Messidor

press release: 

Switzerland | 1979 | 35mm | 123 min. | French, German with English subtitles

Director: Alain Tanner; Cast: Clémentine Amouroux, Catherine Rétoré, Franziskus Abgottspon

A project taken over from Maurice Pialat, Messidor has as its basis a true story which was a sensation of 1970s France: a crime spree by two young girls and its terminal conclusion. Keenly interested as ever in drop-outs and exiles, Tanner tracks the flight of the fierce female fugitives through an Alpine Switzerland which has here taken on a heavy, sinister air, holding their own against masculine menace while on a winding road to nowhere.

Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen: Alain Tanner: Among the last lions of the heroic age of the European art film, the Geneva born Tanner burst onto the international cinema scene at age forty with his debut feature, 1969’s Charles, Dead or Alive, completed after stints with the merchant navy and the British Film Institute, where he became charged with the unquiet spirit of the Free Cinema movement. Back home, the fired-up Tanner would forge a radical body of work that bristles at the numbing neutrality and status quo monotony of his native country, a cinema full of rebels, outcasts, and dropouts, where the presiding mood is one of driftlessness and anxious ambivalence, and a filmography ripe for the rediscovery. This touring series has been organized by UW Cinematheque & NYC’s Metrograph and is supported in part by the French House at UW Madison and the Embassy of Switzerland. Special thanks to Andrew Irving, Jake Perlin, and Marcel Müller.

All Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public.