An offbeat Swiss drama with Antonionistic overtones: Viewed at the Eskishehir (university) film festival, Turkey. November 2009. The final film of the day was a most off-beat and slightly off-the-wall Swiss-French feature with the numerical title a "1 Journée" (One Day) by Swıss-French-English director Jacob Berger, with the director in attendance to field audience questions. The numeric title was probably used to avoid confusion with a French film called "UNE Journée" -- Good choice, because this film is a singleton -- quite unique! Infortunately, the English title says nothing and undermines this psychological time bomb. A perfect example of how a bad title can kill a very good film. My title would be "Hit and Run in Geneva".
An offbeat Swiss drama with Antonionistic overtones: Viewed at the Eskishehir (university) film festival, Turkey. November 2009. The final film of the day was a most off-beat and slightly off-the-wall Swiss-French feature with the numerical title a "1 Journée" (One Day) by Swıss-French-English director Jacob Berger, with the director in attendance to field audience questions. The numeric title was probably used to avoid confusion with a French film called "UNE Journée" -- Good choice, because this film is a singleton -- quite unique! Infortunately, the English title says nothing and undermines this psychological time bomb. A perfect example of how a bad title can kill a very good film. My title would be "Hit and Run in Geneva". on his mind and he finally turns himself in to the police. Meanwhıle pretty blonde wife, having detected his egregious philandering, decides to abandon both Serge and their ten or eleven year old son. The boy who is wise far beyond his years is passionately in love with a girl in his class at school, who happens to be the daughter of the incredibly beautiful mistress. This leads to incredible complications when the incredibly beautiful mistress (Mathilde) takes the incredibly precocious lad, Vlad, in, after his mother throws his bedding out of the window of their streamlined sterile glass high-rise, splits the scene and is about to run off to L.A. with a Japanese Zombie she has befriended ... However, Mathilde after a borderline sexual encounter with young Vlad, finally realizes that his wayward father isn't worth any more of her time and maybe she doesn't really want to wreck the kid's home anyway -- meanwhile the wife has second thoughts and comes back to the high-rise, where in a scene with Antonionistic echoes she reconnects with her estranged family and maybe they're all gonna live alienatedly ever after. I hope I find out in Part Two. This semi-surrealistic film is not quite as weird as it sounds and has some incredibly interesting things in it, and the incredibly beautiful mistress is actress Noémie Kocher, who also collaborated on the scenario and is such a knockout that she alone is worth the price of admission. This thought provoking film has already traveled far and wide -- from the super wide outdoor screen in Locarno to Pusan, South Korea, and is next headed for Moscow. I may have some more to say about it when the thoughts it has provoked settle, but there is no question that Jacob Berger's "1 Journée" is one of the best films I have seen this year. I can only hope other people get to see this remarkable Swiss indie.
