Main cast: Martina Gedeck (The Woman)
Director: Julian Pölsler
The novel Die wand by Marlen Haushofer is one of the pride and joy of Austria, or so I’m told.
Okay, I’m kidding; I’m not that much a philistine as I’m aware of the novel. I couldn’t read it, though, due to the language barrier, but I’ve heard it is one of those dystopian stories that are so deep, really deep—exactly the kind of foreign language stories that one pretends to have read and know all about to sound smart on social media and in parties.
It’s inevitable that someone would make a movie out of this. Well, director and screenwriter Julian Pölsler has retained the key premise, but he has left out most of the more obvious and didactic political and socioeconomic messages in the novel. The result is still a haunting, beautiful movie.
The premise is like this: a woman, whose name is never revealed to the audience, joins her friends and these friends’ dog Lynx for a holiday in a large hunting lodge at the Alps. Her friends leave for a pub, leaving her and the dog.
Well, she wakes up the next day to realize that her friends never came back. When she decides to leave to look for them, she discovers a bizarre anomaly: after a certain point, there is an invisible wall that she can’t past. This is different from the novel, which offers an explanation for the wall; here, it’s just there.
She discovers a neighboring hunting lodge, but the couple that live in the lodge are in some kind of mid-action stasis. It is as if she was in some kind of enclosure, with the outside world having been frozen in time.
This movie chronicles about two years of her life in this enclosure. She writes out her thoughts on papers and, later, the backs of calendars and any other surface she can write on, just to keep herself sane. Fortunately, she has plenty of wood for the time being, potatoes that she can plant for food, and a gun to hunt. She can survive this… can she?
Her writings because the voice-over narration of this movie, thus providing the audience a glimpse into her thoughts as she struggles to do nature-ly things to survive as well as to endure the painful loneliness of solitude.
Die wand is one big metaphor of a movie, although this one removes the more divisive and possibly disquieting elements of the story for something akin to a survival drama in one of the most scenic locations ever. It’s a compelling drama, made even more watchable thanks to that adorable dog and a few other animals that end up keeping the woman company.
Sure, the whole thing is pretty obviously a long allegory about we humans have lost our connection to nature, and reforging that connection could be an often awkward, clumsy, but possibly worthwhile effort. However, we’d have to make a decision on which of the aspects of urban life that we are willing to let go in order to be one with nature again. It’s pretty telling that this movie demonstrates that the sole most destructive element to the protagonist’s gradual acclimatization to her new life is man’s destructive attitude toward life.
Unlike the novel, this one ends on a less bleak, but still bittersweet note. The protagonist will shoulder on, possibly never finding a way back to her old life, but we will never know what happens to her ultimately… because we are held back by our own urban comforts, unwilling to experience the protagonist’s experiences to find out ourselves.
This is a well-paced, very engaging movie that easily gets under my skin and makes me root for and feel my heart break for the protagonist as she tries hard to make the best of her situation. It also makes me think about how I will fare in her situation, and then I find myself reflecting on how I do like the feel of sunshine on my skin and the feeling of grass under my soles, but yeah, I’m still not cut out for all that back to nature stuff.
Still, I can appreciate this riveting drama for what it is, and it lingers in my mind far longer than I expected it to, once I’m done with it. It’s been a while since a movie does that to me, so here are four well-deserved oogies for the experience.
