“Oh, The Brotherhood of the Wolf?” said my friend, “That was out in France about a year ago.” Having spent the semester abroad, she had been in Paris to witness first-hand the sensation that surrounded this film.
I had already formulated my opinion, and was desperate to draw out of my friend how the French?and if I am to believe the trailers that tout this film as the most momentous thing to hit the Old World since the Bubonic Plague, all of Europe, too?came to theirs.
You see, Europe and I don’t agree on a lot of things; that’s just the way it’s gonna be. And that’s fine. They’ve got their continent, I’ve got mine, and we’ve done a pretty good job of staying out of each other’s hair for the past 20-odd years. Sure, every now and then, they throw something over here that I’m not too happy about, or maybe I do something that might be interpreted as slightly antagonistic to their values. But for the most part, our relationship has been healthy in the same sense as that in which two recently divorced parents can enjoy a healthy relationship: Even if there is a lot of tension beneath the surface, we can at least smile cordially at each other from behind the closed windows of our cars when we meet at a neutral spot to exchange the kid for the weekend.
But then they had to go and do something like this. They stabbed me right in the back when they unleashed upon our fair continent the cinematic refuse that was called Le Pacte des Loups, or, The Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Even after seeing the film?nay!, this tripe deserves no such connotations, however superficial?even after seeing the movie (much better), there still remained some vestiges of the amicable relationship Europe and I once shared. I still hoped that, somehow, I was missing part of the story.
So there I was, asking my friend the next logical question, my voice shuddering even then in sick anticipation of what part of me knew the answer must be: “Um, why did the French like it so much?”
A pause, providing a dramatic effect that I might have actually appreciated had not the drama been so close to home, and then: “Well, y’know, because it was French.”
Shortly after emerging from the theatre, I began saturating with gasoline the remains of the bridges that had linked me to Europe. With this response, I tossed the match.
How could blind nationalism so cloud the critical lens of an entire continent that they were ready to rave over the 143 minutes of calculated torture that was The Brotherhood of the Wolf? And if they’re willing to do that, can we ever really trust them again? Is it time to forcibly seize and occupy the Louvre in order to protect the classics from association with whatever else the French are calling “art” these days? Has anyone taken seismic readings around the grave of Francois Truffaut? Has Jean-Luc Godard committed ritual seppuku? (As of press time, the answer is “no.”)
The Brotherhood of the Wolf, condensed: The Chevalier de Fronsac (uncharismatically played by Samuel Le Bihan) rides to the Gavaudan province with Mani (Mark Dascascos), his manservant. They are there to investigate the many mysterious killings apparently perpetrated by some enormous beast. It’s almost too painful to recall, so I’ll keep this brief: One thing leads to another, the beast turns out to be the slave of some sort of cult, there’s a little bit of garden-variety political intrigue, some pre-packaged courtly love, a smattering of martial arts, bad special effects and a dumb, dumb ending.
Throughout, the audience is subjected to the bizarre genre-bending that is supposed to be the film’s claim to being art. We have the period piece, the Western, Kung Fu, the cheesy Hollywood romance, the exploitation-era horror flick, etc. Such gambles are coupled with allusions to various specific movies: Dangerous Liasons, The Matrix, Mad Max, An American Werewolf in London, Titanic and, of course, Predator. On top of the idiotic story and dialogue, these poorly executed ventures serve only to further undermine the viewer’s appreciation of the movie. (The special effects team that created “the Beast” must have been lifted directly from the set of those National Geographic specials that superimpose computer-animated graphics on top of indoor arboretums in order to create the illusion of a dinosaur walking through a prehistoric rainforest.)
The Brotherhood of the Wolf appears to have been an attempt to capitalize on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon formula: Make a bad movie in a foreign language, throw in some melodramatic dialogue and “experimental” cinematography, and the enormous American market will eat it up as an “artsy” foreign film, regardless of whether or not the film actually contains legitimate artistic merit. And now, all judgment of Crouching Tiger aside, whatever good could have come of that movie’s success, perhaps in liberalizing American audiences’ perceptions of the enormous foreign film industry, is ruined for everybody everywhere. Just because it has subtitles does not mean it is a masterpiece.
