Wolves (Why Loops? France/2024). Screenplay and direction: Isabel Brehm. music: Jerry Beatty. Photography: Jan Doroshchuk. Locker room: Anna Carod. ejaculate: Blandine Madec, Charlotte Clamens, Raphael Thierry, Silvia Lippi and Marc Sosini. period: 92 minutes. Our opinion: good.
In southern France, between 1764 and 1767, dozens of brutal killings of peasants, mostly women and children, occurred which were attributed to the “Monster of Gévaudan”. The identity of said monster has never been established with certainty: it is generally assumed that it was one or several wolves, although after these events entered popular French mythology, suspicions expanded to include serial killers, werewolves or other animals not belonging to normal zoology.
This story reached the cinema in the movie Covenant of Wolves (2001), Written by horror specialist Christoph Ganz. Here, two adventurers, knight Grégoire de Fronsac and his loyal servant Manny, an indigenous Iroquois expert in an effective form of self-defense much like karate, set out to find and kill the monster, and along the way, they encounter a large-scale conspiracy linked to the fading power of the monarchy. The film is a very enjoyable pastiche that mixes mad nobility, horror and 18th century martial arts.
Wolves It’s also based on the legend of the Gévaudan monster, but it couldn’t be a more different film, and it represents an opposite way of understanding cinema. Besides Convention… It is a work of fiction, genre and imagination, inspired by classic cinema. This film is written by… Isabel Brehm Question each of these categories. It cannot be said that there is a traditional narrative, rather A set of continuity and discontinuity between parts united by a common theme. The acting is anomalous because at times it seems realistic and at other times a theatrical production. The story has been deconstructed into novels within novels, to the point that it is difficult to determine what level we are at at any given moment. If we had to give it a genre, or a label, it would be the least specific: it is the cinema of formal experimentation.
Just like the monster the movie refers to, one might think that this movie is also some kind of monster or an unnatural combination of disparate parts. Returning to the definition of theorist Andre Bazin, it can be said that it is “impure” cinema, meaning that it is based on the multiplicity of disciplines such as painting, music, and, in particular, what is usually considered the most antithetical to cinema, which is theatre. It should be noted that Bazin considered this impurity a peculiarity of cinema.
The film mentions that in the same area where the mysterious murders took place in 1765, there is the San Alban Castle, which since World War II has been converted into a nursing home (and, in fact, served as a refuge for the Catalan psychiatrist François Tusquel, one of the founders of anti-psychiatry). On this coincidence, screenwriter and director Prem built her story that takes place in these two times: the castle that was harassed by the monster during the reign of Louis XV, and the psychiatric institution it turned into centuries later, where the monster is the trauma that patients carry. Additionally, at the hospice, the residents devote their efforts to creating a play about the hunt for the famous monster, which takes the imagination to a self-referential level. These scenes of mad men leading a show set in the 18th century make us think Marat/Sade, The post-theatrical work of the playwright peter weiss, It was transferred to cinema by Peter Brook.
Wolves It’s an experimental film, as is often the case in this field, combining certain formal results (such as the elaborate web of references weaving together between temps or the unnatural use of sound) with moments of heightened self-indulgence that oscillate between the inexplicable and the absurd. Appreciation of this film depends on each person’s sensitivity to the former and patience with the latter.