Christophe Gans’s The 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. 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.
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.
This is an odd duck of a film. Inscrutably referred to in the feminine case, the titular wolf appears halfway through The Brotherhood of the Wolf in all her digital glory, by which point Gans’s compositions, alternately painterly and schizophrenic, will have long left you feeling discombobulated. There are eight or nine films here, all spliced to form what plays out like a Final Fantasy game held together by slip-shod politics and spirituality. There’s incest, scalping, bulging biceps, bouncing cleavage, and a slew of expertly choreographed peasant deaths. At the very least, The Brotherhood of the Wolf fashions the most delirious graphic match in movie history by cross-fading between Bellucci’s left breast and a snowy hilltop.
Image/Sound
Brotherhood of the Wolf’s theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is presented in anamorphic video on this Universal Home Video DVD edition. The film certainly boasts a complex, varied color palette; some halos are noticeable and while contrast is efficient during the film’s darker scenes, many of the film’s daytime sequences look overblown. The rain machine is put to work overtime in Gans’s film and the Dolby Digital English 5.1 Surround is up to par. The constant fighting, growling and swordplay ensures a consistently engaging mix.
Extras
Included on this DVD edition of Brotherhood of the Wolf are cast and filmmaker bios and a deleted scenes sequence that is the next best thing to a making-of featurette and commentary track. An engaging Gans introduces five deleted and/or extended sequences from the film, each followed with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of those scenes. Throughout this 30-minute-plus sequence (also included on the far superior Region 2 edition of the film), Gans displays his passion for the film’s spiritual themes. Of all the deleted scenes, the frozen lake sequence is of special interest as it was inspired by the little-seen Hollywood masterpiece Portrait of Jennie, one of Gans’s favorite films and an unlikely influence for a film like this.
Overall
Brotherhood of the Wolf was popular enough to merit more than the deleted scenes sequence included here. If your DVD player is code-free, pick up the Region 2 edition of the film.
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