Another New Release review (not that new)

Vaguely New Release Glib Review of 

The Wall
- Directed by Julian Pölsler

“Die Wand” is the title in German of this stark existential film. For that reason (it's existential nature) alone, I recommend watching it in German with subtitles, though on the dvd, the default is an English version. The German 'sounds right' when the main character is thinking all her deep thoughts. 

It has the barest of plots, a Woman finds herself cut off from the world, inexplicably. This is the script choice that makes the film work, that there is no time spent explaining ‘why’ this has happened. 

It is so beyond the character’s understanding, that she doesn’t spend much time at all thinking about it. She worries more a bout surviving, and helping the animals she comes to care for, a dog named ‘Lynx’ and a cat, and a cow. The entire picture is her recalling and putting down her story on paper. When she runs out of paper, the story is finished. Cut off from civilization, she has no choice but to live within, and commune with nature. 

Much of the movie is as naturalistically pastoral as a later Knut Hamsun novel. It’s a deep novelistic movie in that sense, basically narrated, and the imagery is at once both expositive and metaphorical. She sows wheat, she milks, births a cow. 

The woman herself is unnamed. We don’t know her name. But we know that she is extremely capable, even in the face of her despair and doubts at being able to survive alone. She has a family of sorts with the dog, and other animals, she is able to hunt, despite her aversion to doing so. I would wish to be half as capable as this strong anonymous woman is given her almost untenable situation. 

This film would make a great double bill with Michael Haneke’s “Time of The Wolf,” in neither film do we get a 'why' of what has driven humanity into survival mode, and while Time of the Wolf is about staying alive among others, The Wall is about that same survival, alone in the beauty and terror of nature.



9.0453 white crows that bode as well as they bode ill out of 10

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