Time of the Wolf may be the most unrelievedly bleak 2 hours available. Other than a few horrific scenes of animal cruelty (is there no French equivalent of the ASPCA?), Wolf's pain in relentless, but relentlessly muted. After all, unbridled pain would suggest the possibility of cartharsis or resolution, and there is none of either to be found here.
In the first scene, a man is murdered in cold blood, and his family seems hardly ruffled by this inconvenience, instead carrying on with the same grim determination that has gripped this film since the beginning of time (or, at least, the opening credits). A litany of misfortune follows -- overwrought nose bleeds, a perishing parakeet, accidental torching of the barn the blighted family takes shelter in, the liaison with a deranged youth (to whom the teenage daughter is inexplicably attracted, despite his physical, emotional and psychological repulsiveness), make-believe self-immolation.
Perhaps intended as a 21st Century ode to Camus's "The Plague," Wolf tells us nothing we don't already know. People's most evil inner nature emerges in the time of great crisis --- duh! Wolf is probably closer to Lord of the Flies, but absent all elements of surprise and drama.
Incongruously, there is much footage of verdant fields and forests, including a wheat field rustling somewhere near the little train station of horrors, where the benighted survivors of some unexplained eco-disaster seem to accumulate by accident. Perhaps this scenery is intended as irony, but irony suggests, in some small way, a sense of humor at work, and there is surely no such sense at work in this film.
Or maybe there is? When the film ends, more or less, with the utterance of "everything could still work out, maybe even tomorrow," the viewer is left wondering if Woody Allen was asked to provide the closing dialog. But to little avail -- the viewer is likely to have slit his wrists well before tomorrow.
In the first scene, a man is murdered in cold blood, and his family seems hardly ruffled by this inconvenience, instead carrying on with the same grim determination that has gripped this film since the beginning of time (or, at least, the opening credits). A litany of misfortune follows -- overwrought nose bleeds, a perishing parakeet, accidental torching of the barn the blighted family takes shelter in, the liaison with a deranged youth (to whom the teenage daughter is inexplicably attracted, despite his physical, emotional and psychological repulsiveness), make-believe self-immolation.
Perhaps intended as a 21st Century ode to Camus's "The Plague," Wolf tells us nothing we don't already know. People's most evil inner nature emerges in the time of great crisis --- duh! Wolf is probably closer to Lord of the Flies, but absent all elements of surprise and drama.
Incongruously, there is much footage of verdant fields and forests, including a wheat field rustling somewhere near the little train station of horrors, where the benighted survivors of some unexplained eco-disaster seem to accumulate by accident. Perhaps this scenery is intended as irony, but irony suggests, in some small way, a sense of humor at work, and there is surely no such sense at work in this film.
Or maybe there is? When the film ends, more or less, with the utterance of "everything could still work out, maybe even tomorrow," the viewer is left wondering if Woody Allen was asked to provide the closing dialog. But to little avail -- the viewer is likely to have slit his wrists well before tomorrow.