The Wall

The best word to describe this film is "pretentious". That means that it is giving itself airs, claiming to say something important that we lesser mortals have not yet appreciated, and, in so doing, boring us to bits. (POSSIBILITY OF SPOILERS) I understood the film in the following way: the invisible wall is just a way of telling us that the woman had made the decision to cut herself off from the rest of humankind so that whenever she seemed to be wanting to approach someone her inner fear sprang up to restrain her. She has chosen to live alone, having marked out a large swathe of beautiful barely inhabited highland country wherein to live and have her being. She doesn't want to die. Even though she is intensely depressive, and very boring to watch and listen to her low-pitched whine, she gets to know the local animals and is pretty good at keeping herself alive. She bonds with a dog. She apparently has some isolationist experiences which may be valuable for her mental state, though they sound weird or trite to the ordinary viewer. But everything she offers is manna from heaven for art-house patrons and the superior sort of film critic, who would probably quite enjoy watching paint dry. This is similar to that, but it is better in that the countryside and the photography are lovely and worse than that in that there is the additional element of the miserably depressed woman. The couple who bring her to her cottage play ghastly pop music very loudly in their car, presumably a ham-fisted way of telling us, perhaps through her perception, how boorish they (or all other humans) are. Whether we see it as catharsis or denouement or, as I do, merely as confirmation of her hatred of mankind, we see in the final moments of the film that the one human who somehow manages to penetrate the wall is cruel and vicious and the woman, whose hatred of mankind may be seen as being responsible for creating this figure in her world, expresses that hatred and takes her revenge by being extremely nasty to him. End of story. Yawn yawn.

THE WALL is an interesting--though people who want a really tangible storyline and/or fast action and suspense might choose the word "boring"--little film. How to describe it? Quiet, somber, original, going deep without trying too hard. Fantastic in the most literal sense. Well-acted and well-filmed: The Austrian Alpine scenery, perhaps the single best thing about THE WALL, is just spectacular. Still, there are a number of plot-holes and incomplete threads, things that don't add up and are not apparently supposed to--"Kafkaesque" is another word that kept running through my mind as I watched. Though it's nothing great, I'm happy to have seen THE WALL and, most of all, am eager to read the original novel by Marlen Haushofer, which, even if it doesn't make completely logical sense, based on the reviews, apparently has more sense of completion.

This is the synopsis from Netflix: "Vacationing with a couple in their mountain retreat, a woman finds herself alone at the cabin one afternoon, inexplicably trapped by an invisible wall. Her isolation behind the barrier grows more surreal as hours, then days, then weeks pass." Sounds like a cool premise, right? I mean, how is she going to get out? I mean, she's going to spend most of the movie figuring out the nature of this wall and then trying to escape it, right? When she first encounters the wall, she's on a path. Next to the path is a river, where water is clearly flowing through the wall – wouldn't you, I don't know, try to swim in the water to see if you could get under the wall? Throw rocks at it to try to see how high it goes (it does seem like birds are able to cross in and out of the wall and rain, snow and wind still exist, so it's not like a dome). If you happen to see someone two years after this journey, wouldn't you maybe try to talk to him to see where he came from (even if he just killed your dog) instead of just murdering him? You and I probably would because we are not vehicles for philosophy. "The woman," however, exists solely as a vehicle for philosophy, so nothing she does makes any sense. She's too busy contemplating her aloneness than to try to do anything about it. So we, the viewers of this beautifully shot movie (it really is gorgeous!), must suffer through her loneliness with her rather than see her try to do ANYTHING about it. She never digs a hole on the border of the wall to see how deep it goes. Instead she spends 10 days waiting to be rescued and then just accepts her fate. And that happens about 10-15 minutes into the movie, so get ready to philosophize!

This movie is so deep that it will make you ponder on how we live today, in the big cities, disconnected from nature and our real nature. Here are some ideas from the movie: 1. We only stay with ourselves and look inside when life forces us to do so. 2. Being alone is not loneliness. Loneliness is a state of mind. Being alone is taking time to know yourself and to find company in everything around. 3. Nature is the greatest teacher and healer. 4. Everything we need we can provide for ourselves. 5. Inside everyone of us there's a strong being. 6. Animals are a faithful and loving company. 7. A quiet mind is the first step to ourselves. http://lotuspocusfocus.com/2014/02/movie-recommendation-the-wall/