A Film Only a Filmmaker Could Like

A PLAIN, solid-thinking, no-nonsense Swiss engineer visits a drab, small-town cafe to make a speech in his campaign for the Swiss parliament. He stands erect at the podium with all of his bourgeois respectability, smoothly articulating his planned platitudes to a carefully selected, receptive audience. Midway through his speech the moderator calls for a break so that the listeners can refresh themselves with mugs of beer--on the house, of course. From behind the counter emerges a waitress carrying a tray of refreshments, and a striking entrance it is: tall and slender, with long black hair and deep Italian eyes, she creates an inevitable stir, an Aphrodite rising in a sea of mediocrity. The next day the engineer returns to the cafe, and, after obtaining the waitress's address, drives to her apartment. He wants to see her every day, he tells her without hesitation.

With the unfolding of the double drama of Paul (Philippe Leotard) as ambitious politician on the move and lustful man on the make. The Middle of the World beckons with the promise of that all-too-rare film that synthesizes the two great battles of life, the political and the sexual. The action moves from the smoky back room, where cynical machine men map out the fate of society, to the honky tonk cafe, where a tacit smile and a pair of pretty legs determine the fate of individuals, and in the process we seem to get a valuable glance into the multi-dimensional world of both man as social animal and man as existential wanderer.

Unfortunately, the movement of Alain Tanner's direction mirrors the course of his protagonist's development. As Paul begins to miss appointments, muff speeches, and generally lose interest in his own campaign, as he becomes involved with the waitress, Adriana (Olimpia Carlisi). The Middle of the World loses its promised dialectical interweaving of the social with the personal, collapsing into a solipsistic world of passion and despair. The turning point, both in Paul's fortunes as well as the potential of the film, occurs one evening when Paul and Adriana dine in a local restaurant named appropriately enough, the Middle of the World. The name, Paul tells his desire, derives from the position of the town on the water line dividing Europe in half. North of the watershed, he says, all rivers flow into the North Sea; south of the divide, they flow into the Mediterranean. Poised between the warm Latin countries on the one hand and the chill Teutonic lands on the other, the town belongs to neither--it lies in the middle of an uncommitted, non-involved world.

AS PAUL and Adriana leave the restaurant and reach the engineer's flashy red sportscar, the waitress, until now aloof, looks her suitor in the eye and says in a low, seductive voice. "And now I want to show you the real middle of the world." The scene cuts to her bedroom, where the two quickly doff their inhibitions and their clothes and slip under the sheets, quickly reaching the first of the many climaxes that shape their deepening affair.

With the shift from restaurant to bedroom and from the middle of a social world to an insistently personal universe, the couple's ties to the external world are rarefied into a complicated universe of pallid symbols. The political bosses' strategy to address only non-controversial, non-political issues and to sell Paul as a Mr. Clean figure: Adriana's difficulty in keeping her customers' hands off her backside; her mysterious departure from her working-class neighborhood in Italy--the very relations that lend this affair between a married middle-class engineer and a lower-class waitress more than merely psychological significance become only ponderous ornaments adorning a theme we've seen handled too many times in the past.

What results is a portrait of a man and woman that is Bergman-like in its intense depiction of two beings who reach out to one another in an attempt to escape the prisons of their lonely souls. The Middle of the World inevitably raises comparisons with Scenes from a Marriage. But to group the two together, as some critics have done, is like terming Mrs. Dalloway and Pride and Prejudice similar works because each portrays a female as she relates to the people around her. Just as the stylistic innovations of Virginia Woolf's study make it part of a different century and a different sensibility from Jane Austen's traditional novel, so Tanner's film, with its ubiquitous symbolism and its disruption of the conventional rules of narrative, occupies a cinematic universe distinct from Bergman's. Scenes from a Marriage is a classical work. It derives its dramatic power from the potency of its dialogue, the emotive force of its actors, and the austerity of Bergman's camerawork with its insistent focusing on the torn faces of the protagonists. The Middle of the World, on the other hand, is a thoroughly modernist work, straining its story through a sieve of images, metaphors, and formalistic devices which, while establishing the film as a more ambitious production, dilute its intensity and deflate its broader social significance.

FROM THE FILM'S start, when an elusive voice perfunctorily declares that "this film, like all events, takes place at a particular time in a particular place," we are prepared for a violation of the usual rules of narrative. To say that Paul and Adriana's relationship "develops" as it would, say, in a nineteenth-century English novel, would be to misrepresent Tanner's technique, which, with its series of furtive, sometimes unconnected glimpses into their lives, attempts to reproduce on film the texture of everyday life. Just as affairs in reality are a series of fits and starts, with little coherence while they are experienced, so Paul and Adriana's passion and despair, their conversations and lovemaking, occur in non-linear succession, separated from one another by the flash on the screen of the day's date and the unsettling sound of random, atonal notes played on percussion instruments.

Besides this seemingly more "faithful" representation of reality. Tanner uses a disjunctive montage--scenes begin and end arbitrarily--that endows trivial gestures and cursory phrases with a heightened significance. Paul, driving his car along a country road after visiting Adriana, pulls into a dirt lane, pushes back his seat, rolls up the window, and closes his eyes to go to sleep--then another date announcing a new day flashes on the screen. Adriana sits alone nude in her drab room, cooking some broth on her hot plate; she gets up from her chair and slips into a robe; she returns to her chair--and again, suddenly, it is a new day, and we watch Paul as he pulls up to the cafe.

Such a repudiation of the conventions of ordered narrative development provides a ready vehicle for a director eager to present a vision of a bleak, alpine world where individuals try unsuccessfully to break the shell that surrounds them. However, the automatic poignancy it confers on detail lends itself to over-simplification of character that Tanner is unable to resist. When reinforced with an often facile symbolism, these nuances of individual behavior cement the stereotyping of sexual roles that makes The Middle of the World far inferior to Scenes from a Marriage in its dissection of a couple's relationship. Visual snatches of Paul caressing Adriana's leg or putting his hand under her shirt serve to force his character into a one-dimensional world of male physicality and insensitivity. The periodic eruption of a train into the placid Swiss countryside relentlessly hammers us with its tiresome commentary on Paul's mentality; rational, utilitarian, compartmentalized. Adriana is the classic female--equal shares of mysterious introspection, intuitive insight and the constant assertion of the spiritual over the physical. As she is about to make love with Paul for the first time, she drapes a black cloth on the window (it is day time) because, she tells him, he will not judge her only by her body, like most men.

IF TANNER must insist on formulating such pat sexual roles for his lead characters, it would be, one would hope, for the purpose of making some broader statement about why such behavior is so typical of men and women in society. But his adherence to a visual world where details reign supreme and where events occur without apparent consequences not only divests Paul and Adriana of any real inner complexity; it also undercuts whatever representativeness they might have by fragmentating their relations with society into symbols of isolation and solitude. Paul's eventual defeat in the election is merely an incidental event, denuded of any comment on his personal life, which, by the films end, has little reference to the outside world except through scattered incidents that evaporate on the screen before they can take shape as real events occurring in a society of real men and women.

And so, by the time Adriana tells Paul suddenly one day that she is going to leave him, because she's frustrated by his inability to see through to the "real" her, we are neither prepared nor surprised--nor interested, for that matter. Perhaps Tanner and his experiment with modernist formalism has succeeded too well. In approximating life in all its bleak, discontinuous reality, he has made a film that, like most of life itself, is boring. From the perch of his director's seat he surveys the ennui-stricken masses who pour into the movie theaters, hungering for an insight into the chaos that engulfs them. His response; let them cat symbols.