LES LOUPS 
Isabelle Prim
France / 2024 / 94'
Ciné+ Competition, French Compétition 2024

Mid-18th century at the court of Louis XV: “It’s eating!”, “It’s shitting!” While the Digesting Duck, Vaucanson’s automaton wonder, rings up the curtain of an era of Enlightenment and reason, the exhibition of the remains of the Beast of Gévaudan sounds the death knell of the centuries of darkness: “It was just a big wolf!” Yet women and children keep being devoured to death in the forests around Saint-Alban castle. Two centuries later, in Saint-Alban as elsewhere, the illusion of such a divide between darkness and light has faded. Spanish anarchist psychiatrist François Tosquelles opens the walls of the insane asylum, letting the patients out and the outside world in, which marks the invention of institutional psychotherapy. Slipping into the breach of this spatial coincidence, Isabelle Prim creates a wonderful device to merge centuries and inner worlds. As is the case every year in Saint-Alban, the asylum turns into a theatre: mad and less mad people prepare a show on the Beast of Gévaudan. Agnès draws the poster, Thérèse stays in bed, haunted by her brother, Bruno. This disturbing character, at once an artist-hermit and a magician-saint beloved by children, lives in the woods around the castle, an interworld where all boundaries are abolished: a realm of game, fantasy and faith. Always on the edge, this daring film meets many challenges, including getting actors to play madness. What Prim achieves with her amazing cast is astounding: they don’t embody madness but madnesses, both unique and collective, in a way that is not only credible, but true. The Wolves is theatre multiplied by the director’s brilliant editing: she summons up all the powers of the false to produce a truth beyond the divide between madness and reason. For the duration of this film, whose humor never strays from emotion, it is the very experience of Tosquelles’ Saint-Alban that is discovered and shared anew: that lifesaving invention of a human environment in which un-reason can unfold as an individual and anti-society form of genius. In this asylum, in this film, in the forests of Gévaudan, there isn’t “one big wolf”. There are plenty of wolves, big and small, with elusive bodies and unfathomable souls. Away from the performance, a man leaning against a wall reads in his notebook, in a low voice, this question: “Can it be that the madman uses his reason to turn his madness into an asylum?” The poly-folly of The Wolves answers with a resounding “Yes!”

Cyril Neyrat

Date: 26 March 2025 at 8:30pm
Place: La Baleine, Marseille
59 cours Julien 13006 Marseille