It would be better not to die in the wake of the Queen of the United Kingdom, to the mourning that drags on. Clinging to his legend, we were still able to bury Jean-Luc Godard with the honors due to his rank. Two days earlier, the departure of his compatriot Alain Tanner went more unnoticed. Can we cry so many people at once? some wonder. The disappearance of the filmmaker Pierrot le fou completes to engulf the memory of another tenor of the seventh art. Injustice! We salute the Swiss cinema, I say to myself, afflicted these days. Major voices have fallen silent in its Alps.
Among the rising generations, many hardly knew Godard, then Tanner… The latter was at the peak of the New Wave of Swiss cinema in the 1970s, alongside his friend Claude Goretta among others. Godard toured in France and influenced them a lot. Switzerland, so peaceful, rebelled with its 7e art detached from academicism, in political and social engagement. Flagship films came out of its bosom.
I’m talking to you about Alain Tanner because he flew away, therefore, with his quickdraw of a big benevolent bear. And because In the white city is one of my favorite movies. Released in 1983 in line with his previous film, The light years, it appeals to those who like blues works, in free modulations. The filmmaker had managed to infuse this subtle feeling of existential wandering, between anchoring in the home with the sirens calling and the enchanting stopover; haunting journey of a modern Ulysses. The spleen that gripped the character of a runaway mechanic sailor played by Bruno Ganz, sometimes feverish, sometimes casual or even haggard, was carried by a bewitching languor. He set one foot in each world, oscillating between two loves, as if in weightlessness.
Of course, this film fits for amateurs in the Godardian and Durassian years, when the cinema excelled in painting the inner mists. In the white city took place in the heart of Old Lisbon, rich in mazes and floating anxieties. When I watch the film again with renewed happiness, my love for the Portuguese capital mingles with the intoxication of having found it so well painted.
The name Tanner often evokes to moviegoers The Salamander (1971), based on a bloody news item captured from original angles, featuring an admirable Bulle Ogier. Or post-sixty-eight Jonas who will be 25 in the year 2000 (1976), nourished by fascinating intersecting portraits of couples on the verge of new beginnings.
But In the white city never seems to have aged. Our troubled times went into it without filters. Should we cast off or not to embrace a new life? A timeless dilemma. Today, many shrug their shoulders in front of this question, floating between islands and digital pitfalls, at the gates of agonizing tomorrows. Others change course, step out of their comfort zones, embrace doubt, quit work and old ruts. All this reminds me In the white citywhere the hero was unsure where his feet were taking him, but went there anyway, just to see.
Without a smartphone, this scenario of the XXe century follows the man, armed with his Super 8 camera, in the midst of chance encounters, fights, silences, to the tune of a trumpet. Tanner captured the downtime, the embraces of the sailor in the arms of his new love, the videotapes sent to the one he left behind in Switzerland, the furtive moments clinging to a world that could disappear. Like today, on the same note of emptiness.
There are films that stick with you because they didn’t try to catch up with the times. In pure disturbing and slippery sensibility, without answers to offer, without thunderous conclusion, on a suspended time. All the more modern, in fact. No, the big Hollywood show is not the best sensor to X-ray our present times, as Godard would have said. By dint of spitting noise on fleeting sensations, these are nipped in the bud, where it would have been necessary to touch disturbing instabilities with the fingertips, as in this lament by Tanner. Under the frenzy of physical or viral outbursts, contemporary anxieties let off steam blindly, lacking meaning.
Walking in front of the screen through this white city, I notice that the clock of his hotel-restaurant, which was running backwards, now seems to take on its full meaning. Other films over the years, from Lost in Translation from Sofia Coppola to nomadland by Chloé Zhao, were able to translate this feeling of floating that hovers when the ground slips away underfoot. But Tanner’s jewel remains fixed in my memory.
I send my grateful farewells to the great Swiss bear.