Cinema
The dark forest
Peter Ackroyd
The Company of Wolves ('18', Odeon Leicester Square)
rr his is a film which at once creates an 1 atmosphere of mystery, as a respect- able middle-class family is seen to possess its own secret passages and desires. The young daughter of the house, Rosaleen, is asleep and in her dreams we move from the conventional English countryside to a place where the world itself becomes a dark wood populated by carnivorous ted- dies, by trees which grow cobwebs, by storks that preen themselves in graveyards, and by wolves that lurk beyond the paths. And as Rosaleen, now on the edge of puberty, wanders in, this dream state, all the characters and events of her comfort- able middle-class life are quite trans- formed: she faces a world in which her charming storybook characters take on a symbolic and threatening life, and where the natural world is as malevolent as it is beneficent. For her dreams concern a small human community surrounded by a forest- - a perilous community invaded by tales of men that turn into wolves, and of devils that creep up from the underworld to entice and torment the living.
If this is not the landscape of childhood, 'I'm sorry but I never speak to strange men.'
which tends to be altogether a more prosaic affair, it is at least that landscape of simplified morals and messages which adults impose upon children; this makes it rather disturbing, yet The Company of Wolves employs neither conventional hor- ror nor conventional fantasy and it is precisely this elusive quality which makes it interesting. Certainly a British film (it is directed by Neil Jordan) which has escaped the claws of pallid realism is to be ap- plauded at first sight, but one's pleasure in seeing it is more than simply a reaction against the ever-increasing restrictiveness of , conventional social drama. This is, in fact, an alternative form of cinema.
For the film uses the material of fairy story with astonishing results: the plot itself, which concerns the nature and origin of the werewolf, is at , once established within some timeless world where symbol and fantasy can cohabit, and where the conventions of the fairy story can be married with more arcane matters. Angela Carter, who has adapted one of her own stories for use here, evokes sexual images throughout the narrative so that the dangerous enchanted wood becomes a metaphor for Rosaleen's own pubescent state. If that sounds portentous, the rich- ness and elaboration of the narrative make it much less so: the great advantage df using the format of a fairy story, after all, is that the old imperative of 'Once upon a time' remains and carries the audience from story to story.
.The Company of Wolves is also a pleas- ing spectacle, as the glowing interiors are set against the more threatening life of the forest itself. Some of the 'special effects' are very effective indeed, and the trans- formation of man into wolf is done with a faithfulness which makes parts of the pro- cess difficult to watch; ,why on earth this film was given an '18' certificate, by the way, is impossible to understand — unless it was on the grounds that fairy tales are really only suitable for adults.
Certainly the adults within the film performed with an appropriate amount of conviction: Angela Lansbury, as the wise grandmother, was both as reassuring and as frightening as grandmothers often are; she mingled well with the other archetypes in the film as she muttered through pursed lips the age-old warning, 'Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet.'
For the windfall apple will contain a worm, and adjacent eyebrows is a mark of lycan- thropy, both of them neatly suggesting one of the film's major themes: that of the violence which lurks beneath the shiny and beneficent world, and how that violence is often mediated in the relationships be- tween men and women.
This was .a mysterious, rather horrifying but consistently fascinating film which ac- quired an inner coherence and purpose —
and, in the process, the cinema itself became a simile for dream and a vehicle for 'myth. 'Seeing is believing' was one of the repeated phrases, and in a sense that
became true as a number of evocative images helped to re-awaken the capacity for wonder in an audience. If I have one complaint, it is only that the symbolic intentions which Carter and Jordan wished to incorporate became too intrusive to- wards the close, when Rosaleen herself dreams that she has become a wolf and wakes to find the relics of her childhood shattered around her. The point here may have been that the 'animal' element exists in the woman as well as the generally more bestial man, but this fact may already be quite evident to the general public. Never- theless it gave a suitably climactic ending to a film which never failed to please and which often managed to astonish.
There has been in recent years a return in fiction to what has been labelled as 'magical realism'; I am not sure what that phrase means, except that it is meant to unite the work of such disparate talents as those of Michael Moorcock and Angela Carter herself: certainly it is one of the strongest elements in the contemporary English novel. There seems no reason why Neil Jordan, and other British directors of similar intelligence, might not therefore find in modern fiction material much more persuasive than 'social realism', since it is material which, as The Company of Wolves suggested, can be rendered on the screen with great inventiveness and grace. And that, in the end, may be this film's most important lesson.
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