leads from two ultra-realist films by the Dardenne brothers, Émilie Dequenne (Rosetta [1999] and Jérémie Renier (La Promesse [1996]). Many historic associations with the glorious days of the French New Wave filter through the weathered faces of Jean-François Stévenin, Edith Scob and Bernard Fresson. Not content to confine his tale to a movie-defined universe, Gans also nudges the sprawling story into a vague allegory about the rise of right-wing movements in contemporary France. But the film’s ambitions, on all its levels, outrun its capacity to sustain a mood, create a momentum or draw us into the dramatically changing fortunes of history. © Adrian Martin November 2002 |
