Bad Company

Why we decided to watch Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) is a bit of a long story.  When we lived in Tokyo in the late 80s, there was a store in Shibuya that sold nothing by simple cotton clothes in one shade of orange - mostly T-shirts. I think later they switches to T-shirts in a rainbow of solid colors, but just solid colors. They also played only one album in the shop, which we somehow figured out was Danielle Dax. She was a kind of a gothy operatic new-wave diva, somewhere between Diamanda Galas and Souixsie Souix. We even went to her show when she came to Japan.

Just recently, I happened on the tidbit that she played a werewolf in a Neil Jordan movie. We'd never heard of it, but we queued it up.

The movie starts with a family coming home to their big house to find that the youngest daughter (Sarah Patterson) is locked in her room asleep. We see her reading trashy magazines and drifting off to dream land. She dreams of a medieval village where her sister is killed by wolves. She spends a lot of time her old granny, Angela Lansbury. In this dream, granny tells her the story of a woman who marries a werewolf, played by Jordan regular Stephan Rae. All the while, granny is knitting Patterson a hooded red cloak.

The movie winds through several dreams and stories within dreams, mostly based in the fairytale village. There are wolves (both real and played by German Shepherds with dye jobs), huntsmen, frogs, local boys and beautiful noblemen. When Dax shows up, she has no dialog - she is a wolfwoman protected by a local clergyman, who meets a horrible fate. It all ends with her waking up, and a wolf smashing through her bedroom window - or was it the family shepherd?

The story was written by Angela Carter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jordan. She writes surrealistic, erotic fairytales, and this is sure one of them. It has layers of story, symbols all over, and some feminism. Patterson, for instance, swears she would never let a man hit her, and thinks it's silly that girls need saving. It is perhaps unfortunate that the budget is so low, but the blatant soundstages may help the dreamy atmosphere.

As far as the transformation effects, they are a little silly, but definitely go for it. You could compare them to American Werewolf in London, I think. Generally, a face splits open and the skinned wolf head pops out. In one scene, this looked suspiciously like the tip of a penis sliding out of a foreskin - but maybe that's just me.