The daze after tomorrow Looking for clarity in Michael Haneke’s Wolf BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Le temps du loup/The Time of the Wolf Directed and written by Michael Haneke. With Isabelle Huppert, Anaïs Demoustier, Lucas Biscombe, Hakim Taleb, Maurice Benichou, Béatrice Dalle, and Patrice Chéreau. In French with English subtitles. A Palm Pictures release (114 minutes). Through July 8 at the Brattle.

Michael Haneke’s film is a war between two looks: one that sees nothing and says nothing and one that seeks to make meaning out of disorder. The first look is that of Anne (Isabelle Huppert) at her young son, Ben (Lucas Biscombe), as the latter huddles over the little grave he’s building for his parakeet, a fresh victim of the unnamed calamity that has turned rural France — and, one presumes, everyplace else — into a land of lawlessness, disease, and scarcity. Averting her gaze, Anne goes to the door of the barn where she and her two children have taken shelter and looks outside. It’s right after this moment that Ben goes missing, as if his disappearance were a response to his mother’s inability to see him. The second look is that of Eva (Anaïs Demoustier), Anne’s daughter, at a runaway youth (Hakim Taleb) who has taken to thieving and scavenging in order to survive. Eva’s circumspection and compassion will make it possible for the boy to renew a contact with humanity that he has lost.

Haneke’s refusal to give details about the catastrophe that has occurred, or many hints about what national, political, and social structures are in place, if any, has a few obvious advantages. These are clearest in the opening scenes. The family arrive at their country house as if for a normal vacation; the first signs that anything unusual has happened in the outside world appear only after Anne’s husband has been shot dead by a squatter and she and her children have ventured into town in a vain search for help. The logic of the images says that the father’s death has triggered the general collapse (instead of, as is objectively the case, being the consequence of it). This way of dramatizing the situation tightens our identification with Eva and Ben, whose perceptions and responses will shape our response to the narrative.

The vagueness of the post-apocalyptic background becomes a liability when Anne, Eva, and Ben reach a railroad station where numerous refugees have come in hope of rescue. The featureless waiting room, the disparate types thrown together, the uncertainty over whether a train will ever come and whether its arrival will do any good — all these are so many allegorical temptations signifying that Haneke is in danger of giving in to a stagy, conventional imagination of disaster. The interplay among the refugees sometimes comes off as schematic: a low point is reached with the scenes devoted to the very Bergmanesque sado-masochistic couple played by Béatrice Dalle and Patrice Chéreau (the latter best known as a director of film and opera).

That Le temps du loup retains its power to disturb after the action has settled in and around the train station is perhaps a testimony to Haneke’s interest in exploring disaster not as an artistic end in itself but as a metaphor for betrayal. Anne’s failure to meet her children’s emotional and spiritual needs isn’t just a symptom of social collapse — it is the collapse. (The movie Le temps du loup most resembles is Bergman’s Shame, in which global disaster is ambiguously linked to a bickering couple; it also has a more remote affinity with Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.) Haneke likes to harrow the audience by unleashing horror on the soundtrack while keeping the image bland. In one shot, a grieving mother howls and cries while the camera stays on a group of legs disappearing around an improvised funeral. Haneke has the construction of such reticent, disagreeable tableaux down to a science.

Filmed in Cinemascope, Le temps du loup is probably Haneke’s best visual achievement to date and a considerable advance over the stifling, undistinguished elegance of his two previous films, Code inconnu/Code Unknown and La pianiste/The Piano Teacher. In Le temps du loup, the wide screen allows him to make piercing visual statements that are both concise and expressive: Anne is a blur in the left background as she tells her daughter not to forget that she loves her. And the crepuscular light that becomes the film’s signature is truly remarkable: a blue-black half-light in which faces get revealed only when you concentrate on them. Such light is perfect for a film whose main theme is the struggle for clarity.