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Bleak future By Dennis Harvey EACH CULTURAL MOMENT gets the filmmaking it deserves. Perhaps no director seems quite so apt at present as Michael Haneke, a Munich-born Austrian who lately has taken to making multinational projects in French. Actually, it wouldn't matter if these films were in Cantonese, English, or Creole patois. Haneke's characters are citizens of the world – and the global forecast is for gloomy foreboding, followed by probable horror. You might accuse Haneke of the fashionable nihilism demonstrated by such "controversial" recent movies as Baise-moi, Dog Days, Irréversible, and Twentynine Palms, whose intent to "shock and awe" seems quite as cynically contrived as our fearless leader's. But Haneke has been making features since 1989 (following 15 years in German theater and TV), well before most current S-M screen moralists started getting Guignol. As a 47-year-old (now 64), he was no youthful see-how-dark-I-am! poseur; at university in Vienna, he studied philosophy, psychology, and theater – in just that order of descending importance, one might guess. His films, often chided for coldness or lack of "involvement," offer clinical studies of what happens when extreme circumstances cause individuals' everyday assumptions and behaviors to shatter. Or quiver, at the very least. Time of the Wolf is the first Haneke movie not to win any major international prizes (its Cannes reception last year was notably cool). One could indeed say he's done better – certainly Funny Games and The Piano Teacher leave more lingering (even scarring) impressions. But it's also a movie he was bound to make sooner or later, the surprise being only that it took this long. All his features so far have watched civilization collapse in microcosm. When Wolf starts, civilization already has collapsed, and not in any merely metaphorical sense. Yes, Time of the Wolf is a postapocalyptic fantasy, even if the scale of the apocalypse (or its causal nature – chemical warfare?) remains uncertain, and the usual overt sci-fi trappings of the genre are nowhere in sight. There are no CGI-ravaged cityscapes here, no mutant terrors, no desert landscapes playing host to Mad Max-style survivalist action figures. Actually, the French countryside looks quite lovely in Jurgen Jurges's color-muted wide-screen images. Only its gently rolling greenery turns out not to be so friendly anymore. So one city family finds out right away, arriving at their rural retreat with some urgency. Trouble is, another family is already there – whatever they're both fleeing looms large enough to render property rights superfluous – and the second husband has a weapon. In a matter of moments Anna (Isabelle Huppert) is a widow, relieved of car and provisions, forced out into the open to find shelter as she can with teenage daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and younger son Ben (Lucas Biscombe). Rural dwellers who've known them for years bar their doors. It's everyone for themselves, an instant return to the Dark Ages, with unprotected, unarmed women and children at the low end of the feeding chain. Eventually the trio – joined, sort of, by a boy Eva's age (Hakim Teleb) who's already gone near feral – find grudging acceptance as new arrivals at a train depot where the next transport to somewhere better may never arrive, or may (like one already glimpsed) refuse to stop. Its refugee occupants are "led" by Koslowski (Olivier Gourmet), a bully whose self-appointed authority stems from his being the sole gun possessor. With water and food in short supply, he insists all valuables be turned over for the alleged collective good. Yet he's not above trading them for sex, which obviously benefits no one but himself. Like other Haneke films, this one tells us no more than we need to know. Arguably less: do Ben's nosebleeds suggest hemophilia? Just what environmental or other disaster caused this chaos, anyway? Does the ending signify salvation, delusion, or nothing? Time of the Wolf effectively conveys the initial disorientation, then all-encompassing dread that ensues when one realizes all bets are off regarding humane, "civilized" behavior. Our protagonists register all kinds of mute dismay upon realizing there will be no more obligatory helping or being helped. But the film perhaps suffers from starting after the worst-case scenario has already happened. It has a dirgelike tenor some will find too grim or just dull. Despite some piercing sequences, the breakdown of psychological norms isn't as vividly drawn as in The Piano Teacher (nor is Huppert allowed anything near the same acting opportunity). The wide gaps between supposedly commonly held values were more sharply measured in Code Unknown. Inhumanity was illustrated more indelibly in Funny Games and Benny's Video, movies that could terrorize your dreams for weeks. Nonetheless, Haneke remains a true artist and a unique one – drawn to the most disturbing scenarios possible (which he writes himself) yet exacting in his refusal to let them play out in sensational, melodramatic terms. It's that neutral (which isn't to say uncompassionate) observation that makes them so immediate and troubling, more than merely unpleasant. Given the way we're going, Time of the Wolf's doomsday sketch could well be the day after tomorrow (not to be confused with the film of that title, whose Bruckheimer-esque yeehaw! provides the precise artistic opposite to Haneke's stark economy). This director doesn't gloat, but one does get the feeling he's serving up the future he thinks, or fears, we have coming to us. 'Time of the Wolf' opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times. |
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