The Hip Pocket #21: BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF
This French genre mash-up is more than the sum of its parts
We all have movies we love.
Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.
One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.
I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.
This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Jérémie Renier, Vincent Cassel, Emilie Dequenne, Monica Bellucci, Jacques Perrin, Christian Marc, Karin Kriström, Philippe Nahon, Virginie Darmon, Vincent Cespedes, Hans Meyer, Jean-Paul Farré, Perre Lavit, Eric Prat, Bernard Farcy, Edith Scob, Michel Puterflam, Jean Yanne, Jean-Loup Wolff, Jean-François Stévenin, Nicolas Vaude, Max Delor, Christian Adam, Jean-Pierre Jackson, Nicky Naudé, Daniel Herroin, Gaëlle Cohen, Virginie Arnaud, Charles Maquignon, Frankie Pain, Isabelle Le Nouvel, Albane Fioretti, Clarice Plasteig dit Caffou, Delphine Hivernet, Juliette Lamboley, Gaspard Ulliel, Pierre Castagne, Stéphane Pioffet, Eric Laffitte, Johan Leysen, Eric Delcourt, André Penvern, Bernard Fresson, Christelle Droy, Andres Fuentes, Nadine Marcovici, Jean-Claude Braquet, David Bogino, Emanuel Booz, François Hadji-Lazaro, Pascal Laugier
cinematography by Dan Laustsen
music by Joseph LoDuca
screenplay by Stéphane Cabel & Christophe Gans
produced by Richard Grandpierre and Samuel Hadida
directed by Christophe Gans
Rated R
2 hrs 22 mins
originally commissioned by Will Morey
Those who have money and power will do anything to protect that money and power. That’s the way it’s always been; that’s the way it will always be.
There are two ways to deal with this bitter truth on film. In most Hollywood movies, they avoid this truth. Power is celebrated. Money is celebrated. These are aspirational things, placed on a pedestal, and we’re supposed to be willing to do anything to obtain them. In some films, though, there is a righteous fury about this truth, and a push back against it. These films seek to disrupt the status quo in some way, challenge the conventional ideas about what we hold dear.
The real brilliance of Brotherhood of the Wolf, the deeply underrated mash-up masterwork by the never-gonna-get-close-to-this-again filmmaker Christophe Gans, is how it takes the shape and style of the movies that wallow in this stuff, the glossy big-budget fare that reinforces just how cool it is to be the richest and the biggest, but it is all in service of a deeply cynical movie that just can’t wait to stick those elite motherfuckers in the guillotine where they belong.
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