Le temps du loup (2003): **** out of ****
Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Anaïs Demoustier and Lucas Biscombe.
by Andy Keast
The first third of "Le temps du loup" works as effectively as a horror film. A catastrophic event --a plague, a war, the film never discloses what-- has crippled the world, causing food and water shortages, no electricity, and chaos. Director Michael Haneke doesn't focus on the science fiction logicistics of the story, but instead on their effect on the characters, and the remaining two thirds eventually build to a frightening, thoughtful comment on desperation and humanity.
The film opens with the great Isabelle Huppert arriving at a cottage with her husband and two children (Anaïs Demoustier and Lucas Biscombe). Like the prince in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death", we assume they're there to safely wait out whatever has happened. They find the cottage occupied by a man with a rifle, and in one of Haneke's wince-inducing moments, there is a misunderstanding and the father is killed in front of them.
They press on through this nightmare world. Streets are empty, we assume the populace has either fled or died. Mountains of cattle are smoldered in town centers. Water and batteries are rationed. There's no transportation save horses, bicycles and the occasional train which characters wait endlessly for.
Haneke --the director of "Funny Games", "The Piano Teacher" and "Code Unknown"-- is a master of stark images, his scenes have this ability to furrow under your skin the same way those of Cronenberg do. Here he extrapolates certain moments for your attention, as with a funeral scene: a static shot --almost Japanese in its quiescence-- which holds on a half dozen figures from the waist down, surrounding a grave at dusk. All we hear is someone weeping off-camera. Hundreds of feet away, out-of-focus torchbearers slowly enter the frame. We could be watching the photographic underworld of "Days of Heaven".
Haneke has not made a science fiction film as they are known in the United States. Describe something as 'post-apocalyptic' to me and I think of "Mad Max". That's not the M.O. of "Le temps du loup". His film is not unlike "Testament" from 1983, where Jane Alexander struggles to protect her family from radiation poisoning in post-nuclear war suburbia. The plight of Huppert's character is cut from the same cloth, and both films exemplify what it really might be like to live in a post-apocalyptic society, where survivors would live only to envy the dead.
Andy Keast andykeast@gmail.com 18 May 2005
-- rec-arts-movies-reviews@robomod.net mailing list http://www.robomod.net/mailman/listinfo/rec-arts-movies-reviews
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews