A high-class family, made up of mother, father, son and daughter, arrive at a peaceful country house for their holiday. Yet for some mysterious reason, the world seems to come apart and an overwhelming sense of chaos to descend. When some visitors to the house (disconcertingly enough we see them again soon after) kill the father of the family, it is left to the mother, son and daughter to flee. The trio gets to a railway station where people are waiting expectantly for a train to come and take them away. This is a place where money has no place, where needs are met on the basis of exchange. And our helpless family falls in expectantly with the group... Haneke draws a starkly real picture of the conventions imposed on us all through life, of the guise of indispensability these conventions acquire after a time, and of the despair that sets in when they are taken away from us in some way or another. As proverbial fish out of water, adapting to the new situation is imperative if we are to survive; but unfortunately, it is impossible for this reluctant endeavour to be any more than hollow. There is no telling whether it was a conscious decision on Haneke’s part or mere coincidence, but The Time of the Wolf bears a close resemblance to the premise of Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 work, Hour of the Wolf. While in Bergman’s film, we watch the torment of an artist battling with his ‘second self’, in Haneke’s we are alone with the dilemmas of an individual waiting helplessly for that ‘second self’ to materialise. Perhaps we should also include Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky talked openly of his admiration of Bergman) and reassess the three films through different eyes... Murat Özer
