Director; Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Spain, France). Year of Release: 2022
An out-of-the-way village in Galicia. Two men trying to control a large horse and wrestle it to the ground. Opening credits read: “To allow them to live freely, the Aloitadores immobilize the beasts with their bodies to clip and tag them.” To fans of metaphor: there may be something here for you. We are soon in a bar where the locals are having a row about who has signed up to a new wind farm scheme. When one ups and leaves, the others challenge him for going early.
While Antoine speaks Spanish in Eusebio’s bar, when he returns to his wife Olga, they speak French. We gradually learn that, unlike the other villagers, they are not locals. Antoine gave up his job as a teacher to set up an organic vegetable farm and do up the local houses. Although he occasionally shows his face in the bar, his relationship with the locals is not full of congeniality. Olga mainly keeps herself to herself, tending the vegetables.
Antoine receives particular animosity from Xan and Loren, the brothers who run the farm next door. In the bar, Xan is always the loudest. Sometimes Xan asks Antoine to sit down and join them playing dominoes; at other times, he calls Antoine “Frenchie”, and reminds him that Napoleon’s invaders thought that the Spanish were morons. In both moods, Xan carries a sense of menace, always looking like he’s about to burst into a tantrum which might end up in extreme violence.
Loren is quieter, and less quick with his tongue. People call him slow after he lost some of his mental facilities during a childhood encounter with a horse. Loren almost always carries a gun, which he says is unloaded, but who’s to know for sure? When the brothers encounter Antoine and Olga on a lonely night time road, and Xan starts tapping on one window while Loren leers into the other, you can just feel the fear being emitted by the French couple.
The intimidation and mobbing goes further. One day, Antoine looks at his prize tomatoes to see that they are all rotten. Further investigation shows that someone has put two car batteries in the well used to water the crops. “Everyone” knows who is responsible, but the police are reluctant to pursue the matter – maybe because they are too close with the villagers, maybe because Antoine has no real proof. In response, Antoine starts filming everyone he comes in contact with.
Wie wilde Tiere is scary because although it is pregnant with brutality, we never see any real violence on screen. The one occasion when intimidating words turn into aggressive deeds, the camera turns away before we see anything happening. Instead we have the permanent feeling that things could turn nasty very quickly, very soon. Rather than being beaten into our seats by watching big men hitting each other, we are pursued by fears of what might be about to happen.
But just when you think this is a simple Straw Dogs story of sophisticated city folk being made to suffer by the crude xenophobic yokels, the film throws us a curveball. It turns out that Xan and Loren may have a point. In their eyes, Antoine and Olga are gentrifiers. The villagers work because they have to. The Frenchies moved into the area by choice. They are educated, they could do anything they wanted. And now they lord it over their uneducated neighbours.
The crux of the dispute is the offer by a wind farm company to buy the land. For the villagers, this would be a chance to escape their back breaking work and find something less stressful. Xan in particular has dreams of buying his own taxis and working 12 hour shifts, with Loren doing the night shift. Antoine’s decision to veto the land sale has robbed his neighbours of even this illusion. Xan may be a brute, but he does not share Antoine’s luxury of choosing his own destiny.
One aspect of the dilemma which could have benefitted from more discussion is the nature of the company which is trying to buy the land. Now you and I know that even wind farm companies are rapacious capitalists who are more interested in making profits than saving the environment. But is this really the view of middle class environmentalist Antoine? We hear him saying that windmills would destroy the environment, but this argument is never really pursued.
After the tension builds up gradually, suddenly Plot happens (to find out what, you’ll have to watch the film). As a result, Antoine and Olga’s daughter Marie visits the farm. Marie is a ball of energy and righteous anger, who cannot understand how her parents have lasted so long. She obviously loves her mother very much, but they cannot avoid rowing – Marie accusing her mother of staying in a sterile marriage, and Olga despairing that her wayward daughter never settled down.
Some reviewers have suggested that the final act with Marie and Olga offers a feminine counterweight to the macho anger which we have seen up until now. I can see where they’re coming from, but am not fully convinced. Although Antoine, Xan, Loren and other characters show excessive machismo, this is never their sole defining feature. And it’s not as if the women in the film are significantly less fucked up than their husbands, fathers, and sons.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like Wie wilde Tiere. For a start, it’s over 2 hours long. But there’s also been a number of well-received recent films set in European agricultural communities, which have left me rather cold. I was worried that this was going to be another of those films which address Important issues for sure, but wouldn’t engage me. I’m not sure whether it was the first rate acting, a well weighted plot, or just my mood, but Wie wilde Tiere kept me transfixed to the end.
CinePhil 