La salamandre

Renting a foreign film, at random, especially one you've never heard of, and directed by someone you're unfamiliar with, can be a wonderful experience if you're lucky enough to wind up with "La Salamandre."

This 1971 Swiss/French production, shot in glorious black and white, is an off-beat satire which mocks bourgeois conformity and culture in oh-so-straight laced Switzerland. Like shooting fish in a barrel? Director Alain Tanner is far too inspired a talent to settle for the obvious.

He takes an absurdest plot -- played terribly straight -- about a couple of down-on-their luck, hapless, hack writers, trying to put together a TV script about a sexy, free-spirited young woman who, "in real life," shot and wounded her uncle for several good reasons, mainly, I suspect, for being boring (a motive I find endearing).

Tanner, best known for "Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000," takes his sweet time setting up his eccentric characters and their numskull project, but once in place a lot of genuine laughter arises from the work of his gifted cast, led by the irrepressible Bulle Ogier (the compassionate dominatrix in "Maitress") in their delirious situation. Many great bits, all played straight, are offered, including a government inspector of "civil decency" popping up for an investigation. Much of this inspired stuff seems like it could have been written today and definitely not about the Swiss.

Most people see in Alain Tanner's movie "La Salamandre" a grotesque critique on everyday's life in Switzerland at the beginning of the 70ies. We see Tanner's films populated with the typical bearded men with their dark Pasolini-eyeglasses and their long shaggy hair. One wonders why they seem to attract rather good-looking girls in hippie-skirts and Moses-sandals ... . That must have been a time when someone's political conviction, marked on the outside, appeared sexy ... .

However, besides the occurrence of an officer for "good Swiss behavior" (a predecessor of the characters Max Bodmer and Moritz Fischer in Rolf Lyssy's legendary Swiss movie "The Swissmakers" (1978)), the plot of Tanner's "Salamandre" goes like that: A journalist and a writer get money for writing a scenario about Rosemonde, a young girl who supposedly killed her uncle. They decide to approach their task from to different sides: The one wants to meet Rosemonde and interview her in order to get the "facts". The other relies wholly on his fantasy in turning the facts into a story. The one is convinced that in order to write somebody's biography one has just to learn to know this person. The other thinks that the bare facts say nothing about a person, and only by aid of sensing what is between the facts, it is possible to draw someone's personality. Hence, both have to come to the conclusion, that neither way is sufficient, or even false, since it seems to be impossible on logical reasons to reconstruct a character - even of a living person. In the case of Citizen Kane, there was only reconstruction left. In the case of "Citoyenne Rosemonde", even description is failing, because she behaves like a salamander, negating her appearance in the moment when she shows it. And obviously, she loves that, despite her alleged naivety, she winds herself out of every possible angle with most elegant cleverness. So, this is in first line a movie about the impossibility to represent the objects or fact by signs. (In Tanner's hitherto last movie, a professor of semiotics disappears, leaving confusing traces to his students.) Traces are by definition ambivalent, and neither logical nor intuitive approaches are sufficient to reconstruct that person that left them - because none of these methods is semiotic and thus appropriate to the traces that are signs. But let us not forget: Although the two writers fail in reconstructing Rosemonde from her traces and signs - does this mean that she is for us, too, non-reconstructible? After all, we have witnessed her over two hours and a lot longer in psychological time. So, Tanner perhaps means that not the protagonists of the film, but the film itself may be appropriate to reconstruct the "real" Rosemonde - since the film is a semiotic medium.

I have seen only two other films by Tanner, Le Milieu du monde and Jonas..., but I can say that he is one of my favorite directors. This episodic, fascinating work was written by Tanner and John Berger, the left-wing art critic, and it attacks the mania for finding tidy explanations for deviant behavior: if a man cleans his gun and it goes off, wounding him, is it an accident or foul play? If the man's daughter is a strange, half-educated rural girl, should either Pierre or Paul start sleeping with her? What are the employment prospects of a girl who can't fill a plastic casing with sausage out of a machine, and who listens to heavy rock as though there's a message from the cosmos in it?

I fell into the rhythm of this picture very easily. Its critique of life in bourgeois Switzerland is sharp--the visit from the inspector of "civil decency" is very funny. Both Jean-Luc Bideau and Jacques Denis are very good as the two sheepish city guys, and Bulle Ogier always holds your attention as the unsophisticated Rosemonde who just wants to have fun.

"La Salamandre" is probably the worst film I've seen in years, but let me be clear about this: I'm not calling it bad because Alain Tanner is an incompetent or untalented filmmaker. On the contrary, he is very capable and very deliberate about what he wants to do and how (the 119-minute running time cannot be accidental - it has to be a deliberate joke). It's just that his ideas of what a film should be are completely opposite to mine: I think films should tell a story or, failing that, should at least be about something; he thinks that nothingness on the screen is fascinating, that the characters themselves saying to each other things like (and I quote) "we're bored", "we're doing nothing here", "we're mucking about", "we're at a dead end" is the peak of cinema entertainment. We're just on two completely different wavelengths. Bulle Ogier is certainly a great camera subject - one that, thankfully, you can study in many other films which won't make you feel like shutting them off in the first 15 minutes. Rating: the temperature of Ogier's wintry village.