The Time Of The Wolf

Reminiscent of Bergman’s fondness for medieval apocalyptic millenarianism but situated in the context of contemporary French countryside Haneke throws us quickly into a presumably allegorical story of a woman (Isabelle Huppert) and her two children stranded in a suddenly-estranged world in which food and water are in desperate shortage due to some unidentified catastrophe.

The obvious point is to illustrate the tenuousness of social order and morality, which is all well and good, but Haneke does nothing but exactly that at interminable length. Dramatically, the film offer little. It starts effectively, albeit enigmatically, and certainly not without promise, the director setting up a disquieting mood with Huppert et ses enfants wandering homeless and afraid through a wintry landscape. Once, however, they arrive at a railway station and settle down with a lot of other transients the film bogs down. Huppert’s character is a detached observer of the disintegration around her and has but passing interaction with other characters, none of whom are given more than minor roles in the story (the Beatrice Dalle character, for instance, effectively disappearing from it). Her daughter (Anaïs Demoustier) forms a tenuous relationship with a young runaway (Hakim Taleb) but the latter remains resolutely aloof.

There’s nothing wrong with pessimism or dystopianism but the fundamental requirement of cinema is to engage us emotionally and as impressive visually as this film sometimes is, that it does not do. Then again, Haneke is a highly intellectual director, his films concerned more with illustrating some high-flown  thesis than offering conventional cinematic satisfactions and that may explain the relative opacity of this film.

 

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