Time of the Wolf

Local rep cinema programmer, shame on you! What ever happened to Time of the Wolf, Michael Haneke's most recent work of pseudo-cynical cinema? Wasn't the success of his last film (2001's The Piano Teacher) enough to guarantee a stint in local rep theaters? Well, apparently not. I'll admit that Haneke's Code Unknown was a film destined for box-office disaster, with its explicitly meandering narrative structure and ambiguous ethics. But Time of the Wolf could have found an audience.

Throughout his career, Haneke has demonstrated a penchant for provocative and unnerving filmmaking. He's not terribly risk-averse, a quality that underscores almost every aspect of his peculiar approach to cinema. Suffice to say, Haneke's cinema is a challenging one, as consistent in its endeavor to communicate what is often only communicable in images as in its underlying goal: to unveil the harsh realities which beset the majority of the world's population, exposing the hidden agendas of the bourgeois classes. In this regard, Time of the Wolf may be his most accomplished film yet.

Thankfully, the good people at Palm Pictures have found it in themselves to acknowledge the film. Like many of Haneke's films, his latest charts the experience of several subjects striving to survive in the face of adversity. Isabelle Huppert (Anne) is superbly cast as a mother caught in the midst of an unexplained apocalyptic event with only her son (Ben) and daughter (remarkably portrayed by Anais Demoustier) on/at her side.

The film registers a decidedly Tarkovskian palette of imagery and motifs including a burning house, a child's vow of silence, trains as transitional mediums, and a people/environment succumbing to the exigencies of a post-apocalyptic reality (see Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice). Yet the film is treated with a manner of detachment, opacity, and subtle reflexivity which is characteristic of some of France's most significant recent auteurs (such as Haneke contemporary, Bruno Dumont). Some will consider Time of the Wolf exhaustingly cynical, while others will revel in his sense of duty to uncover the truths that mainstream media (read: television) neglect in their "objective" inquiries.

Luckily, the Palm Pictures DVD offers both Haneke and Huppert the ability to reflect on the film. The interview, even at a mere 5 minutes, confirms Huppert's status as one of the world's most accomplished and beautiful actresses. But it is Haneke himself who touches base with the viewer and sets the record straight, so to speak. His candid reflections are all pertinent: the presence or absence of humanism at the heart of his provocative filmmaking process, TV's hijacking of the modern family, and the experience of working with one of the world's foremost actresses.

Unfortunately, most interviews with Haneke present a distinguished filmmaker who still feels obliged to defend his films' thematic and ethical ambiguities. But for spectators enraptured by Haneke's keen sensitivity to both intellectual and emotional realms of humanity, Time of the Wolf's images, words, and sounds speak for themselves.

One of the DVD's extra features includes behind-the-scenes footage of Haneke and his crew focussed on one of the film's key scenes. What's interesting here is the sense of the films' scope, which contrasts sharply with Haneke's pared-down, lower-budget works, which are often concentrated on a limited number of actors and locations. Here, Haneke is all over the map, employing an ensemble cast (including peer Patrice Chereau), an isolated rural landscape, and a fairly large crew (in European terms). The footage is a tad rough and abrubt in its presentation but it's fairly illuminating and effective in conveying Haneke's process as one of Europe's most challenging auteurs. -- Dan Stefik