MARIE-EVE NADEAU IN RICH IS THE WOLF

Found footage biopic, second hand

In Rich Is the Wolf, a woman called Marie (Marie-Eve Nadeau) spends days and days watching a whole shelf-full of small-format K-7 videotapes (from the last seven years) left behind when her boyfriend Olaf (Damien Odoul) suddenly disappears, using these records and mementos as a way of trying to get close to him. She does not expect him to return, nor does she question his sudden unexplained departure, or notify the police, or Olaf's family: she says he has no family and no friends either; that he wanted to "become Asian," eating a lot of rice and practicing martial arts (footage shown is of wrestling practice). The many hours of video images randomly excerpted for us, with voiceover and musical accompaniment, are supplemented by a a notebook. Only very limited narrative content emerges through Marie's commentary and her conversations with another woman (both of whom speak with what sounds like a French Canadian twang), and with occasional poems or ruminations by Olaf. The film being evidently Odoul's, this is a very peculiar and personal kind of documentary autobiography: oneself seen through left-behind fragments viewed by an abandoned girlfriend. This film falls into the category of Interesting Experiment, but it's more interesting to think and talk about than to watch.

The director, Damien Odoul, is an avantgardist French filmmaker little known in this country and this film has no French release or mention on the website Allociné either. However, it was shown at Locarno and reviewed for Variety by Jay Weissberg (Aug. 20, 2012). This is a meditation, a speculation, an experiment. It's a little like Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour: a woman goes back over a love affair, reviewing her past and his -- but with none of the art house polish or narrative detail of that earlier film. Odoul uses random found or personal footage, and though he "plays" Olaf and we see him a few times, most of the time we see no one in particular and no story is told to us. Instead we get farm animals staring into an amateur camera lens. We get trees being chopped down in a forest (Olaf says he is celebrating his 40th birthday and is chopping down a 40-year-old tree). We get a hamburger and canned peaches being broken up and flushed down a toilet. Music and words often go counter to image. It's surprising how poetic and momentous trees can look seen from below as a car rushes along (as in the famous sequence in Shoot the Piano Player). A French commentator (in connection with the Marseille documentary festival) says "wolf" is used in the title because that's the old German meaning of Odoul's name; he likes the filmmaker's instinctive and indirect way of working drawing character, scattering and dispersing it rather than doing a linear drawing of its contours. As Marie makes clear, she, and by implication the viewer, is not trying to "see" Olaf, but to experience him by imagining oneself seeing through his eyes.

I know Damien Odoul only as the director of his debut film, Le souffle/Deep Breath, reviewed by fellow Cinescene contributor Howard Schumann and one of his favorite films of the decade. Le Souffle is a partly vérité, partly surreal 77-minute film about a day in the life of a bored, tense teenage boy spending the summer with his uncle at a rural French farm. There is a wild beauty about Le souffle, which brought Odoul to the attention of French film fans; his method is very sui generis. In 2007 he made L'histoire de Richard O., starring the well-known Mattieu Amalric as a man spending the hot days and nights of an August in Paris searching for erotic experience, with 13 encounters included (Amalric co-produced Rich Is the Wolf).

Rich Is the Wolf contains what Weissberg may be right to refer to as "an almost parodic level of Gallic philosophical inquiry," and likely also right in saying "Prospects outside Paris are low." In fact prospects inside Paris are not established as high, given that no French theatrical release of Rich Is the Wolf is listed on Allociné or IMDb. In his Variety review from when the 89 min. film debuted at Locarno, out of competition (20 August 2012), Jay Weissberg noted correctly that the premise was intriguing but felt that the film's "lack of visual development" with its long train of nondescript videocassette footage and the philosophical rambling would not win new fans for Odoul or play well anywhere outside Paris.

La richesse du loup was screened for this review a part of the Unifrance-FSLC Feb. 28-March 10, 2013 series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.