The swash­buck­ling thrills of Broth­er­hood of the Wolf

Christophe Gans’ Broth­er­hood of the Wolf (Le pacte des loups) is a fan­ta­sy adven­ture set in a his­to­ry with­in a his­to­ry. The fram­ing nar­ra­tive that book­ends its actions (and occa­sion­al­ly inter­rupts them with ele­giac com­men­tary) sees a grey­ing gen­tle­man (Jacques Per­rin) choos­ing to fin­ish pen­ning his mem­oirs in his cas­tle quar­ters rather than to seek escape from the mob out­side bay­ing for his blood.

It is the late Eigh­teenth Cen­tu­ry, and the French Rev­o­lu­tion is in full swing.

“This world had to change,” says Thomas d’Apcher in voiceover, wist­ful­ly recog­nis­ing that there is no place for an old noble like him­self in the approach­ing Repub­lic and resigned to his fate. Yet in his final hours, his mind is filled less with present dan­ger than with events from his youth, some three decades ear­li­er, which sim­i­lar­ly gave rise to pub­lic hys­te­ria and poten­tial sub­ver­sion of the then pre­vail­ing order.

Those events are drawn from real his­to­ry: between 1764 and 1767, the mys­te­ri­ous Beast of Gévau­dan – said to be wolf-like in appear­ance, but much larg­er and with an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic enthu­si­asm for homi­cide – was ter­ror­is­ing the rur­al province in south-cen­tral France, killing over 100 locals. The fail­ure of sev­er­al roy­al­ly sanc­tioned hunt­ing par­ties to kill this mon­strous cause célèbre made the Beast not just a threat to Gévaudan’s exposed peas­ant pop­u­la­tion, but to the sup­posed divine author­i­ty on which the King’s pow­er rest­ed. This was a true-life hor­ror sto­ry with res­o­nances in both mythol­o­gy and politics.

In treat­ing this his­to­ry, Gans engages in his own myth-mak­ing. For the prin­ci­pal inset nar­ra­tive begins with a scene of the unseen Beast vicious­ly attack­ing and killing a ter­ri­fied woman, and then of two roy­al emis­saries arriv­ing on horse­back in rainy Gévau­dan. These two fic­tive char­ac­ters – the King’s gar­den­er and nat­u­ral­ist Gré­goire de Fron­sac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his loy­al ​‘broth­er’ Mani (Mark Dacas­cos) – have been fash­ioned to look like cow­boys from a west­ern, and indeed Mani is, some­what improb­a­bly, an actu­al Iro­quois.

Yet as this pair cross­es paths with a group of sol­diers (dressed as women) ruth­less­ly club­bing the old peas­ant Jean Chasterl (Philippe Nahon) and his wild-eyed daugh­ter (Vir­ginie Dar­mon), Mani sin­gle-hand­ed­ly takes them all on in a fight that is less oater stand­off than mar­tial arts beat­down. So it is clear from the out­set that, in this his­tor­i­cal set­ting, genre is vey much up for grabs. Sure enough, soon Gans will be deft­ly inter­twin­ing the tropes of Ham­mer hor­ror, court intrigue, roman­tic melo­dra­ma, mur­der mys­tery, crea­ture fea­ture, action extrav­a­gan­za and revenger’s tragedy to put his own imprint in this by-road of French history.

Fron­sac and Mani are there as guests of the younger Thomas d’Apcher (Jérémie Renier) to inves­ti­gate the Beast’s attacks – the for­mer with the ratio­nal­is­ing eye of a nat­u­ral­ist, the lat­ter with the instinc­tive spir­it of a shaman­ic hunter. In the film’s first half, Fron­sac fails even to see the Beast – which, owing to the gram­mat­i­cal gen­der of the French word for ​‘beast’ (la bête), is always referred to in the fem­i­nine as ​‘she’ or ​‘her’.

He does, though, have his eye fixed on anoth­er woman, the vir­ginal noble­woman Mar­i­anne de Moran­gias (Émi­lie Dequenne), whom he pur­sues with equal fer­vour and as lit­tle suc­cess. A noto­ri­ous lib­er­tine, Fron­sac seeks solace for his failed court­ing in the more open arms of Sylvia (Mon­i­ca Bel­luc­ci), an Ital­ian cour­te­san at the local broth­el who seems to have a bet­ter idea of this community’s com­ings and goings than any­one else.

There is a sequence in Broth­er­hood of the Wolf where Fron­sac shows his fel­low din­ers a mirac­u­lous fur-cov­ered fish that he claims to have found in the Amer­i­c­as, before reveal­ing that is in fact a fake prod­uct of cre­ative taxi­dermy. ​“Drag­ons and uni­corns only appear in fables,” Fron­sac explains – and short­ly after­wards he will be reluc­tant­ly recruit­ed to dress up a wolf’s cadav­er to make it look more mon­strous, as pro­pa­gan­da – and a rewrit­ing of his­to­ry – for the King. In a sense this is what Gans is doing in this film, as he carves into history’s corpse and sex­es it up with his own lay­ers of sen­sa­tion­al­ist fiction.

The film’s first half, though focus­ing on a pair of invent­ed char­ac­ters, does lay out with some accu­ra­cy the his­tor­i­cal details of the elu­sive Beast’s coun­try­side rav­ages – but the sec­ond half, sly­ly intro­duced in Thomas d’Apcher’s nar­ra­tion with the words, ​“What real­ly hap­pened appears in no his­to­ry book – it was care­ful­ly hushed up”, traces Fron­sac and Mani’s sec­ond, pri­vate­ly ini­ti­at­ed vis­it to Gévau­dan, where both the Beast (now ful­ly seen), and fan­ta­sy itself, are unleashed and allowed to run riot, in what is pure movie make-believe.

Woven into this mytho­log­i­cal tapes­try is com­men­tary on the bes­tial­i­ty of France’s own his­to­ry. The nobil­i­ty that we saw fac­ing erad­i­ca­tion in the film’s frame sec­tion is shown in the ear­li­er nar­ra­tive sec­tions for all its overt racism, sex­ism and bla­tant dis­re­gard of peas­ant lives, while dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters here have been shaped by their expe­ri­ences of French colo­nial­ism abroad. Mani’s entire clan was wiped out by the tox­i­c­i­ty of colonists in North America’s New France, while the same cam­paigns left Fron­sac both lit­er­al­ly scarred, and also dis­il­lu­sioned with the mores of his own coun­try­men. Mean­while Marianne’s broth­er Jean-François (Vin­cent Cas­sel), an expe­ri­enced hunter, has been crip­pled by an encounter with a lion in the African colonies.

Broth­er­hood of the Wolf may pit man against beast while break­ing down the dif­fer­ences between them, but there are oth­er polar­i­ties that it also con­founds and sub­verts – civil­i­sa­tion vs sav­agery, male vs female, the­ol­o­gy vs sec­u­lar­ism, truth vs fic­tion, old vs new – to cast a spot­light on France’s dark­est mythos. Deliv­er­ing all at once vis­cer­al mon­ster may­hem and bonkers polit­i­cal con­spir­a­cy, Gans thrills the view­er from start to fin­ish, while prov­ing the words of the Ver­sailles courtier and pro­pa­gan­dist Merci­er (Bernard Fres­son): ​“Truth is a com­pli­cat­ed thing.” For amid all this film’s flights of fan­cy, we get an alle­gor­i­cal pic­ture of a nation ever in flux and ever frozen, where rev­o­lu­tion is the only vehi­cle of change, yet always seems to bring out the beast.

Broth­er­hood of the Wolf is released in a new 4K UHD restora­tion of the Director’s Cut, as well as on Blu-ray, DVD and dig­i­tal from 15 May, 2023 via StudioCanal.