TIME OF THE WOLF (Le
Temps du Loup) C+
France Austria
Germany (114 mi) 2003
‘Scope d: Michael Haneke
In films, catastrophes usually happen
elsewhere — war in Iraq, hunger in Africa, never at home. This is a film made for wealthy
countries. I wanted to see what would
happen if tomorrow we had the same situation here that always exists in the
Third World. Since September 11, it’s
easier for people to imagine catastrophes happening here. That’s the ‘news’ element, in inverted
commas.
—Michael Haneke in a
2003 interview with Jonathan Romney, Michael
Haneke: 'If someone doesn't get my films, it's not my problem ...
Haneke’s only film
shot in ‘Scope, by Fassbinder’s cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, who shot the two
previous Haneke films as well, but this was their final collaboration,
appropriately, in an apocalyptic end of the world setting, a Götterdämmerung,
where domestic space is violated and ultimately all social structure is
eliminated, though there is no back story to suggest anything is amiss. Instead it comes as a surprise, like a jolt
to the senses in an opening scene that serves as a reprise to Funny
Games (1997), where a middle class family arrives at their summer home in
the woods stocked with supplies only to be surprised by armed intruders who
appear to be starving and in desperate straits, shooting the husband, stealing
their food and water, and sending the mother, Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert)
and her two children, teenage daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and younger son
Ben (Lucas Biscombe), to scamper through the countryside on a bicycle without
any provisions. From the claustrophobic
tight opening shots where it appears there isn’t sufficient room for all of
them inside the cabin to long panoramic landscape shots where the fleeing
family are tiny specks seen along the road, the film is a study of contrasting
fates, an elusive freedom and an impending doom. The first half-hour or so takes place in near
dark, a cinematic revelation, really, with no artificial lighting, where towns
and cities have been abandoned, reduced to ghost towns engulfed in fog where a
few have barricaded themselves inside, refusing to answer their doors or
provide help to others, with livestock dying from contaminated water, seen
thrown into the streets in a ritualistic burning, like something seen in the
Middle Ages — or Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV (1966). While we never hear what led to this dire
situation, there is a collapse of any existing societal order, reduced to basic
survival instincts in a post-apocalyptic scenario where there is utter anarchy
on the road, evoking an era where barter becomes the norm, sexual favors are
exchanged for meager amounts of food, milk or water, suggesting a return to
petty squabbles and racial animosity, a lawless world without any hint of
justice. Like other Haneke films, this
becomes a morality tale that concerns itself with ethical problems, though
questions of guilt or responsibility are curiously absent. Characters are required to struggle against
chaotic conditions that led to this scourge, where only a few are actually
willing to help others, as most are caught up in self-preservation, where any
sense of their former humanity is completely shut down. In some cases, with no food or water, death
is commonplace, especially for infant children, with distraught parents reduced
to begging and pleading for help to indifferent ears, remaining traumatized
afterwards, where no words can describe their agonizing pain.
Unrelentingly bleak throughout, where the achievements of
civilization serve no higher purpose, but remain remnants of a distant past,
lost in a maze of disorientation and forgetfulness. Lacking the poetry of novelist Cormac
McCarthy in John Hillcoat’s The Road
(2009), an adaptation of his Pulitzer prized literary work that describes a
bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic world, yet that film was so much more
involving and deeply profound, while this features plenty of crying and
moaning, emphasizing the wretchedness of the human condition, chaos in modern
times, an absence of basic necessities, including gasoline and electricity,
leading to a collapse of human values, where unfortunately the director crosses
the unwritten lines of his own barbarous treatment of animals (hint: there are no CGI special effects in this
film), shooting three live horses on the set, then knifing the throat of one of
them that was still shuddering (actually shot in a slaughterhouse), watching
the blood pour out of his throat. While
there may be laws against this in the United States, apparently not in Europe,
yet this certainly emphasizes a glaring character flaw in the director. There is a cinema of cruelty, but being cruel
himself as a director is a whole other matter, perhaps providing insight into
his own moral dilemma, but what it really represents is his own sadistic cruel
streak, bordering on Lars von Trier territory, where each seems to step over
the other in personifying cruel and despicable behavior. Unfortunately, this inhumane treatment of
animals extends throughout Haneke’s films, smashing a fish tank in The
Seventh Continent (Der Siebente Kontinent) (1989), then filming the fish
writhing and fluttering outside water where they can’t breathe, seen dying of
their own asphyxiation. In Benny's
Video (1992), a bolt is shot through the brain of a pig instantly killing
him, basically a snuff film used throughout that becomes a metaphor for a
human’s desire to commit a murder. In Caché
(Hidden) (2005), a child axes the head off a rooster that continues to
thrash around afterwards, while The
White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009) shows
a horse fatally tripping over a wire.
Rather than reveal any profundity about the human condition, these
barbarous acts serve to undermine this director’s own reputation, as a key
focus in his films is the viewer’s complicity for violent and abhorrent
behavior, yet bludgeoning a live horse onscreen is simply inexcusable,
revealing the director’s blind spot, a glaring view of his own inhumanity. This literally undermines Haneke’s intent,
which is to provoke a viewer discussion with the content happening onscreen, in
effect, broadening their worldview. But
this has the opposite effect, targeting the director himself, holding him
responsible for his own despicable behavior.
Certainly there is
evidence to suggest Haneke is an anti-humanist, a misanthrope, as his works are
guided by gloomy and fatalistic outcomes, yet it’s hard to believe that’s what
actually drives his creative impulses.
Often criticized as a shock artist, his work reveals a preoccupation
with fascism, showing the face of it throughout his films, routinely making
viewers uncomfortable with what they see.
Released during the aftermath of 9/11 and the second Gulf War, with
continuing conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and civil war strife breaking
out in Africa, this film was actually conceived a decade earlier, bordering on
a pervading sense of hopelessness, despairing over man’s brutal inhumanity to
man, suggesting continued malevolence breeds passivity and demoralization,
where anxiety and fear unearths suspicion and distrust, yet there is an
intangible factor, the element of the unknown, which suggests there is more
lying under the surface, where the ability to suffer, particularly among
children, adds an almost religious context.
Despite a collection of French stars, their use is minimized, as the
film is more about the impact on children, who are the featured leads in this
film, with Ben losing his speech following the shooting death of his father,
becoming a silent observer. The daughter
Eva (Anaïs Demoustier in only her second film and first international
appearance) seems to personify that spirit of hope in the film, reaching out to
strangers or undesirables, and in a nod to Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust remembrance
novel Night, she’s enchanted by the
playing of Beethoven on a barely audible Walkman in such a Godforsaken place,
where we hear her intently listening to Beethoven’s 5th Violin Sonata Beethoven
violin sonata No. 5 Spring Mvt 2 (2/3) Perlman YouTube (6:27), though here
there is no ultimate redemption.
Certainly in the director’s most prolific period from Code
Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000) through Caché
(Hidden) (2005), all seem driven to right some wrongs in the world, to
expose a glaring evil in order to eradicate it, with his films serving as a
catalyst to provoke a change for the better.
Those are hardly the actions of a misanthrope, though his fallback or
default position does appear to include strains of pessimism and fatalism,
which may be his own morbid outlook that has yet to be transformed by a higher
calling. Many artists are themselves
despicable people (Good
Art, Bad People - The New York Times):
Probably
the most frequently cited example is Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was such that
he once wrote that Jews were by definition incapable of art. Degas, a painter
often praised for his warmth and humanity, was also an anti-Semite and a
staunch defender of the French court that falsely convicted Alfred Dreyfus.
Ezra Pound was both anti-Semitic and proto-fascist, and if you want to let him
off the hook because he was probably crazy as well, the same excuse cannot be
made for his friend and protégé T. S. Eliot, whose anti-Semitism, it now seems
pretty clear, was more than just casual or what passed for commonplace in those
days.
Anti-Semitism
turns up so often in the résumés of 20th-century artists, in fact, that it
almost seems part of the job description, and critics and commentators have
sometimes tried to mitigate if not excuse it. Wagner, they point out, had
Jewish friends. Eliot was a devout, churchgoing Anglican — surely not a “bad”
person in any extreme way. So for now, let’s leave anti-Semitism off the list.
How about misogyny, or generally creepy behavior toward women? Picasso probably
takes the prize here: of the seven main women in his life, two went mad and two
killed themselves. His standing could be in jeopardy, though, if the crime
novelist Patricia Cornwell ever succeeds in proving her conviction — argued at
length and at great expense in her book Portrait
of a Killer: Jack the Ripper— Case Closed — that the British painter Walter
Sickert was in fact the famous serial killer.
Speaking
of killing, Norman Mailer in a rage once tried to kill one of his wives. The
painter Caravaggio and the poet and playwright Ben Jonson both killed men in
duels or brawls. Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed
incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys. So case closed, one is tempted to say,
invoking Ms. Cornwell’s phrase: anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism (I left that
out, but there are too many examples to cite), murderousness, theft, sex
crimes. That’s not to mention the drunkenness, drug-taking, backstabbing,
casual adultery and chronic indebtedness that we know attended (or attends) the
lives of so many people who make unquestionably good art. Why should we be
surprised or think otherwise? Why should artists be any better than the rest of
us?
One could argue that this is one of the director’s weakest
efforts, as it holds no grip on the viewing audience, showing little involvement
with any of the characters, precious few moments of suspense or exhilaration,
feeling more like a retreat into the wilderness regions of the director’s
imagination, but it simply can’t hold a candle to other works that similarly
depict familiar apocalyptic outcomes, where the Granddaddy of them all is
Tarkovsky’s Stalker
(1979), which may be in a league by itself, but even more recent efforts, such
as Béla Tarr’s The Turin
Horse (2011) and David Michôd’s The Rover
(2014) carry greater weight, where all go to more extreme lengths to establish
a pervasive mood that remains baffling and mysteriously inexplicable. All exhibit a transcendent spirit that is
completely missing from this film, instead presenting a series of exploitive
anarchistic events that seem to go nowhere, presenting a portrait of mankind in
oblivion, where bits and pieces of near incoherent ramblings take on greater
meaning, including conspiracy theories or religious rants, the kind of stuff no
one would pay attention to during normal times, but due to the absence of moral
guidelines in such precarious times, people’s lives are tested like never
before. Surrounded by bickering
arguments that never seem to cease, trying everyone’s last nerve, what some
might describe as nonsense becomes horrifically meaningful in the eyes of a
child, who can’t yet distinguish between good from evil, as it all looks and
feels the same in such blisteringly harsh times. Minimalist to the core, much of what happens
appears random and perhaps even improvised on the spot, where prominent French
names appear in the cast but have insignificant roles, becoming the third
Haneke film shot in French language, suggesting a universality that extends
borders or nationalities. While it has
been suggested that mainstream Hollywood cinema takes refuge from the world of
responsibility, European cinema has a tradition of challenging audiences to
decipher various moral dilemmas presented to them, with films becoming puzzle
pieces that often hold clues, remain ambiguous, or reveal transformative
material that can alter the lives of viewers by the personal impact it can
have. This film is void of all that,
seemingly abdicating its primary responsibilities, feeling like a modern day
experiment gone wrong that is starkly underwritten and unfinished, looking
backwards instead of forward, having more in common with his dismal “emotional
glaciation” Trilogy, offering mere fragments, like outtakes, caught up in
insignificant details, never really breaking through into becoming something
meaningful or important.
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