 27 Sep 2003 @ 14:28, by Quidnovi
"…wolves may lurk in any guise. Now, as then, tis simple truth; sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth."
This archetypal realm is the setting for a smart, subtle, literate script, a script which is as good as you'd expect from [Irish director] Neil Jordan (himself an accomplished fiction writer) and [fantasy writer] Angela Carter. For Carter, the cauldron of story has always been a witches' brew, bubbling over with primal ingredients: mist-shrouded forests, ancient graveyards, virginal girls and wise women, wolves with glowing eyes. She adeptly blends them all together. There is a symbolic richness to the film; everything is permeated with a sense of significance.
The point of it all, I think, is to represent a girl's rites-of-passage on an unconscious, primordial level. A night-journey through the forest, from the village to the grandmother's home, is the crux of THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. "Don't stray from the path," Rosaleen is told, again and again, and the path is both literal and figurative: the path through the forest and the path of life. Staying on the path is the conventional approach suggested by Rosaleen's elders. Carter and Jordan, never conventional, explore what goes on when you leave the path.
Those who stray will supposedly meet with a dark fate. This fate is literalized in the dream as werewolves, but the werewolves connote many things: death, sex, knowledge. If straying from the path leads to death, then it's not a good idea---but if that's what you have to risk to get sex and knowledge (and therefore power), then maybe it's worth the risk. When you leave the path, the world becomes a dangerous, ambiguous place, but it's full of potential. And it's certainly more interesting than the Disney version.
---Review by David Dalgleish at Subjective.Freeservers.com
Wolves howl outside.
She looks up.
ROSALEEN: who's come to sing us carols then?
HUNTSMAN: Only my companions, darling. I love the company of wolves. Look out of the window and you'll see them.
(He sinks back grinning into the rocking chair.)
(Rosaleen goes back to the window and looks out.)
(...)
ROSALEEN: Are you our kind, or their kind?
HUNTSMAN: Not one kind or the other. Both.
ROSALEEN: Then where do you live? In our world, or in theirs?
HUNTSMAN: I come and go between them. My home is nowhere.
Once upon a time. . . when the village was asleep. . . a she-wolf came, from the world below to the world above...
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