Fuoco Maria Balduzzi | Wolves / 2016

the boy in the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fuoco Maria Balduzzi and Joachim Neef (screenplay), Fuoco Maria Balduzzi (director) Wolves / 2016 [20 minutes]

 

London Film School student Fuoco Maria Balduzzi’s 2016 film Wolves feels more like a cinematic fairytale than a contemporary story of loneliness and isolation, the context in which it is primarily set.   

      It begins with the central event of the work, a sixteen-year-old boy Josh (Roly Botha), sitting alone in the cold forest, sketching something in his book when he suddenly notices a vague image, and checking it out discovers a nearly naked boy crouching near the forest floor. He slowly approaches the terrorized boy, Blaine (Jay Walker) who seems unable to speak and ready to speed off at the slightest of provocations. Slowly he peels off his overcoat and scarf and presumably gives them up to the boy before himself running off back to his house in the English countryside.

     His father, Robert (Gareth Davies), unpacking groceries in the kitchen, queries him about his missing jacket, but Josh doesn’t answer, sloughing off even helping put the groceries away by his claim of having homework to finish.

      The next morning early Josh again returns to the forest, this time discovering a small shrine lined with an offering of ferns, flower petals, and other objects, where Josh lays out the gifts he’s brought in backpack: shirts, pants, tennis shoes, presents to the wild child.

      As he sits writing or sketching for a while, he observes Blaine again appear, this time with a handful of ferns which he ritualistically places on the ground as moves step by step, following the ferns he lays out before him, as if he cannot walk the sacred ground with protecting it from his footsteps with a leaf.

     He moves directly up the Josh, handing him a pinecone, turns and walks away, once more moving step by step upon the ferns, Josh following after.

     The movie interrupts Josh’s forest adventures to show him in his room, his father knocking on the door to nicely ask him to join them downstairs to watch the soccer game on TV, an invitation to which Josh simply says, “No, I don’t like football,” quickly shutting out his caring father. Both

stand at the door for a moment after, clearly frustrated with their lack of communication.

     Back in the forest, the boys further participate in strange ritualistic games, Blaine pointing with a large, many-branched stick, touching his new friend’s shoulder with it as if appointing him to some role in life with Josh picking up the far end and pointing it the sky. When he brings it back down again, Blaine reaches out his fingers along the branch, Josh meeting him with a touch and then a joining of the hands that appears to seal a bond between them that is quickly restated in a gesture of love as John brings his hand up to cup the strange boy’s cheek. It is as if both of them have miraculously found what they were seeking without knowing that they were even seeking anything.

     In his room again, Josh looks out the window to witness his father talking to his other male friends, expressing his intense disconcertion about his ability to communicate with is son. Josh looks on without seemingly being able to offer any truce between the two. As we know he has entered his own fantasy-like world with the strange boy wandering the woods. And in a brilliant intercut, Balduzzi shifts back to the boys in the forest with Blaine now carefully caressing Josh’s face, this time however with a gloved hand, as Josh returns the caress. In short, the expressions of their love have continued, with a quick glimpse of Josh raiding the home kitchen for provisions which he might share with Blaine.

      In the forest the boys have now constructed a kind of tent-like structure made up of branches, towels, and bedsheets, decorated, like a Christmas tree, with pinecones. We see them wandering the woods looking for other materials but when they enter a clearing, Blaine refuses to follow, despite Josh’s assurances. Back at the tent, Josh is attempting to light a Bunsen burner when suddenly, in the distance, they hear the call of “Blaine!” Josh again tries to tell his friend to ignore it, but when the call is heard again, the boy speeds off with Josh running after him. They finally meet up on a road running through the trees, Blaine in tears, Josh hugging him closely in an attempt to calm and soothe is terror. Josh assures him that he’s safe with him.

      But we know that even in fairytales children are not always safe. And as Stephen Sondheim has shown us, the real world too often intrudes. When Josh returns home late at night, his father is waiting in his room. They share the anger between the two that has long been brewing, the father’s total frustration for his son’s refusal to explain what’s happening in his life, and the boy’s evident resentment of his father for his mother having left. The father demands the boy be quarantined to his room at the very moment when the boy feels his new love needs him the most.

      We see the inevitable as Josh quickly packs his bag and escapes the house, returning in the deep of night to their forest hideout. When Josh meets up with Blaine, it is now his turn to cry, the other comforting him. The two boys finally share their love cuddled up in the makeshift tent. But it is a momentary joy they share, the next morning spooning out peanut butter with their fingers and holding branches upon their heads like deer antlers as they wander through the woods. But as they lay out in the afternoon sun, Josh’s father discovers his son is not in his room. And as another night approaches, the call goes out to the community to find the boy.

      Meanwhile, Josh wakes up with the need to pee and rises. While he is out, a man suddenly springs upon the sleeping Blaine, pulling him brutally up to take him off, as he shouts out, “Did you think you could hide from me. Did you think you can get away?” Josh tries to fend him off and finally hits him over the head with an object that sends him crashing to the forest floor.

      As the men back at his house gather to strategize about finding Josh, he enters.

      In the next scene he and Blaine are the backseat of a car, and Blaine is asked to go with “the people who have come to take him away.”

    Unfortunately, the film ends far too abruptly, and we can only imagine what has happened: that Blaine has been kept by a violent man, perhaps his father or perhaps not, but clearly his abuser. The way the boy behaves it is clear he has kept him isolated, perhaps not even allowed to learn the skills of language. The boy, moreover, seems to be of Lapp or of an indigenous Eskimo origin. At one point as Josh returns home, one of the men throws out the name Harkstead, one imagines the name of the man who Josh has killed, perhaps a Norwegian who has brought the boy to England which could explain a Lap connection and would offer a reason why the boy speaks no English, Sámi being his native language.

     Presumably, the people who have come take Blaine away are the county authorities who will attempt to provide him with help and therapy, perhaps eventually find a safe home for him.

    What we do get firm evidence of is that the incident has brought Josh and his father together, as the boy hugs his dad to comfort him for what has happened and what he himself has done. Presumably, the authorities have believed his “fairy” tale. What we do know is that the experience has helped Josh to realize who he truly is and that he is capable of feeling and sharing deep love.

     For someone like me, who loves to find parallels and links throughout cinema and literature, what strikes me about this beautiful film is just how similar it is to the 1995 US film, Parallel Sons, another tale about a disoriented young man who hides the man he loves in the woods and attempts to escape abusive love, in that film without success. That film would unlikely have been known by the young filmmaker Balduzzi.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).