Neil Jordan’s second feature
certainly established him as a filmmaker who wasn’t afraid to try new things
and The Company of Wolves is certainly a very different film from Angel.
But is it any good?
A Freudian retelling of the
Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, the film begins with a sleeping Rosaleen
(Sarah Patterson), who has just stolen her sister’s lipstick. She dreams that
she lives in an alternate, fairy tale world. She lives in a village constantly
under threat from a large population of wolves who live in the woods.
Rosaleen’s Granny (Angela Lansbury) tells her a series of stories designed to
make Rosaleen cautious of the woods and the wolves inside, but which are also
intended to make her wary for her growing sexuality and potentially predatory boys.
Rosaleen takes note of these stories but she also has an independent streak and
so when she meets the sinister Huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, she is
more intrigued than frightened.
The film is based on a screenplay
by Jordan and Angela Carter and takes as its inspiration stories by Carter.
Carter’s intention with these stories was to rewrite famous fairy tales from a
less conservative and oppressive slant. She found that fairy tales were
designed to teach women to fear their sexuality and taught them submissiveness.
In her stories, which were loaded with Freudian imagery, the female characters
are far from passive and the stories encourage women not to fear their
sexuality but to take control of it. Essentially, her stories were modern,
feminist version of the ancient fairy tales. The Company of Wolves sets
out to do the same thing, and all of the typical elements of the fairy tale are
present, albeit presented from a Freudian perspective and with a dream-like
feel.
As interesting as this may sound,
it is rather unsatisfying. The Freudian imagery is over-used and dated – films
had been drawing parallels with Freud’s writings for years and Jordan doesn’t
offer anything particularly new. The film’s symbolism is also heavy-handed. The
phrase “Don’t stray from the path” – though taken from the original versions of
the Little Red Riding Hood tale – and often repeated by Granny is so clearly
meant to represent the rules and limits placed on women in male dominated
society that it’s lack of subtlety only causes one to roll their eyes at its
every repetition. Granny is here an ambiguous figure – being both loving and
restrictive or, in other words, a parent. The stories that Granny tells
explicitly link sex with danger, violence and death – and never with love –
while the stories Rosaleen tells represent instead the power of women,
particularly a story in which a wronged peasant woman somehow turns her rich
abusers into wolves – the wolf (usually a symbol of predatory sexuality)
presumably taking on a new significance here. This stuff, though interesting in
a surface kind of way, is ultimately over-subscribed. In this day and age, how
many are truly convinced that red represents a budding sexuality via menstrual
blood or that fruit represents sexual organs?
Neil Jordan has claimed that the
appeal he finds in the film is not the heavy Freudian symbolism, but instead
the simple joys of storytelling. This argument is not wholly convincing but it
does point towards the most interesting thing about The Company of Wolves.
In the first half of the film, Rosaleen is told stories that are clearly
intended as cautionary tales to guide her through puberty and into adulthood –
a patriarchal society that is not too interested in raising strong, independent
women is evident. But when she starts to tell her own stories, she takes
control of her own destiny (such as it is) and reclaims certain desires as her
own and not the dangerous evils that she has been taught to avoid. The film
then shows the regenerative qualities of fiction, particularly in making up
one’s own fictions. The film delights ultimately in making an oppressive story
(Little Red Riding Hood) into a story of sexual awakening and power.
None of which particularly works
with the jarring ending, in which Rosaleen reawakens from her dream at a point
where she has finally become a woman in control (as represented by her becoming
a wolf), only to see a wolf entering her room (read the maturation of dream
Rosaleen impacting onto real life Rosaleen) and start screaming, horrified.
Hardly a feminist ending. Taken together with the fact that while in the
original fairy tale Red Riding Hood is either killed or saved by a man, in the
film’s version she overcomes a man but nonetheless becomes a wolf on his terms,
not particularly on her own. Surely this means that the meaning of the film’s
version of the tale is not particularly better than those that came before,
since Red Riding Hood is still waiting for a man to act for her in both cases –
either to save her or point the way for her passage into womanhood.
Also problematic, and leaving the
symbolism aside, is the film’s dream-like style, in which scenes follow on from
each other in a off-kilter, irrational way intended to reflect the pacing of (or
lack of) a dream. This has also been done before, though here it is very
distancing device, which keeps one outside the film rather than inside, like listening
to two people who know each other so well that their conversation is
impenetrable to anyone else. Like a lot of Neil Jordan’s films, it is very
cerebral and not particularly welcoming.
As interesting as the film may or may not be, it feels
badly thought out. The ending would seem to be directly contradictory to all
that came before and the symbolism is so obvious and so dated that it just
isn’t convincing. Nonetheless, it is a fairly original film from a filmmaker
who is clearly trying something new, which is something that remains worth
celebrating since it is now so rare.
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