Time Of The Wolf(2003)
Time of the Wolf (French: Le temps du loup) is a 2003 French dystopian post-apocalyptic drama film written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Set in France at an undisclosed time, the plot follows the story of a family: Georges (Daniel Duval), Anne (Isabelle Huppert), and their two children, Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and Ben (Lucas Biscombe). The film also stars Olivier Gourmet and Serge Riaboukine.
Time of the Wolf(2003)
Desson Thomson of The Washington Post commented that "[he] would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with"[10] while A.O. Scott of The New York Times said that "You can feel frightened and disturbed by this movie without being especially moved by it".[11] According to Scott Foundas of the Variety Magazine, "Haneke demonstrates profound insight into the essence of human behavior when all humility is pared away, raw panic and despair are the order of the day, and man becomes more like wolf than man."[12]
Michael Haneke's movies have an incredible dual quality. 1) They draw you in and keep you chained to your seat, making you want to close your eyes and keep them open at the same time because you just HAVE to see your own inner meltdown set off by his harrowing genius & 2) they distance you from the subject with their cold sterility and detached storytelling.
I hadn't seen a Haneke film in a while. Now I know they're not a barrel of laughs but this was relentlessly grim, set in a post-apocalyptic time when survival is now based on dominance. I've seen other dark such films as this (Mick Wilson's "Threads" comes to mind) But whereas that film is chillingly effective and leaves one shook, Haneke's film begins to feel pointless after a while - bleak for the sake of bleakness.
Since Michael Haneke devotees are taking the imminence of an inevitable apocalypse for granted, it is only natural to expect from him a grim prophecy on the state of the world after that ominous event occurs. The title, taken from an ancient German poem, refers to the time just before the end of the world, and it does not really matter what will determine this end.
Powerful images sometimes relieve the conventionality of the situation, the majesty of nature desecrated by the cold atrocities of human hands. But as more and more characters are brought in, and as it becomes evident that Haneke does not intend to take anyone anywhere - for there is nowhere to go - the interest in what is happening on the screen quickly wanes. The biggest disappointment comes in the closing shot, which offers an inconclusive ending that is not much more than a cop out to an inconclusive plot.
The time preceding the apocalypse is known in Germanic mythology as the time of the wolves. Fleeing a disaster, a middle-class family travel from the city to their private countryside refuge, believing themselves to be escaping the consequences of the general state of chaos.
In the 1960s, NPS wildlife management policy changed to allow populations to manage themselves. Many suggested at the time that for such regulation to succeed, the wolf had to be a part of the picture.
by Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we're drowning in an ocean of our past--garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they'd been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot's broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless "someday soon" that is always just around a corner that never comes.
It's why Steven Spielberg's A.I. has a more compelling future than his Minority Report. There are junkyards and rabies in A.I. but just suburbs and cities in Minority Report, and the end result of our fast culture of corporate abuse, materialism, and greed is that we're going to end up living in a rubbish heap. Think a futurama of Fred Sanfords scavenging bits and spare parts--the Frankenstein model applied to our art (post-modernism is a pastiche pastime), our environments, and ultimately procreation itself. The combination of machine and man, then, cybernetic organisms ("cyborgs") with human emotions and memories (from James Cameron's Terminator (1984) to Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1986) to computers and androids implanted (as they are in Blade Runner, A.I., 2001: A Space Odyssey, WarGames, The Matrix, I, Robot)), have emerged as foremost in our modern science-fictions. What are cyborgs except straw men cobbled together with flesh and bits of wire? Humans without souls and machines with them--something about where we are as a people speaks to this desire to create a surrogate for ourselves that can experience the kind of depths of loss and pain we no longer can or wish to.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence picks up a few years after the events of the first film, taking for granted a knowledge that Ghost in the Shell is not only among the most influential animé films of all time, but also the source material for most of the richer veins of philosophy in the Matrix films. Set in a future world that looks suspiciously like a Hollywood noir, complete with trench coat hero and vintage transportation, the basic narrative involves a murder mystery as a "gynoid" (partial anagram for ningyo, the Japanese tradition of doll worship), a girl-robot implanted with the "soul" of a young woman and used by the wealthy as a sex toy (shades of Blade Runner and character Pris are unavoidable), kills her keeper and a pair of cops sent to apprehend her, then self-destructs before hardboiled protagonist Bateau can save her. The thread leads Bateau, himself so souped-up with robotic improvements that he's described as more machine than man, to the home of a demented programmer and, later, to a secret laboratory where the process of soul-extraction appears to be taking place.
In a similar way, it's the great leap forwards of Star Wars of a generation ago (and sure enough, the storyline is at times alarmingly like that of the original Star Wars trilogy), where technology advances to the point at which nostalgia and the decay that accompanies it can finally be represented with a presumption of authenticity. Sky Captain is a scrapbook of references to old styles and newer films, everything from the pulp art of Rafael DeSoto and Frank Paul to the modern versions of them in the art of Jon Muth and George Pratt; from old Buck Rogers serials to The Land that Time Forgot and Journey to the Center of the Earth to the clinical lunar phantasms of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even the kitsch camp of Mike Hodges's curious Flash Gordon is evoked. Telling, too, that with a cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow as a Howard Hawksian news maven, Giovanni Ribisi as a boy-mechanical-genius, and Angelina Jolie as a one-eyed British sky-pirate (a turn that would fit comfortably with any outtake from Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso), the only thing that sparks conversation is the technology used in the film's creation--and the sources that it's cannibalized to serve as the framework for all the admittedly impressive gewgaw.
On the far side of the spectrum comes Austrian director Haneke's literally dark, chilling fable of the end of time, Time of the Wolf (a title from the "Codex Regius," inviting comparison to Ingmar Bergman's similarly internalized Hour of the Wolf). When a clan led by matriarch (and Haneke mainstay) Isabelle Huppert shows up at their summer home, a nuclear family of squatters summarily, arbitrarily executes her husband--an act of senseless violence intruding into the middle of a domestic idyll the same tactic Haneke takes to begin his almost-unwatchably brutal Funny Games. Time of the Wolf proceeds in a series of un-scored, almost voiceless tableaux of an emptied French countryside devastated by some unnamed plague that sees what might be left of humanity congregating at a train station, waiting for a ride that may never come. A conversation between a boy and a girl across the railroad tracks in a mist-shrouded magic hour is one of the most haunting, most laden moments in any film this year.
The relationship that Time of the Wolf has with the machine salvation offered by the rail is the same as the conflicted response to the railroad in the Industrial Revolution world, the engine infernal cutting through the pristine countryside for the Brits, the locomotive bringing colonists to the promise of their futures in the American West. What Time of the Wolf does is reverse the Industrial Revolution, in a sense, using the same image of the train and the rail-line to represent that border at the end of expansion--examining in the process the ways that man convulses when robbed of the insulation of mechanical conveniences. It's a time travel film, in a sense--not into the future, but into the undifferentiated past, where the night shortened the day and communal society was the bedrock for human survival. The suggestion here, stripped down and denatured, is the same as the existential postures of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and the existential quandary represented by Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: that machines are basically an extension of human automatism. That even without the Industrial Revolution, man would take refuge in mindless repetition and ritual--religion and society as the same children born of the same mother of invention as the steam engine and the cotton gin. Haneke shows horses being slaughtered alongside people and presents justice rewritten without nuance (timely for life in these United States), suggesting that this devolution is nothing of the sort. Rather, it's a sidestep through a mirror darkly of our machine future and our machine present into another reality just around a corner that never comes. Originally published: September 17, 2004. 041b061a72