I watched now "The Warrior and the Wolf" two times and it worked rather well for me as an art film.
For me the film is structured in three parts: 1) war 2) warrior and woman 3) folk tale about humans shape-changed into wolves.
The time-structure of the first part "war" is not easy to follow at first viewing, but on the other hand not as hard as I feared from the reviews. The first part reminds me very much of the first part in Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)", where a scholar from central China is shaped into a warrior by a general in the western out-reaches of the Chinese empire soon to be overrun by tribal people. This part has the same feeling of following a whirling leaf in a storm.
The second part "warrior and woman" is still reminding me of the scholar's story in "Tun-huang", because the scholar-warrior finds a princess, hides her in a store-house, and finally forces intercourse, after which she considers herself his wife. I like the second part best, because it shows the strongest acting as the actors portray very conflicting emotions. Odagiri has convinced me now in three different eccentric roles: mad samurai, uninformed prince, peace-loving warrior. Some reviewers wrote about repeated rape and Stockholm syndrome. My impressions were more that here animalistic behaviour overruled humanist behaviour. The woman is very conflicted. Maggie Q. is somewhat less convincing than Jo Odagiri, but her character is the more difficult to portray. She is partly a wolf and partly human and thus her humanity leads her to moral behaviour while her wolf nature leads her to quite different expressions by which she lures the warrior to the wolf side.
The third part, the folk tale, is for me the weakest. Not in the sense of the director's vision but in the sense of handicraft. It uses cgi and trained animals, but nevertheless it's simply a bit less convincing because those "tricks" are still discernible and thus a bit irritating to me. I can infer what the director wanted to tell, and that works quite well for me, but since I feel irritated by the artefacts of make-belief I perceive the last part as the least perfect.
Overall for me the film has very good pictures, good direction, and great acting. I have not read the original short story, but by comparing Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)" and short-story "The Hunting Gun (1949)" with the film I think that the director captured Yasushi's style quite well.
In my view the film might be quite attractive for people who like modern poetry, in the sense of feeling comfortable with visualisations based on mental associations and produced by a disjunctive structure. The film "The Warrior and the Wolf (2009)" reminded me in style and nihilistic atmosphere of the films "Valhalla Rising (2009)" and "Dust (2001)", but worked decidedly better for me than these two.
For me the film is structured in three parts: 1) war 2) warrior and woman 3) folk tale about humans shape-changed into wolves.
The time-structure of the first part "war" is not easy to follow at first viewing, but on the other hand not as hard as I feared from the reviews. The first part reminds me very much of the first part in Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)", where a scholar from central China is shaped into a warrior by a general in the western out-reaches of the Chinese empire soon to be overrun by tribal people. This part has the same feeling of following a whirling leaf in a storm.
The second part "warrior and woman" is still reminding me of the scholar's story in "Tun-huang", because the scholar-warrior finds a princess, hides her in a store-house, and finally forces intercourse, after which she considers herself his wife. I like the second part best, because it shows the strongest acting as the actors portray very conflicting emotions. Odagiri has convinced me now in three different eccentric roles: mad samurai, uninformed prince, peace-loving warrior. Some reviewers wrote about repeated rape and Stockholm syndrome. My impressions were more that here animalistic behaviour overruled humanist behaviour. The woman is very conflicted. Maggie Q. is somewhat less convincing than Jo Odagiri, but her character is the more difficult to portray. She is partly a wolf and partly human and thus her humanity leads her to moral behaviour while her wolf nature leads her to quite different expressions by which she lures the warrior to the wolf side.
The third part, the folk tale, is for me the weakest. Not in the sense of the director's vision but in the sense of handicraft. It uses cgi and trained animals, but nevertheless it's simply a bit less convincing because those "tricks" are still discernible and thus a bit irritating to me. I can infer what the director wanted to tell, and that works quite well for me, but since I feel irritated by the artefacts of make-belief I perceive the last part as the least perfect.
Overall for me the film has very good pictures, good direction, and great acting. I have not read the original short story, but by comparing Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)" and short-story "The Hunting Gun (1949)" with the film I think that the director captured Yasushi's style quite well.
In my view the film might be quite attractive for people who like modern poetry, in the sense of feeling comfortable with visualisations based on mental associations and produced by a disjunctive structure. The film "The Warrior and the Wolf (2009)" reminded me in style and nihilistic atmosphere of the films "Valhalla Rising (2009)" and "Dust (2001)", but worked decidedly better for me than these two.