The Wall

The Wall is a remarkable movie coming out of Germany. The premise of the story is intriguing and a bit uncomfortable to contemplate, but...the transformation of the woman who has to deal with this unexplainable event is depthful and moving. One must listen closely to her narrative as she journals her experience because it contains gems of wisdom. This is not a sit on the couch and eat popcorn movie, but if you want to be moved and changed in some way, this is a masterful movie. Forget it if you classify yourself as ADHD...

With an interesting premise, and beautiful scenery, I was sucked in. A tail of self discovery for a woman isolated in the wilderness, a mysterious invisible wall (The Dome anyone?), I figured "why not?" I knew that a narrated style movie such as this would be a little art-housey but this one was too far. I'd warn that there are spoilers ahead in this review, but seeing as the film is pre-spoiled I shall not bother. To sum things up so you don't have to waste your time, the entire movie is narrated by this woman who is writing down her experiences of the last few years of being trapped by a large invisible barrier inside an Austrian country side. She can see a few neighbors mysteriously frozen in place, though other elements of the environment, such as flowing water, seem to continue outside of her bubble. She fends for herself taking care of livestock and farming inside her prison and writing very flowery and often poetic phrases about her lonely existence and how calm she is beginning to feel. This goes on for a few years, a time much shorter than watching the movie felt, until a mysterious man miraculously shows up one summer day to hack her young bull to death and kill her dog, the only friend she has. Then she runs out of paper and concludes her tail. The End. The actress, without having many lines, was quite good I thought. Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. The scenery was also spectacular, and that's all I can say positively about it. My first real complaint is that it seems she is going on a personal journey with her isolation and introspection. Unfortunately, we the audience, cannot go on it with her has we have no idea who she was before. Was she like Tom Hank's Cast Away character and too busy and hectic to realize the life he was leading? Was she a narcissist? A bad person? Hated animals? Getting over a lost love? We just don't know. All we know is that she came up to a secluded hunting loge with a couple, even though she hated hunting, and didn't want to go into town with them right after they arrived. We know nothing about her, her relationships, her reasons, or her purpose. This made a lot of the dramatic introspection she was narrating pointless. I guess we also know that she somehow had enough basic farming knowledge to survive even though she clearly stated she was weak and unaccustomed to that type of work. I also found her lack of curiosity about the wall disturbing. I take that she couldn't go too far away from the cow, as it needed tending, but after the initial shock wore off she didn't seem to want to do things like dig under the wall, find out how big it was, or find out if others existed in it (fires, smoke signals, etc...). She just accepted it and her situation and moved on with her potato harvesting. To end the way it did felt like a cheap emotional ploy. Let's kill off her best friend, the dog, out of the blue by having a mysterious man show up. Who was this man? Where did he come from? Why was he there? Was he just insane or did he have a purpose? Unless he was totally off his rocker wouldn't his first impression upon coming across the logging and domesticated animals of someone else after 3 years be more "yea I'm not alone!!!" rather than "let me axe this cow and dog to death"? If he was insane then how did he last so long though the harsh winters? Wouldn't her reaction likewise be more to find out where he came from, where the wall ends, if others are there, etc... than just to shut herself off in her little house? Finally, the abrupt ending without any questions being answered left a bad taste in the mouth. Don't tell me about how you get to make up your own conclusions, as that's just lazy storytelling. We find out nothing about the wall, what her future is like, if the world survives, nothing. I finished the movie asking what was the point and why did I ever waste my time on this?

The movie can only be understood as a dream. Otherwise, there's no way to reconcile the science fiction like invisible wall with the rest of the story, which is extremely earthy. Of course you could imagine some way if you liked, but this idea, I think, leads to the correct interpretation of the story as a dream and then to the possible interpretations of the unseen story being told by the dream. All the characters (even the dead ones) represent something the main character has experienced in her normal life. She is basically coming to own her own life and she has to go through a process of transformation to do that. She's been hurt, badly, by events in the backstory. Here are some clues (without taking away all the fun): She's in a hunting lodge, not a farmhouse. The people in the farmhouse are dead. Her dog is a scent hound, he really hurts his nose by running into the wall, which is invisible (and odorless, apparently) and he essentially tries to lead her away from it. As the story progresses, she understands him more and more. His name is "Lynx". What is her dog like? Her cow's name is Bella; she's pretty high maintenance. There's also the cat and the crow (both white outcasts from nature) The cow gives birth to a bull, but even the bull dies eventually. Really, all the other characters are like her spirit guides. They appear, help her through some part of her "journey" and then disappear. The writer left her readers to imagine what might happen in the future. So what happened to her? What will happen?

Très beau film. On se sent bien pendant, après. Et toute cette nature. Cela nous ramène à la nature, à la base de tout. Je cherchais ce film sous titré en français comme il n'a pas l'air d'exister en audio français. J'ai trouvé cette édition en allemand sous sous-titré en français et en néerlandais. Je vous joins la pochette car les informations manquent sur Amazon. Cela nous oblige à attention aux références.

A fairy tale, fable or parable. An isolated hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps. The lodge is rustic but roomy, stocked with provisions and firewood, a cosy get-away from the stressful rigours of modern city living. One weekend three people drive to the lodge in a sporty red convertible. It’s a warm spring day. They drive in bright sunshine with the top down, the wind in their hair. They look happy, carefree. An upbeat pop song about freedom blares in English on the car stereo. The mood is positive. All three will enjoy the stay. But it doesn’t work out that way for reasons left unexplained by the film. The elderly couple who own the lodge (Hugo and Luise) decide to walk into the village shortly after arriving at the lodge. Their guest, a woman in her mid-40s, stays behind with Lynx, the couple’s cocker spaniel. Whatever the woman’s name is, we never learn it. The day passes, evening comes. The woman feels weary and goes to bed early. Morning arrives and she rises early. During the night she did not hear Hugo and Luise come home. She must have been lost deep in sleep. She knocks on the bedroom door of the couple. No response. Moving her head closer to the door she hears nothing stir. All is still. The door is unlatched. She opens it. No one there. Hugo and Luise never returned. So strange. The woman is worried. Hugo is old and somewhat frail. He might have had a heart attack. The lodge has no telephone — Hugo’s idea of reclusiveness. So the woman must walk into the village to find out what happened to the couple. She walks down a narrow sunny road that hugs the side of a mountain. Lynx goes with her. In fact, the dog is joyful and runs on ahead round a bend in the road. Suddenly she hears Lynx bark and whimper. He is shaking in the middle of the road. She tries to calm and console him but fails. Lynx is scared and runs back up the road to the lodge. The woman proceeds a few steps down the road to the village but doesn’t make it. Somehow during the night an invisible see-through wall has been erected around the area. How this has happened she cannot fathom and we don’t know either. For purposes of the story we’ll just have to accept the wall as a real thing. At any rate, she cannot burrow under or crawl over it. She is a prisoner now, an isolated creature under glass. Solitude is the human quality examined by the film, aloneness being the condition our individuality confers. As such, the film is an existential meditation on life. Alone with her thoughts, self, animals and nature, the woman must come to terms with what it means, if it means anything. What we learn of her comes through her voiceover thoughts in the film. We hear her think, and of course watch her behave. Her interaction with animals constitutes her social world. Lynx the dog becomes her closest companion and confidante. They communicate emotionally, each intuiting the needs and situations of the other. Lynx is joyful in temperament, happy in his surroundings. The woman finds she loves this about him, his joy seeping into her. His eyes shine, his tail wags. He runs to kiss and lick her. She embraces, pets and kisses him in return, no words needed, though she whispers kind words to him anyway. Bella is another creature the woman becomes close to. She is a cow who wandered up from the valley. She is heavy and slow moving because she is pregnant. Months later the woman will help Bella give birth to a son, a baby bull she will call Bullock. A stray cat also appears at the lodge, ringing wet from the rain. This happens months later in autumn. She too, this cat, is pregnant. Later in a cosy wardrobe she will give birth to a white female kitten whom the woman will name Pearl. There is one other white-coloured animal the woman becomes close to — an albino crow rejected by its black mates. Even in the animal world, it seems, conformity is standard. Outsiders are suspect, marginalised. The albino crow sits on a branch of a tree on its own, the others squawking gregariously in the canopy above. The woman sees this and pities the white crow. She gets into the habit of feeding it scraps when the other crows aren’t around. The white crow understands her pattern of behaviour and comes to depend on it. Thus a bond develops between the two, bird and human, two solitary beings reaching out to one another. It’s obvious the woman sees aspects of herself or condition in the albino crow. She wonders about the use of prolonging the life of a rejected bird. Is there another white crow in the forest with whom this one might mate? If not, what is the life, this life of the single crow that is destined to end where all things do in death? If there is purpose or meaning in the crow’s life, what might it be? Is it to live from day to day, to accumulate as many of these days as possible? Is it some sort of journey toward an imagined goal? Why live? She looks at the bird and wonders, as if looking in a mirror at herself. The seasons are distinct and there are four of them. This happens because the Earth is not upright. It tilts more than 23º on its axis as it twirls through space and circles the sun. The woman may know this because she is intelligent and probably educated, but we don’t hear her think it. We just see her react to the changing seasons, adjusting herself to them, participating in them. As time passes her thoughts seem to gradually subside, immersed as she is in activities. The animals must be cared for: Bella milked, Lynx and Pearl fed. The white crow too comes for morsels. In spring the woman gathers seeds, nuts, fruit. In summer she plants potatoes and cuts hay. In autumn she hunts for roe deer with a rifle from the hunting lodge. In winter she hunkers down, builds fires in the hearth, writes notes in a makeshift journal on the backs of old calendars, plays with the animals, thinks her thoughts, sleeps and eats, cleans the lodge. Life is now this simplicity, these chores and routines, this pattern of being. She is neither happy nor sad. She shifts between both, as we all do anyway in our lives. She learns to be calm, emptied of useless thoughts. It’s emotion that matters, the bedrock of being, she feels, not the realm of thinking where thoughts come and go like clouds drifting across an empty sky. She learns to trust this feeling of calmness, this quiet state of being, rather than the rambling thoughts that plunder and confuse her mind with insistent claims on her attention. After a time she even begins to forget about the wall — where it came from and what it might mean. If there are still people beyond the valley in mountain villages or elsewhere, they may or may not come to find her. She’s non-committal, accepting both possibilities, no longer forcing life to fit the schemes she has devised for it. Come what may, as the seasons do, defines the tenor of her life now. The past lives on in scraps of memory, but this day, this one right now, the one filled with sunshine, chirping birds and fresh air, is the one that counts. She knows it. The future? What use in plunging deeply into it? We can’t impose our will and desires on it. We must look at it as we look at anything else we can’t control — with our gambler’s luck and hope. At one point she thinks these thoughts aloud, thoughts that show the transformation she is going through, thoughts that could never have occurred to her before. The old bourgeois life is a chrysalis she has left behind, an artefact of the past. She thinks this: “Sometimes my thoughts become confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me and is thinking its eternal thoughts in my brain.” This admission comes during her third year alone. She then thinks: “Back then, in the second summer, I hadn’t reached that point. The demarcation lines were still rigidly drawn. I find it hard when writing to separate my old self from my new self, and I’m not sure my new self isn’t slowly being absorbed into some greater ‘we’.” Why the Cartesian duality in our brains, the false dichotomy we impose on the world? Why this fallacy we take to be true? Because our brains are hardwired to see patterns in the world, and among them the idea of opposites is the simplest, most common: night and day, Heaven and Earth, life and death. But these are just concepts, subjective and arbitrary, valuations the human mind places on the world. There is no night and day to the earth. It just rotates. It has no sense of opposites. Night and day are one, the illusion of difference made by the 12 hours we measure between them. One wintry day in the forest she is hunting for roe deer. A fox appears on a snowy bank near the river. We see the fox in the sights of her rifle. The rifles trembles. The dog Lynx whimpers nearby. He has come to learn what the sound of the gun denotes. He knows it signals blood and death. The woman knows it too, shaking at the sight of death so near the fox. No, she can’t do it. She can’t extinguish the life of such a beautiful creature. Then she thinks again and tells us why: “The only creature in the forest who can do right and wrong is me. I alone can show mercy. Sometimes I wish away the burden of decision-making. But I am human and can only think and act like a human. Only death will free me from this.” She is right. She is moral because only human beings can be, as morality is an invention of culture. She has an idea that something is right or wrong which no other creature has. Again, the realm of opposites, which culture needs to function. No law without order and vice versa. Having left the forest, the jungles of Africa which gave us life, this is now our condition, these things we’ve made called culture and civilisation. What then has meaning if all is a fabrication of culture, if nature is amoral, remorselessly indifferent? Maybe value is more important than meaning. Life is valuable because it exists. Something is more valuable than nothing. Whatever this might mean, maybe it’s for you to decide. But value is intrinsic. You needn’t decide. Just accept. The gift of life, this chance, is given. I once came across a sentence by the Irish writer Wm. Trevor that stopped me in my tracks. I never forgot it. He wrote: “Love is the only thing that matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.” Our woman in the forests of the Austrian Alps now realises this too. She thinks: “I pity animals and I pity people, as they’re cast into this life without being consulted. Maybe people are more pitiable, as they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one…I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path.” For the woman now there are no right paths. Or none that lead to a freedom other than this. Here is where she is and this the life she must live. Maybe this is what this brilliant film has wanted to say all along. If so, there are few finer ones to be seen.

Have seen it twice on Netflix and had to own it !! Acting is superb, scenery is simply beautiful and the magnitude of the story, how one woman alone, made the very, very best of the most unsettling event ever,to happen-well, like I said, I had to have it and will watch it once or twice a year and make that night a special wine & popcorn night !! I LOVE this magnificent presentation !!!

Die Frau, gespielt von einer fantastischen Martina Gedeck, hat eigentlich gar keinen Namen. Sie fährt mit einem befreundeten Ehepaar in die Berge auf eine Jagdhütte. Das Paar geht am Abend noch einmal kurz ins Dorf hinunter und die Frau bleibt mit dem Hund Luchs zurück. Als sie am nächsten Morgen aufwacht, sind ihre Freunde noch nicht zurück. Sie wundert sich und läuft ebenfalls los in Richtung Dorf. Doch plötzlich stößt sie an eine Wand. Durchsichtig wie aus Glas aber absolut fest. Mehrmals versucht sie dagegen an zu kommen, aber die Wand ist fest und stabil. Auch als sie versucht in einer anderen Richtung aus dem Tal heraus zu kommen, stösst sie auf die Wand. Nach und nach richtet sie sich ihr Leben danach aus, dass sie alleine ist. Sie findet eine Kuh, die bald darauf kalbt und eine Katze. So sind die Tiere ihre einzigen Begleiter und Gesprächspartner in der Einsamkeit. Sie richtet sich auf einen längeren Aufenthalt ein und planzt Kartoffeln, jagd und macht Heu für das Vieh. Jeder weitere Versuch aus dem Tal zu entkommen scheitert an der Wand. So lebt die Frau zwei Jahre in ihrer Abgeschiedenheit. Bis die Katastrophe passiert! Der Film besticht vor Allem durch das Spiel von Martina Gedeck. Ebenso beeindruckend sind die Landschaftsaufnahmen. Das trübe Wetter im Regen, der tiefe viele Schnee mit Kälte und Eis, die sonnigen Tage. Vor allem auf der Alm. Der Film ist teilweise sehr bedrückend und hier vor allem am Schluß. Doch ist es einer der sehenswertesten Film der letzten Zeit

Film stupendo. Inaspettato e intensissimo. Arrivato in ottime condizioni. É in tedesco