Time Of The Wolf: Devastating Acceptance

Devastating acceptance: the first two words that drift together in my head when thinking of Michael Haneke’s films. Formally, most of his films are told through fragments that only further his stories through suggestion. Reading a Michael Haneke film is like trying to scale a mountain that only provides holds big enough for fingers and toes; they are as polemic as they are antipsychological, as violent as they are passive. As a director, he presents his characters through detachment, forcing the viewer to accept their circumstance, regardless of how harsh and hopeless it may be. Characters whimsically drop in and out of multiple storylines, important narrative functions are completely dropped (A meets B and uses C to get D turns into A gets D), which makes it impossible to distinguish how characters are motivated, let alone how plot points are achieved. But, nonetheless, they are most definitely achieved. Time of the Wolf is no exception, setting itself against a post-apocalyptic landscape in France, a perfectly cold and distant environment for Haneke to work in.

As with all of Haneke’s work, the film opens with a typically content suburban family returning to the comfort of a summer home, where they immediately fall victim to misfortunate chance – another family already awaits inside, anticipating their arrival. Verbal confrontation turns physical when a shot is fired and the father’s blood splats across his wife’s face. They are turned out into the French countryside, where a hostile and unforgiving landscape awaits them.

The first of Haneke’s films to be set in an alternate present, the space gives Haneke more freedom to create a greater symbiosis between space and story – both of which are indifferent to their characters. Anne, the mother, tries her hardest to keep her family together and alive, as her daughter, Eva, does her best to tolerate her mother’s panic and her brother’s silence. Their chemistry is illustrated best in the most affectively stressful sequence of the film: forced to take refuge in an abandoned farm as night falls, the family wakes in complete darkness, only to find that Benny – the son – has gone amiss. The mother, fueled with panic, is reduced to lighting small bunches of hay on fire, searching in vain against nothingness. With no electricity, the screen remains disturbingly dark, refusing to submit to unmotivated light. The search continues long and hopeless, hauntingly unmotivated sounds whisper from the darkness, and with a simple, abrupt cut, we jump through time to blue morning light, the barn a mound of smoldering embers, and Benny taken hostage by an entirely new character. The scene demonstrates Haneke’s intolerance of explanation and resolution, and his embrace of the ambiguous, while keeping the viewer deeply involved. Within this ambiguity, we’re allowed to fill in the many, many plot holes and character motivations with our own assumptions, thus engaging the audience in a way that throws light on both the characters and ourselves.

It’s never clear why or how humanity collapsed so suddenly; it’s simply a tool that lends itself to exposing the most primal levels of human interaction and organization. Haneke touches upon – if only ever so slightly explaining – tribalism when the family treks across the land, totalitarianism when they join an organized group huddled away in an abandoned train station, and communal socialism when a gigantic herd of people bring energy - and reinstate hope - to their small, organized clique.

All of this is presented through a lens that’s not so much objective as it is neo-realistic. Long takes of striking images morph subtlety like a magic eye book, bringing implicit meaning, as well as inherent realism, to many of the sequences. The acting is meticulous to the point of transparency. Unlike Benny’s Video, The 7th Continent, and 71 Fragments (The Glaciation Trilogy), there is no explicit reflexivity or commentary on mass media. Quite the contrary. Definitley, Haneke intertwines media coverage to some extent, but only insofar as mentioning it’s absence. Without disinformative news coverage, or taking the postmodern approach of studying the moving image within the frame of a motion picture, the only realities left on screen are relative to the characters, making the film much more accessible to any casual filmgoer who is open enough to let a film engulf their senses, as sporadic and shifting as the film is constructed.

Above all, it’s refreshing to have a film that – finally – doesn’t simply show what a post-apocalyptic world might look like (i.e. special effects and zombies [no matter how fast they move]), nor does it go through contrived, explanatory dialogue presenting the blueprints for how it happened. It shows characters in dire circumstances under an immense amount of pressure to survive, all through the lens of an artistic reality that consistently involves the audience – not submitting to viewer passivity by explaining “what if’s”. That said, there’s nothing wrong with films that simply entertain. Haneke says himself that, “The world is too cold without entertainment.” There’s a place for Haneke’s film as well, and that space was void for far too long.

In my own personal experience, I walked out of the theater attempting to envision – to the best of my ability – how I would cope with such a situation. Scooting out of the theater parking lot, I realized that this post-apocalyptic world of Haneke’s is not so different from the lives of many in Iraq, Sudan, or any of the other dozens of places currently undergoing genocide, a military coup, or dictatorship. It’s just that Time of the Wolf is an alternate present.