The series A posteriori le cinéma is intended as an opportunity to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting flagship titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
In the glorious golden age of video stores in the mid-1980s, horror cinema was at the height of its popularity. Scary or attractive, your choice, the covers of VHS and Beta videocassettes competed in morbid imagination. Through its macabre poetry, that of the film The Company of Wolves (The company of wolves) stood out: Against the backdrop of a huge full moon, a teenage girl who looks like Little Red Riding Hood watches a man in the foreground who would appear to be howling… were it not for the wolf’s jaws erupting from his distended mouth. The evocative image is in keeping with Neil Jordan’s haunting film, released in limited release 40 years ago this month, and based on Angela Carter’s feminist reinterpretations of fairy tales.
In the book Film out of boundsMatthew Edwards wrote in 2007: “ The Company of Wolves is arguably one of the best British films of the last thirty years. It is a strange hybrid of fantasy and horror, brimming with eroticism, symbolism and sexuality.
The film begins and ends in the present day, as a preteen, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), restlessly dreams in her bedroom. Following her, we are plunged into a sinister and wonderful dream. We find Rosaleen again, but in the context of a peasant hamlet located in an enchanted forest.
And his grandmother (Angela Lansbury) tells him the story of a woman who made the mistake of marrying a wolf disguised as a man… And the narrative mise en abyme follows one after the other…
Celebrated English author Angela Carter co-wrote the screenplay with Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa ; The Crying Game/The cry of tears ; The End of the Affair/The end of an affair), a still-new Irish director. As Jordan explains to The Guardian in 2023: “She had written a screenplay based on one of her short stories called The Company of Wolvesitself an adaptation of the Little Red Riding Hood. It wasn’t long enough for a film, but I came up with a sort of nested structure, with a young girl dreaming herself up as a fairy tale character, and her dream grandmother telling her uplifting stories. That way we could incorporate elements from other tales in Angela’s collection.”
The author therefore invited the filmmaker to join her at her country house, where the scriptwriting took place.
“Every morning we would sit down and outline potential scripts, then go away and write separately, and compare the next morning what we had done. In about two weeks, the script was finished,” Jordan recalls.
A feast for the eyes
Forty years later, the film remains a feast for the eyes. Inspired in part by paintings by the painter Samuel Palmer, the deliberately artificial universe was entirely constructed in the studio.
In a 2016 essay for Devilish Magazineeditor, critic and director Kat Ellinger sums up: “Dark, provocative, brimming with Freudian subtext, the feature The Company of Wolves is full of nuances of female sexuality and hidden meanings. As a horror film, it stands out within the subgenre of the “werewolf film”: like the lycanthrope, it is neither quite one thing (a pure genre film), nor quite another (a coming-of-age story). […] Angela Carter’s feminist themes and her delightful take on contemporary gothic are omnipresent in the image.”
Speaking of “Freudian subtexts,” the concept of the return of the repressed is central to the film, in the form of that animal part that we usually keep inhibited, and which here is disinhibited, literally and figuratively — especially literally.
In this regard, the film offers sequences of metamorphosis that are all the more striking (for the time) because they vary, courtesy of the special effects expert Chris Tucker, who had just distinguished himself with the prosthetic makeup ofElephant Manby David Lynch. One transformation shows a man tearing off his skin while, underneath, his body becomes an animal, while another, the one that inspired the poster, shows a man releasing the beast through his mouth.
In an essay published in 2006 in the periodical Bright Lights Film JournalVictoria Large notes however on this subject that the film, in accordance with the writings of Angela Carter, does not offer a binary reading of the man-animal and the woman-prey: “Rosaleen is warned by her grandmother against girls who “stray from the right path and wolves who look like men but are “hairy inside” […] But The Company of Wolves is far from a simplistic film, and its thematic concerns are more complex than simply highlighting the more animalistic characteristics of men. Rosaleen’s mother reminds her that “if there is a beast in men, it also meets its equal in women,” and the symbolism present throughout suggests that while the passage to adulthood (and adult sexuality) can be distressing, it is also desirable and, in fact, necessary.
His own way
We thus witness Rosaleen’s “learning”, as she rejects the insistent advances of a young neighbor, as she questions the moans her mother lets out when her father gets touchy at night, and as she gives free rein to her imagination, her first vector of emancipation.
Inquisitive and independent-minded, Rosaleen listens to the women in her family, but chooses her own path. Victoria Large sums it up: “The grandmother’s one-sided warnings are associated with the world of childhood and are set aside in favor of a more complex understanding of sexuality presented by Rosaleen’s mother.” […] Younger but wiser, Rosaleen knows how to fend for herself in the woods.
In fact, in her short story, Angela Carter writes: “It is the worst time of year for wolves. But this stubborn child insists on going through the woods. She is perfectly certain that the wild beasts cannot harm her, although, duly reprimanded, she carries a butcher’s knife in the basket that her mother has filled with cheese.”
What is the “path” chosen by Rosaleen? At the end, when the villagers arrive at the grandmother’s house who was devoured by the wolf, they find not one, but two beasts. This is because after having tamed the wolf, Rosaleen herself has become a wolf, by choice. And it is her mother, a figure of knowledge, who will prevent her father from shooting her by recognizing his daughter’s pendant around the young wolf’s neck.
Memorable images
Furiously original, The Company of Wolves is full of memorable images: the phallic trees and mushrooms; that bird’s egg containing not a baby bird, but a cherub’s trinket; the decapitated wolf’s head that falls into the barrel of milk and resurfaces as a man’s head; that other head, that of the grandmother, which shatters into a thousand shards of porcelain…
And there is the music of George Fenton (Gandhi ; dangerous links/Dangerous relationships), by turns sinister and enchanting…
Ten years after the release of what was only his second film, Neil Jordan returned to literary horror with his sumptuous adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel, Interview with the Vampire (Interview with a Vampire).
In 2012, his little-known but excellent Byzantium brought him back, with vampires again, but this time with a feminist subtext from Moira Buffini’s screenplay, based on her novel. I can’t wait for Neil Jordan to return to refined, “literate” horror. Like Rosaleen, we can always… dream.
The film The Company of Wolves is available for sale in 4K and Blu-ray.