The Brotherhood Of The Wolf aka Le Pacte des loupsChristophe Gans
France, 2001, 142 minutes; Pathe Films
Review by Christopher Fowler (2001)
If I’ve suddenly become a Francophile, it’s because France is currently undergoing a serious revival in the arts, especially in music and the making of good films. Europe has lately seen the payoff of a policy to create movies that compete in size and popularity to Hollywood output, while intellectually thrashing them. Britain promised to follow France and produce large scale movies, but we’re hopeless at it. The best we’ve managed is Lucky Break, a film so horribly out of touch with its audience that it feels as though it should star Sid James and Peter Sellars. The French, on the other hand, come up with this extraordinary film.
The question they’ve asked themselves is; how do you sell an intelligent period thriller based on fact to teenagers who are just looking for a good time? Answer: pack it full of things that appeal to them. So, in well over two hours (the UK cut will be shorter because distributors hack ‛foreign’ films to fit the American attention span) we get bodice-ripping, snarling monsters, ninja acrobatics, shamanism, gunplay, sexy women, whoring, incest, rape, homo-eroticism, heroics, political shenanigans, blasphemy and big frocks – all at a pace that manages to be both scorching and unhurried.
So – France, the late eighteenth century, and the countryside is being laid waste by a terrifying beast that would appear to be a gigantic werewolf. Indeed, there are silver bullets being meted out to deal with it, but after several years of marauding, and a great many dead villagers, someone has taken to producing texts ridiculing the king for his lack of action. Enter Gregoire, a two-fisted taxidermist, philosopher and botanist in the king’s employ who travels with Mani, a handsome North American Indian, to uncover the truth.
Yes, there are a few things wrong. Too many attacks on victims, too many scenes of angry villagers, a couple of faults in the creature revealed by computer graphics (they have yet to master the way animals move), but the successes far outweigh the miscalculations. There’s the thrill of subversion – cheer as Catholics are mown down! There’s the iconography of the images – the heroes in leather masks and tricorns are featured on the French poster – and then there’s the sheer fabulous fucking glamour of the whole enterprise – that swordplay! those clothes! that countryside! But best by far is the plot, a totally original and outrageously fresh take on the werewolf legend, so fresh, in fact, that I guarantee you won’t figure out what the actual ‛beast’ is until after you come out of the cinema. Forget that it’s not Hollywood – that won’t be difficult once you realise the actors are thinking – this is sensational film-making with all the stops out. And if you think I’m being unreasonably biased, check it beside
Tomb Raider which, in comparison, appears to have been edited by David Blunkett.