QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Lost in a world where beasts and humans walk side by side, this documentary is set in Croatia. It’s a place where wolves attack livestock and other animals, which leads to conspiracy theories that the European Union themselves are transporting these rabid animals into this territory. Indeed, they fully believe helicopters are taking the animals in, and plopping them down. The fears are well-formed because they hear howls echoing through the night sky. And all the while the conspiracies get more outlandish, the more they have function and purpose.
Despite the peculiar premise, The Feast of the Wolf is often monotonous to watch. Early on in the movie, the camera follows an elderly woman walking down the road. What it entails, only the director knows because it adds nothing of value to the feature. It’s set in gorgeous mountain terrain, with pastoral hues decorating the backdrop. But the opening few minutes are done virtually in silence, offering no sense of palpable danger to these individual locals.
When the characters start talking, they barely stop to take a breather, and the viewer is overloaded with information. “She is against us, not wolves”, one man mutters, humiliating his fellow country-woman on camera. The villagers speak in frenzied rhetoric: paranoia has started to kick in. Weirdly, Nessum Dorma is heard on the radio, but if this is a call-back to the scene in which Sydney Schanberg realises his mistakes in The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984), it doesn’t take off.
Much of the film is about villagers spouting ill formed facts, and the director never enters the crux of the matter. There’s no central logic to the accusations; all the photographs show are sheep mauled to death by bigger, more threatening animals. One woman spends her sparetime taking snaps of bloodied, dead animals, but it’s difficult to discern which hunter tackled the vulnerable ones. The Feast of the Wolf is frustratingly inconclusive in its research.
The conspiracies grow more outrageous during the work, with one man going as far to say the arrival of the wolves has led to the hottest weather in some time. “You have to adapt, but nowadays is different”, the person grumbles at the camera. Everyone seems to be pointing fingers at the world, and the lack of cohesive argument gets tiresome after sometime. The movie lacks contradiction and counter-point. Some of it is the fault of the filmmakers, as the edits jump from one scene to another, with nothing to connect the two. A luminous dark night jumps to an old man eating cereal in a bowl. Whatever tension set up by the dark night has dissipated in the following moment. There are audio problems too, the presence of wind bashing endlessly against the microphone and camera.
The early scenes are beautifully put together, but the cinematography gets flat as the movie proceeds. There are some chuckles to be found, not least when the man complaining about the excessive heat whinges : “even the goats aren’t the same as they used to be!”. But for all the arm throwing and curses, it’s hard to sympathise with these villagers when the information stems from virtually nothing but innuendo. Most of the film coasts on the central interviewees. It won’t change anyone’s opinion of the European Union, but it may caution them to the dangers of wolves in the 21st century environment.
The Feast of the Wolf just premiered in the Doc@PÖFF International Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
