THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984)
"If there's a beast in men, it meets its match in women, too."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, Tusse Silberg, David Warner Directed by Neil Jordan Written by Jordan and Angela Carter, from a story by Carter Cinematography by Bryan Loftus
In recent years, there has been a trend in the field of fantasy: writers have been revisiting the fertile world of myth and fairy tale and reclaiming that world, investing it with new life and energy. In modern times, fairy tales have become Disneyfied and debased; they have become trite adventures involving leering witches, friendly dwarves, and cuddly talking animals. But in their original forms, fairy tales have a dark, wicked edge. Crows tear out the eyes of Cinderella's sisters, a gorier fate then they receive in the animated version. Hansel and Gretel relish cooking the witch in her own oven. Writers have become fascinated by the bloodier, morally ambivalent aspects of fairy tales, and are now modernizing the old stories while simultaneously going back to their roots.
Before this trend was in vogue, Angela Carter--whose stories always have a dark, wicked, subversive edge--had been reinventing fairy tales for years. In THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, she and Neil Jordan retell the story of Red Riding Hood, enlivening it with werewolves, Rolls Royces, and a visit from Satan.
The story is structured as a dream, occurring in the mind of Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), an adolescent girl about whose 'real' life we learn very little. Within the dream, there are a number of inset stories, most told by dream-Rosaleen's grandmother (Angela Lansbury), and these tales gloss the central story in intriguing, suggestive ways. The result is a surprisingly successful example of a sinister, contemporary fairy tale.
I say "surprisingly" because there are so many ways this film could have gone wrong. And there are ways in which it does. The performances are mediocre, except for Lansbury's--she finds the right note for the prim, apple-cheeked granny, the wise and stern teller of cautionary tales. The soundtrack, synth-heavy, reminded me of bad 80s horror movies, as did the special effects in the shapechanging scenes. Probably state-of-the-art at the time, they are now laughable.
But Jordan succeeds at what I consider the trickiest aspect of the film: he transcends the poor acting/music/effects and conveys a sense of the fantastic, of otherness. One of the problems in adapting full-blown fantasies is that fantasy is often best left to the imagination of the reader, rather than being subjected to the 'realism' of the screen. Part of me would love to see an adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings,' but, on the other hand, I know that any filmmaker's recreation of ents, hobbits, and balrogs is inevitably going to be really lame compared to what I picture in my mind.
This makes Jordan's accomplishment here seem mighty impressive to me: he imbues THE COMPANY OF WOLVES with a genuine sense of magic and mystery. The somewhat Ruritanian dreamworld becomes a kind of ur-reality. The sunshine is exceptionally warm and abundant. The nights are quiet and misty and eerie and ghostly. The peasant village is rustic and cozy, the woods old and hoary.
This archetypal realm is the setting for a smart, subtle, literate script, a script which is as good as you'd expect from Jordan (himself an accomplished fiction writer) and Carter. For Carter, the cauldron of story is a witches' brew, bubbling over with primal ingredients: mist-shrouded forests, ancient graveyards, virginal girls and wise women, wolves with glowing eyes. She adeptly blends them all together. There is a symbolic richness to the film; everything is permeated with a sense of significance.
The point of it all, I think, is to represent a girl's rites-of-passage on an unconscious, primordial level. A night-journey through the forest, from the village to the grandmother's home, is the crux of THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. "Don't stray from the path," Rosaleen is told, again and again, and the path is both literal and figurative: the path through the forest and the path of life. Staying on the path is the conventional approach suggested by Rosaleen's elders. Carter and Jordan, never conventional, explore what goes on when you leave the path.
Those who stray will supposedly meet with a dark fate. This fate is literalized in the dream as werewolves, but the werewolves connote many things: death, sex, knowledge. If straying from the path leads to death, then it's not a good idea--but if that's what you have to risk to get sex and knowledge (and therefore power), then maybe it's worth the risk. When you leave the path, the world becomes a dangerous, ambiguous place, but it's full of potential. And it's certainly more interesting than the Disney version.
A Review by David Dalgleish (June 28/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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