The Hunter, one year on

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 October

I have been reminded of a film from last year's Festival, The Hunter (2010), whose main character, Ali Alavi, is played by its director, Rafi Pitts. At the time (a bit like Kosmos at this year's Festival), it seemed likely to be too subtle to be readily understood (though not quite as the film's official wording would suggest):

In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive (edited for punctuation).

On the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (www.rottentomatoes.com), Jason Wood (in Little White Lies) is quoted as saying 'Seemingly destined to go largely under-appreciated, this is a work of precision and complexity'. (Given that someone - presumably by mistake - has posted a review of the film from 2011 of the same name on IMDb's web-page for this film (www.imdb.com/title/tt1190072), there is evidence of under-appreciation that it even exists as a separate entity!)

Looking at what both who Wood is (or appears to be?) in relation to the film's distribution and what has written (www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/the-hunter-12001), he is clearly not going to give away exactly what happens or, more importantly, the rationale behind it. But there are two short sections (amongst others) that I think most worth quoting, the first for where the film is, the second for where it may have come from:

[...] And yet the film also feels incredibly universal. In its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places, it perhaps has more in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.

[...] Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident, intelligent and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver (edited for punctuation).


At the screening, I definitely felt as Wood does in the first quotation - it was a very intelligent take on those earlier films, with a good dose of redneck lawlessness thrown in for good measure.

As for the specific echoes that he identifies, I will need to consider them, and also to look at obtaining my own copy of The Hunter. What I will say is this, by way of indicating my own thinking about the film: what is it that we are told about how Ali's wife comes to be killed?


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