«La Salamandre» – Free-spirited Rosamonde turns everyone’s heads
With “La Salamandre” in 1971, the late Geneva director Alain Tanner (here at the premiere in Zurich) presented an eternally modern film about a free-spirited woman and the art of storytelling.
After the vision of his classic «La Salamandre», it is not surprising that Alain Tanner’s films also became internationally known. As part of the “Groupe 5”, Tanner was a founder of the Swiss Nouvelle Vague in the 1970s together with four French-speaking Swiss directors – Claude Goretta, Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange. His feature film from 1971 is a prime example of this new Swiss filmmaking: playful, humorous and headstrong.
But the film works well even without prior knowledge of film history. Let yourself be enchanted by the whimsical characters from the very first moment. A nice side effect is reveling in a bygone era, when people smoked indoors and telephone booths, typewriters, juxeboxes and yes, even instant coffee were part of everyday life.
The Geneva journalist Pierre (Jean-Luc Bideau) has to convert a newspaper report, a so-called faits divers, about a young woman who allegedly shot her uncle into a screenplay for television. He gets literary support from fellow writer Paul (Jacques Denis). Pierre researches and interviews those affected, Paul weaves stories around the case and lets his imagination run wild.
When the woman her text is about, Rosamonde (Bulle Ogier), enters their everyday life in flesh and blood and she no longer just insists on paper, things get complicated.
It goes without saying that the free-spirited and seductive Rosamonde turns the two men’s heads. Who wouldn’t fall in love with this woman, enchantingly played by Bulle Ogier, who shakes her hair so adorably to her favorite song and faces the world with a refreshing defiance.
However, there is no real ménage-à-trois à la Truffaut’s «Jules et Jim». The three are somehow too busy with themselves for that. Pierre, the self-possessed, lanky journalist who usually sits doggedly at his typewriter. Paul, the melancholic author who lives in the country and whenever he is sad he starts singing with vibrato in his voice. And finally Rosamonde, who doesn’t last a month at the same job, only does what pleases her and lets her inner rebel run free at every opportunity, even if it’s just massaging customers’ legs without being asked in the shoe shop where she works. “She had little obvious taste for what you call a profession,” Paul writes of her.
Escaping work and society’s expectations is a phenomenon typical of this period. But bureaucratic reality knocks on the door in “La Salamandre” in the form of two officials. The two writing bohemians get a very Swiss visit: one from a civil defense inspector who checks whether the people still have the red civil defense booklet. Later by a building manager who stops by to appraise the furniture
In every shot, Tanner’s film tells of the time in which it was made. Posters of Alain Delon and the Beatles hang on the walls, the old trams squeak through Geneva and the garbage collection is on strike. Nevertheless, the characters look incredibly modern.
The only thing that seems strange is the reaction of Paul’s wife, who only smiles at his confession that he slept with another woman and says succinctly: “It’s a sign that time is passing. You’re getting old.” But maybe that’s that much-vaunted free love from back then that’s a little hard to understand in today’s context.
A trick whose motivation is never quite apparent is the omniscient narrator’s voice, which repeatedly tears you out of the otherwise very realistic narrative. The screenplay is by accurate author and art critic John Berger.
Paul once talks to his wife, who is a poet, about how the characters he writes about have settled in his head: “A big family, a screwed up uncle, a gun. You with your poems, you only photograph the inside of your skull.”
Tanner’s «Salamandre» is also a film about the art of storytelling and what happens when fantasy meets reality. Because Rosamonde is much more enigmatic and complex than the woman dreamed up by two men sitting at their desks.
*This text by Sarah Sartorius, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
(SDA)