Review: Brotherhood of the Wolf

Christophe Gans’s The Brotherhood of the Wolf has artifice working shamelessly to and against its favor.

Brotherhood of the Wolf
Photo: Universal Focus

Christophe Gans’s Brotherhood of the Wolf has artifice working shamelessly to and against its favor. Think Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans by way of the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, with a little Original Sin thrown in for good measure. Its pre-revolutionary angst is never less than ludicrous, and its artistry isn’t quite as consistently Grimm as that of Sleepy Hollow’s, but it’s so outrageously trashy that it’s impossible to resist.

Before Jack ripped prostitutes to pieces in the Whitechapel district of London, the Beast of Gévaudan was tearing into peasant women and innocent children on the slopes of southern France. If Jack signaled the 20th century, Brotherhood of the Wolf’s titular beast portends the guillotine’s glory days after Louis XV sends philosopher/scientist Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his Iroquois blood brother, Mani (Mark Dacascos), to smoke the beast out of its cave only to stumble across a ludicrous web of spiritual-political twists and turns.

Fronsac and Mani appear on the scene shortly after the beast cracks a woman’s spine against a cliff. No less ostentatious than the film’s violence is its characterizations: Upon arriving in the province of Gévaudan, Mani catches the attention of a peasant woman soon before she strokes a horse and swaps saliva with a couple of knife-wielding freaks. That’s the French for you. They eventually head to the local brothel, where Mani strikes out and Fronsac hits pay dirt with Monica Bellucci’s Sylvia, whose drawing-blood shtick out-divas Angelina Jolie’s.

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For his part, Gans seems intent on out-crossing Luc Besson’s ecstatic Messenger with all the Jesus iconography. The stoic Mani may be able to raise the dead, but the film’s uppity French bastards have no patience for him. In the end, his spirituality is little more than an irrelevant appendage on the film’s smackdown treaty. Gans’s use of slow-mo in the middle of a shot wears thin soon after Mani does the crouching tiger with the town’s local oafs, and while the story’s bourgeois-as-conspirators revelation is beside the point, you may find yourself applauding one fight sequence for the way the director channels his inner John Woo.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is an odd duck. Inscrutably referred to in the feminine case, the titular wolf appears halfway through the film in all her digital glory, by which point Gans’s imagery, alternately painterly and schizophrenic, will have long left you discombobulated. There are eight or nine films here, all spliced together to form what suggests a Final Fantasy game beholden to slipshod evocations of politics and spirituality. There’s incest, scalping, bulging biceps, bouncing cleavage, and a slew of expertly choreographed peasant deaths. Not all of it soars, but you may find yourself applauding what may be the most delirious graphic match in movie history: a cross-fade between Bellucci’s left breast and a snowy hilltop.

Score: 
 Cast: Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Émilie Dequenne, Monica Bellucci, Jérémie Rénier, Mark Dacascos, Jean Yanne, Jean-François Stévenin, Jacques Perrin, Johan Leysen, Bernard Farcy, Édith Scob, Hans Meyer  Director: Christophe Gans  Screenwriter: Stéphane Cabel, Christophe Gans  Distributor: Universal Focus  Running Time: 142 min  Rating: R  Year: 2001  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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