unrueh/ unrest (w&d cyril schäublin)

Schäublin’s curious film left both myself and sñr Flamia somewhat bemused. It’s a very elliptical telling of the way in which events at a Swiss watch factory on the 1870s influenced Kropotkin, who happened to be drifting around the valley where the factory is located at the time. The socialist principles of the watchmakers are emphasised as they offer to donate some of their wages to striking workers in Baltimore, part of a worldwide union movement that doesn’t prevent four of the female factory workers from being unjustly sacked. Kropotkin moseys around, looking out wistfully, perhaps nursing a crush on one of the factory workers. Whilst obviously based on facts, the film seems less concerned with exploring and developing its narrative and more interested in becoming a mood piece. Much is made of the element of time, with the valley having several different time zones. Whilst this helps to restrict the homogeneity of life, it also makes it hard to plan. It felt as though there was a lot bubbling under the surface of a likeable premise, but the lid is never lifted to release the full radical force of Kropotkin’s ideology on the audience. Which is a pity, as one suspects that the Cinemateca audience would have been well up for it. 

the line (w&d ursula meier, w. stéphanie blanchoud, antoine jaccoud)

Meier is one of those European directors alongside the likes of Petzold and Ozon, who seem to keep effortlessly bumping out high quality films which are humanist and sceptical with regards to genre. Her films interrogate family and its constraints. Dramatically engaging characters seek to sort out their lives against a backdrop of confusion and thwarted dreams. In The Line, Christina is the middle aged mother of three grown up children. A former concert pianist, she is dominant and stifling, but much loved. The film kicks off with a deliberately melodramatic sequence where the tension breaks and the angular and angry Margret, her eldest daughter, attacks her. The film then becomes about the fall-out from this moment, as Margret struggles to overcome her anger, whilst Christina’s other two daughters, Louise & Marion, try to find a way to live within a family at war. Stéphanie Blanchoud’s portrayal of Margret as a scarred soul seeking to overcome her flaws is beautifully acted. Whilst never appearing to be groundbreaking or sensationalist, Meier delivers constant tension around the simple premise: can this fucked up family recover? Or is it destined to be caught in a brutal cycle with no way out? 

sauve qui peut (d. godard, w. anne-marie miéville, jean-claude carrière)

Godard’s mid-period film, which Richard Brody says he described as his second first film, is a rambling box of tricks and sighs. The tricks are beautiful, the sighs are ugly. The tricks are ugly, the sighs are beautiful. A trick might be the use of slow motion, as Nathalie Baye’s progress on a bicycle through the Swiss countryside is slowed down into a sequence of digital movement, frame by frame, discovering a poetry in the simplest of actions, a trick he repeats at other moments throughout the film. Another trick might be the imposition of the most lyrical music, for a few seconds, propelling the film towards a dreamy romantic level, only to cut the music off before the viewer can get lost in it. Another trick, the ugly tricks, are the turns that seedy men ask Isabelle Huppert to perform as a prostitute. Godard pushes the ugliness towards Centipedal lengths, confronting the viewer. The sighs are the human moments, when the characters who so often feel like marionettes in Godard’s psycho-sexual landscape suddenly step out of character and become real people, with real concerns. Something Baye excels out, inveighing her lost character with a pathos that seems to go against the filmmaker’s grain. Brody’s comments on Huppert’s thoughts on Godard’s direction are great in this regard: “She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.” The complexity of the process the actors faced is complemented by the complexity of everything in Sauve Qui Peut: the narrative; the blurred urban/rural division; the mash-up of visual styles; the mash-up of tones. In this sense it feels, as perhaps all Godard’s work feels, like the predicted apex of a modernity which has already passed. His bricolage was ahead of its time, the time came, it went, leaving a film from the future firmly in the past. In this sense it’s a commentary on a world on the eve of the digital. Innocent pleasures of the kind to be found in his earlier films are banished, we are now in the aseptic land of sex, lies and videotape. Identity begins to fracture, the director is Godard, the lead character is called Godard, people’s lives will not flow in straight lines, they will be broken down with slow motion and out-of-synch musical interludes. Emotion no longer comes naturally, it will be constructed in spite of moral indifference. 

love me tender (w&d klaudia reynicke)

Reynicke’s film is essentially a tender portrayal of mental illness. Seconda is a dance obsessed young woman who suffers from agaraphobia. When her mother dies and her father does a runner, she’s left alone in the house. What can save her? Although there’s something faintly predictable about the initial set-up, with its echoes of Repulsion, the film takes wing when Seconda, played with a gamine intensity by Barbara Giordano, finally escapes the house. She collects a lover, kidnaps another would-be lover, and goes on an extended flight of fancy in the woods. The film is whimsical, floating between dirty naturalism and heightened fantasy sequences. Whilst there are echoes of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, it is also reminiscent of another recent Swiss movie, Alloys, (d Tobias Nölle), which in a similar manner dealt with the threads linking society, alienation/ atomisation and mental health. It makes one wonder what they’re putting in the Swiss water. This seeming land of plenty is actually peopled by lost souls struggling to come up with a means of coping with the complexity of the big wide world; the lure of escaping into a fantasy world proving far more enticing. 

the dead (sebastian kracht, tr. daniel bowles)

The Dead, portentous title aside, is like a delicious if slightly unsatisfying first course. It’s a slim novel, which takes a lot on. The narrative recounts the story of a Swiss film director, Emil Nägeli, who is commissioned by a Nazi director of culture in the early days of the Third Reich to make a German language film in Japan. This offers the novelist Pynchonesque scope, which he takes advantage of. The action flits from Japan to Switzerland to Berlin, back to Japan, to Hollywood and finally Zurich once more. It takes in figures including Chaplin, whose visit to Japan is skilfully interwoven into the narrative, Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, and others. The Berlin sequence, where Nägeli spends a whirlwind few days, is brilliantly realised. One half-expects Nägeli to run into a pre-GI Slothrop. However, the bittiness of the book ultimately works against it. The pages end up feeling like fragments from a larger novel which hasn’t been written. The narrative hop, skips and jumps until it runs out of steam. 

homo faber [max frisch]

Homo Faber is one of the more indefinable novels you are likely to read. Part travelogue, part mid-life crisis, part Oedipal nightmare. The novel relates an extended journey taken by Walter Faber, an engineer. His plane has to make a forced landing in the Mexican desert, which then propels him on a journey to meet an old friend in the Guatemalan backwoods. Only the old friend has recently hanged himself. He ends up back in New York where he takes a boat to Southampton and falls in love with a young woman who happens to be the daughter he never knew he had. In most hands this level of coincidence and melodrama might have rendered the tale ridiculous. No-one can plausibly experience this degree of bad fate that Faber does in the course of a few weeks. The gods are crueller to Frisch’s protagonist than they even were to Oedipus. Through it all, the narrator’s voice remains not so much stoic as near-imbecilic, insistent that he doesn’t believe in anything except for a rational twentieth century logic. Faber is almost heroically unmoved by the events that befall him. So much so, that one begins to believe the lady doth protest too much. At a certain point, it feels as though the object of the author’s irony is not so much his protagonist as the reader. Constantly expecting the protagonist to rebel against his fate, but instead finding someone whose tone remains phlegmatic and dispassionate throughout. The blurb suggested this was an ‘existential’ novel. Perhaps there is something of Mersault in all this, but there’s no angst, no expression of alienation. A closer comparison might be that other arch ironist, Houellebecq, another writer half-in love with a kind of Schopenhauerian cruelty. The writing is what might be described as flinty, with staccato dialogue and vivid descriptions. Vultures consume a dead donkey. A man contemplates the shape of his daughter’s hips. Frisch constantly pre-empts the drama, relating that which is to pass. The reader is placed in the god’s chair. Should we judge this curious anti-hero? Or should we accept that morality is flat, life is flat, shit happens, we just have to learn to live with it? 

sister (d. ursula meier, w meier, antoine jaccoud, gilles taurand)

Ursula Meier’s first film was the high/low concept movie Home, about a family living beside a motorway, a curious blend of the cerebral and the emotional. On the one hand it appears to reference Godard’s Weekend or the work of Ballard. On the other it’s a study of the modern family and the extraordinary pressures it faces. It’s also one of those films where the conceit controls the narrative. A where-can-this-go-next kind of film.

Sister, her follow-up, has a different kind of feel. We’re in more traditional European art movie territory. It has been compared to the work of Dardennes brothers but this is also the neo-realist territory of Bicycle Thieves and its ilk. Meier locates her story (interestingly her credit is for ‘scenario’, thereafter working with other writers to flesh out the story and dialogue) within the world of the Swiss winter ski season. A brother and a sister live in a high rise block, below the gleaming peaks, and struggle to make ends meet. Simon, 12, has turned to petty theft. He steals anything from skis to goggles and sells them on at discount prices. Meanwhile his sister, Louise, who is in her early 20s, is something of a waster, going with random guys and unable to look after herself. It’s Simon’s criminal enterprise which keeps them afloat.

This premise immediately sets the film up for moments of exquisite tension, with the pint-sized Simon constantly on the point of getting caught. This strand is balanced by the development of his relationship with Louise, one that becomes ever more complex. At one point, he resorts to paying her for affection. In an uncomfortable scene, the 12 year old curls up in bed with her. These are characters for whom the distinction between maturity and immaturity barely exists: survival in their strange isolated world is all that matters. Until the final scenes, when Louise finally starts to take responsibility for both her own life and Simon’s.

All of this is told with an economy which ensures the narrative, surprises and all, moves along briskly. A couple of showy cameos are more or less seamlessly integrated and the acting of the two leads, Kacey Mottet Klein & Léa Seydoux is impeccable. Klein gives on of those astonishing performances which only children can, one which seems to almost transcend ‘acting’.The cinematography makes the most of the peaks and troughs of the mountain landscape, suggesting the way in which its geography maps on to human geology: those who bask in the white glory of the summit, where the cold is another luxury, are opposed to those condemned to the muddy trenches of the valleys.

Meier’s vision is perhaps reminiscent of the work of Jelinek, observing the way that those who inhabit the uplands, whilst ready to condemn Simon as a thief, have no scruples buying their bargains from him. Everyone is complicit in an amoral system. Beneath this observation lurks, perhaps, an icier critique. Why should some be granted the financial freedom to roam the beautiful peaks whilst others have to steal to get by. The moment when Simon seeks a hug from the idealised mother figure, Gillian Anderson, is the moment where the worlds collide. Here the social critique is fully rounded, as the audience roots for the thief and hopes that her victim can find it in her heart, and perhaps redeem herself, by forgiving him. It’s an affecting narrative moment in a impressively constructed film.