MARTINA GEDECK AND LYNX IN THE WALL]
Ordeal with philosophical overtones in the Austrian mountains Austrian filmmaker Julian Pölsler's solid, visually beautiful
The Wall (
Die Wand), adapted by the director from the ("feminist") novel by Marlen Haushofer, is a Robinson Cruesoe tale set in the Austrian mountains. How could that be? Because the protagonist, a hardy, grimly determined Woman (Martina Gedeck of
The Lives of Others) wakes up at a remote mountain hunting lodge to find her two friends haven't returned from the village they drove down to for the evening. When she goes out scouting with the dog Lynx, there turns out to be an invisible wall (some would call it a "force-field") across the road. And it's elsewhere too. The Woman is stuck up by herself in the mountains, with no knowledge of what's happened to the rest of the world. It's an apocalypse, if you like, a low-keyed Austrian mountain style one. The film becomes an intense experience of solitary persistence.
This is a survival tale, all right, but as happens more and more in contemporary fiction its starting point is not a natural turn of events, if such remain possible, but ("lo-fi") sci-fi or metaphor. Also unlike the classic Crusoe model,
The Wall withholds any kind of satisfying conclusion, leaving us to ponder a dark and lonely future without a man Friday or rescuers, without even the little calf she has painstakingly helped to be born or the faithful dog that has kept her company for the several years of diary-keeping and unreeling seasons she's told us about.
A criticism of
The Wall is the continual voiceover. Since the whole film is in German, to spare English-speaking viewers 100 minutes of subtitle-reading without a visible speaker to go with it, this narration has been redone in German-accented English, but the remaining complaint is that visible action and voiceover never quite mesh. Maybe at some times not. But isn't this typical of modern storytelling too, like the narratives' unnatural and metaphorical premise? Certain events are also foreshadowed, or spoken about, before they're actually shown as having happened. This surely is intentional, and underlines that though the Woman has fierce determination and like Crusoe but with an easier starting point leads a highly organized existence, sanity is not always easy to maintain. There are disturbing dreams, and sometimes the sight of her gray face in bed at night staring into space is disturbing.
The narration is essential because our Woman not only has serious survival skills -- if less elaborate than Crusoe's -- and grim determination, but a lot of things to think about. One of the first things she decides is that she's "no loner young enough" to think of suicide. Later, she must be strong because there's a cow that has turned up that she names Bella, and eventually has a calf she calls Bull, and there's a cat and a kitten called Pearl. She must stick around to take care of them. At various times the Woman harvests a field of hay, which takes three weeks because she's "so clumsy and so weak," and in a certain season she picks fruit and potatoes. She gets milk from the cow, but must also feed her. There are plenty of deer in the vicinity, and in the winter she must kill them; she has good rifles and ammunition and knows how to use them. She can also carry a dead deer back to the lodge. Some pretty bad things happen later on, but she is never going to give up, just as her life is never going to become easy. So it goes. She survives, and blends into nature, the animals becoming her friends and equals.
A little too metaphorically, as if the wall were not enough (but we just accept that: it's in the nature of a good storytelling that we can accept some real stretchers at the outset), among the crows that come around there is one white one kept apart from the others and the Woman makes feeding it her special task. The philosophy behind
The Wall is a kind of nihilistic existentialism (or is that redundant?), something like the Latin motto "Credo quia absurdum," I believe because it is absurd. For the Woman, life makes no sense and never really has but one goes on because one must.
The scenery is gorgeous, but without calculation, just because it is. And to enhance the beauty of the loneliness there are often strains of the most beautiful music of loneliness ever created, Bach's suites for solo violin. (They are, appropriately, played by a woman violinist.) A glitch in the English narration is that early on Gedeck calls the dog "Luchs," later switching to "Lynx." It turns out the red-brown Bavarian Mountain Dog is played by the director's own pedigree hound "Luchs vom Kyffhäuserbach." But in the movie his name is "Lynx." A fine and beautiful dog to watch, however.
What makes all this work reasonably well is the realism of the physical action, and the convincing, committed performance of Martina Gedeck, who gradually goes through many small changes, truly appearing to be living the ordeal of the Woman who must feed herself and take care of her charges through all kinds of weather. However strange and never explained its semi-allegorical premise,
The Wall is a well-made, origina and involving film, and one of the best depictions of companionship with a dog I've ever seen. Nonetheless note everybody plugs in as well as I do; some critics seem to find T
he Wall a long depressing slog whose allegory is dead in the water.
Die Wand , 108 mins., debuted at the 2012 Berlinale and won the Panorama Ecumenical Jury Prize there. Christian Bischoff, Uve Haußig and John Konecny got the German Film Award for the sound design. Limited US release began 31 May 2013.
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