136. The Company of Wolves

Song - Bright Eyes (Art Garfunkel)

Movie: The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

I will always like a postmodern pastiche that explores how communities make sense of their lives through folklore. But this is a whole lot of fuss to retell Little Red Riding Hood. Now, I haven't thought much about Little Red Riding Hood since childhood, so I had never really considered the story as a metaphorical warning against sexual predators. In retrospect, it does seem like an obvious subtext that this film brings to the foreground. It's not uninteresting, and it's done with a considerable amount of artistry. It's also quietly transgressive without being smug. Its provocative moments, such as they are, do not exist to provoke and rile up the audience, but are in the service of the story and the broader questions on the film's mind. And it's clear that everyone, throughout the entire production, has put a lot of thought and care into the making of the film. 

Still, I couldn't help thinking that the whole thing is a bit of a fool's enterprise. The caveat here is that I would have probably thought better of it if I had seen it in 1984. I am seeing it now though, when Hollywood is swamped with 'gritty' reboots and overblown origin stories, straining to find great meaning where there is none, or bludgeoning you with THEMES, pretending to find new meaning that was already there in the original stories  In The Company of Wolves the main character (Rosaleen!), is an ordinary village girl, the only person in the village who believes, and has a real connection with, her Granny (Angela Lansbury), who tells her about the dark secrets and the magic of the forest.  She 'becomes' Red Riding Hood after her Granny knits a red cloat for her. At the end of the film she meets the big bad (were)wolf at her Granny's house, sitting in her Granny's chair after killing her, notices his big paws and big teeth, and 'defeats' him with some cunning and some magic. Red Riding Hood then disappears into the woods with the wolves, to be hunted by the village people who don't realise that she may be the only one standing between them and the blood-thirsty 'wildebeests'. 

A sequel (perhaps one involving Rapunzel and Snow White!) to this film never came, but obviously not for the lack of a good setup. In any case, this is the kind of nonsense Marvel/DC/everyone who wants to imitate them is currently in love with and that I find incredibly annoying. Todd Phillips is a hack, but I wouldn't have liked Joker even if he weren't. Neil Jordan is obviously not a hack, and this is probably as good as a film like this can be. Which is good news. Jordan is a director I've always wanted to explore more of. I have only seen this and Greta, a wonderfully stylish genre exercise that's pretty much the antithesis of the kind of Hollywood blockbuster I complain against here. 

It is worth noting that The Company of Wolves has more on its mind than just being a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. It's also an "old-wives' tale" about the "old-wives' tales a village forest community surrounded by wolves tells itself and in doing so it shows quite nicely how folklore becomes folklore. It understands that for a community shaped by its relationship with the forest and the wolves living in it, the forest and the wolves will become the frames of reference through which it tries to understand and explain the world. This seems rather straightforward, but making obvious how the stories we tell are shaped by the world around us (and vice versa) is not an easy thing to do. This film does it by creating a clever meta-narrative that is not only influenced by Red Riding Hood, but also by other traditional folk tales, werewolf lore and Christian and pagan narratives and imagery. Despite this mish-mash of references, all the stories told here share the same basic narrative, aesthetic, thematic and tonal characteristics, making it believable that they all originate from the same village. Their overarching idea is that nature is inherently grotesque, unknowable and, actually, unnatural. The entire film was filmed on a soundstudio, and Jordan is happy to highlight the fakeness of the sets whenever he deems necessary. That doesn't make the werewolf transformations any less frightening.