Chaos and Hope
by
Chris Knipp

You wouldn’t expect a Michael Haneke post-apocalypse film to be anything but harrowing, beautiful, moving and redemptive. It has all these qualities. Where The Time of the Wolf differs from its many sci-fi cousins (which it externally resembles but somehow doesn’t feel like at all) is in its minimalism and the rawness of the experiences it depicts, the sense of shock and confusion. A hay barn burning, a horse being slaughtered, a man being shot, a violent thunderstorm, a boy’s nosebleed – all have a palpable reality no special effects could match. Haneke is a risk-taking director, and this is a movie that’s willing to appear disorganized and boring: that’s the only way he can capture the true chaos of a world where the social order is breaking down, where there is no communication, no government, no sense of what will happen next.

The Time of the Wolf can be interpreted as representing modern war; the sufferings of the characters as those of war refugees. But there is a strange namelessness about everything that helps the film avoid conventionality or specificity. It’s obvious that Isabelle Huppert, though she’s stripped of her usual formality and elegance, is playing a bourgeois woman from Paris who has fled to the country with her family. But Paris is never mentioned by name, and we don’t know when this is, or why it has happened, or where we are and what the result will be.

The sheer chaos of civil disorder is conveyed in the film’s structure by the way Anna (Huppert) and her son and daughter Ben (Lucas Biscombe) and Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) merge into the crowd that gathers in a depot where people (including Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau and Maurice Bénichou) wait for a train to come and rescue them. They no longer seem central any more. Their needs or goals blend into the vague collective aspirations of the crowd, which seem aimless, yet keeps everyone going from day to day into who knows what eternity.

In the course of the daily comings and goings of people at the depot, the man who shot Huppert’s husband at the beginning of the film appears, and in the absence of witnesses or judges, nothing can be done. This is balanced by the presence of another man bent on scapegoating a foreigner for some disaster in his village. This wrong also is impossible to push through for the same reasons: no one knows, and the man is silenced in the interest of the common good. As in André Téchiné’s Strayed, there’s a wild teenage boy (Hakim Taleb) who scavenges and hovers on the edge, unwilling to join in the makeshift society, and Anna’s daughter is drawn to, but maddened by him. It’s this wild boy who has led them to the depot. There people trade bikes, jewels, watches, batteries, and sex for necessities that impromptu leaders dole out. There’s a man named Koslowski (Olivier Gourmet) who’s in charge of trading the group’s pooled resources for food and water at a nearby village but we don’t know how all this works or how it came into being. Everything has a quality of randomness that is all too real. A letter the girl writes to her dead father defines as well as anything could the difficulty of individual consciousness in a state of social chaos. She has to write the letter; there’s nobody to help her digest what has happened, and she must come to understanding alone.

The central role of Anna is a self-effacing one for the regal Huppert, but it was already clear that she can fearlessly and brilliantly go anywhere Haneke takes her. For the risk-taking director, she is the perfect actress. The action begins with the little family who seek shelter at their vacation home, which is when the father is shot by squatters who have taken the place over. After a difficult period of solitude and deprivation, when Huppert and her two children (with the wild boy hovering nearby) have found the warehouse with its gathering of people, they cease to be the “main characters” except for the sequence in which the little boy, Ben, tries to enact a rite of self annihilation and apotheosis in fire. It’s a typically Haneke moment, both desperate and noble. He is rescued and soothed and there is somehow a moment of hope, even if it’s fantasy.

Code Unknown (2000) is a study of social evils, of the same kind of exploitation of “second-class” nationalities that we see developed with a more intimate and conventional plotline in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. The Pianist (2001) is a study of the dark side of sexuality and a glimpse into the depths of the human soul. The Time of the Wolf is a depiction of human chaos -- of what happens when society breaks down. This film is full of randomness, but also of particularity and a strange desperate hope. Haneke’s vision is really unique. Because so many of the encounters are inarticulate, ideas aren’t developed as fluently in The Time of the Wolf as in the two earlier films. But it is nonetheless powerful and thought provoking, and this stunning trilogy confirms the Austrian who makes films in French as one of the world’s most brilliant and provocative directors. When his stuff is on the screen, you’re in for a rough, memorable ride, and his repeated tendency to bring up the more reprehensible and painful aspects of human behavior does not mask his sense that the human condition is worthy of our most intense and loving scrutiny.

©2004 Chris Knipp
CineScene