Primarily composed of long dialogues, the film involves a loose-knit social circle: four men and four women, all carrying forward the ideals of the 1960s to varying degrees. Where The Middle of the World ends up with nowhere to go, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 seems an open map. Still from 'Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000,' 1976. Both Adriana and Rosemonde would simply prefer not to, thus upending the traditional role of the actress, no matter the part. In most movies her character’s resistance would be the opening salvo of a seduction-as with the femme fatale, that locus of the male gaze-but here it’s given the last word. The lovers seem to speak their own private language, and the genuinely liberating quality of their erotic connection makes it all the more depressing when Paul begins pressuring Adriana to quit her job (Berger and Tanner’s screenplay wittily links this romantic trajectory to economic normalization). They meet in a Swiss town that’s picturesque but small-minded, especially whenever it comes to a group of men gathering around a table. Their bond is playful and humane-Paul turns somersaults in the snow at the thought of it-and yet cannot survive the dead weight of social convention. It’s the story of a love affair between Paul, an engineer campaigning for political office, and Adriana, an Italian working in a provincial café. The Middle of the World is even more unsparing in its narrative logic. Still from 'The Middle of the World,' 1974. La salamandre is the rare movie that leads its audience to understand that the so-called happy ending may well be at the cost of freedom. Not for nothing is she fired from a later job at a shoe store for “taking liberties” with customers. Openly disdainful of any such frame, Rosemonde is several years ahead of schedule for punk. Two writers, Pierre (Jean-Luc Bideau, a recurring presence in Tanner’s films reminiscent of Elliot Gould) and Paul (Jacques Denis), take a cash advance to pen a television script based on her story, with Pierre pursuing a decidedly hands-on documentary approach and Paul opting for an imaginative treatment. She plays Rosemonde, a disillusioned young woman accused of wounding her uncle with his own military rifle. La salamandre does indeed function as a kind of intellectual exercise in the politics of representation, but one held together by an altogether electrifying performance by Bulle Ogier. For devotees of Berger’s essays, it’s fascinating to see some of the writer’s key ideas take dramatic shape: both La salamandre and The Middle of the World, for instance, can be seen as testing many of the same propositions found in Berger's critique of the role of women in art found in his groundbreaking 1972 television series and book, Ways of Seeing. Berger’s radical humanism proved a lasting match for Tanner’s narrative sensibility: alternately tender and dire, open-minded and argumentative. The two men met in the 1950s, when Tanner was studying at the British Film Institute. Berger, whose sensitive essays on art and politics often do the work of sociology by other means, died last year. This inquisitive approach is especially evident in three early features co-authored with the art critic John Berger: La salamandre (1971), The Middle of the World (1974), and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976). Tanner came to filmmaking from sociology, and it shows in the analytical bent of his movies, which collide multiple points of view to unpack the cultural conditioning of character. Tanner is the subject of a Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive series beginning July 26 and running through August 19, his first retrospective there in more than 20 years, during which time his freewheeling dramas have largely fallen out of circulation. Godard’s fellow Swiss, Alain Tanner, is an exemplary figure in this regard, having directed a score of features focusing on what critic Dave Kehr has aptly described as “the dilemma of the revolutionary in non-revolutionary times.” Much has been written about the films that seemed to anticipate the events of May 1968 (Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise is often mentioned), but rather less on those that undertook to sort out the consequences.
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