“Qui m’a deshabille?” 

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      La Jeune Fille Et Les Loups opens with a pack of wolves visciously tearing apart a deer carcass.  Within moments, a pack of human beings appear to massacre the wolves in an even more viscious scene.  As the wolves are taken away, the lone surviving member of the pack, a tiny and dreadfully cute black cub, wanders into the town looking for its family, and meets up with Angele, a tiny and impossibly cute little girl.  I think the scene where the cub sees the rest of the slaughtered pack hanging in Angele’s father’s house (he is the taxidermist) is supposed to be heartbreaking, but it’s too early in the film, and everyone is so cute that it’s just kind of sappy.

     Angele decides to release the wolf cub back into the wild, since she figures it’s his only chance of survival.  The young wolf is almost immediately attacked by an eagle – life in the wild is dangerous for a solitary wolf cub, you see.  Then some years go by, Angele’s parents die (it’s wartime, no big deal), and Angele grows up to be ridiculously hot.  Laetitia Casta hot.  So gorgeous, in fact, that she must be played by Laetita Casta.  She is now studying to be a veterinarian, but she’s not a terribly impressive intellect – one of the first scenes in which we see her, she is being convinced to pose nude in some kind of “patriotic” photo by some apparently unscrupulous horndogs.  This works for me, because I too am an unscrupulous horndog, but I’m not sure it works for the movie.

     Oh, I should mention – La Jeune Fille Et Les Loups is out June 30th from Alliance Films, and the DVD is entirely in French.  No English subtitles or dubbing available.  This isn’t always a problem, because a lot of the scenes with the wolves, and a few of the scenes with the nipples, need no dialogue for explanation.  But if you want to enjoy the film thoroughly, it would be best to esnure that you are a Francophone.

     Anyway, back to the movie.  The first day of veterinarian school involves the milking of a horse for his semen and a big old horse penis flying around.  Angele is ridiculed for wanted to become a chick veterinarian, and run out of the classroom, but she shows she has the fire of a young girl who doesn’t care what everyone thinks, and she has a mind of her own, and she won’t let this man’s world intimidate her, and all those other character traits that a young woman needs to exhibit in a lazy movie starring a totally hot chick like Laetitia Casta.  You see, she must be more than just a spectacular face.  She must also be feisty, and driven, and determined, and stubborn.  And so forth.

     She soon decides she needs experience with wild animals if she is going to become a real veterinarian, and accepts a ride into the mountains that surround her home town.  I guess her idea is that she will just hop out of the plane and ask the bears what’s wrong and check for their heartbeats or something.  But of course, the plane crashes.  Every plane flown by a guy with a circus-ringmaster moustache, in every movie involving a plane flown by a man with a circus-ringmaster moustache, will always crash.  It’s a law.  Angele is hurt, and the ringmaster goes for help.  But while he goes for help, the wolves close in…but one of them recognizes her…

     I like the idea in movies like this, that the one wolf in the pack can prevent the other forty wolves from attacking and eating the obviously wounded and clearly delicious fresh meat with which they have all just been blessed.  Like he can just growl and stare at them, and they will back down.  OK, leader of the pack.  We will not eat this gorgeous, defenseless and obviously tasty hot woman.  We will wait until we see a giant caribou, stalk it for hours, expend a ton of energy chasing it en masse, absorb kicks to the face and blows from horns, and make an attempt at taking it down that may not work in the end, instead.  I guess you know this woman.  And we wolves understand the bond that you formed with her as a pup – we’ll be cool.

    From there, the movie actually begins.  An hour has gone by, and a ton of stuff has happened, but the real movie actually starts at about the 57 minute mark.  Now Angele is rescued by the wolves and their protector, a mentally handicapped man named Giuseppe who lives up in the mountains thanks to the benevolence of an elderly local millionnaire.  His existence there is being threatened because the old man is growing incoherent and his son is taking over the business, planning to run a railroad through the mountains.  For some reason, this means that he will kill all the wolves and run this nice young man off his land.  I’m not sure what one has to do with the other.  I guess he doesn’t want the wolves looking pretty next to his train tracks.

     Now Angele is involved in this battle, and she fights to help Giuseppe save the wolves and his home.  Because she is hot, she is able to convince the bad guy to let her do a few things, and the suggestion is made that she is willing to sleep with him to make those things happen.  Of course, she doesn’t, because that would have made this a movie with guts to show questionable behaviour.  There is a scene where she is about to give herself to the mentally handicapped Giuseppe, but an attack by the bad guys stops them before they can get naked, which saves the movie from doing something interesting.  And in the end, it’s just an hour of pointless plot followed by an hour of after school special, kids-save-the-community-centre stuff.

     La Jeune Fille Et Les Loups is better than an after-school special, but it isn’t good.  Casta is a good actress, but her talents are wasted here because the film doesn’t let her go all the way in any situation that would make things interesting.  The real stars of the movie are the wolves themselves, and they are beautiful and compelling, but they are kind of incidental to the plot.  In fact, the whole plot feels incidental.  As does the whole movie.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under 2008, Drama, Foreign, French. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.