La salamandra - Alain Tanner

film che ha l'aria fresca del '68, i due protagonisti Paul e Pierre "studiano" Rosemonde, e interferiscono con l'oggetto dello studio.
un film sulla ribellione, la liberazione e la libertà, in una Svizzera che non è Parigi.
non sarà perfetto, ma ti cattura, grazie anche alla  bravura degli attori, che sembrano girare un documentario.
e bravo Alain Tanner, naturalmente, insieme a John Berger, sceneggiatore.
da vedere, davvero unico - Ismaele

Il montaggio della sequenza iniziale è magistrale nel confondere l'idea di verità e aprire il varco a dubbi e insinuazioni. E' stato un incidente o lo sguardo di Rosemonde è colpevole?
Il secondo film di Tanner parte come un'inchiesta giornalistica che assume i contorni del giallo, ma ciò è un mero pretesto. La ricostruzione pedante del passato di Rosemonde in realtà è l'occasione per interrogarsi sulle condizioni che hanno determinato il fallimento di un'ideologia e individuare le ragioni per conservare l'idea di libertà nell'inestinguibile giogo capitalistico.
Il tempo nei primi film di Tanner è sempre il post-'68, volutamente e inevitabilmente.
Lo spazio, altro elemento imprescindibile, è una Ginevra filmata come luogo al confine con la Francia in cui si mescolano le vicende di frontalieri e persone in movimento…

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Alain Tanner’s “The Salamander”
Public intellectuals and liberation of Rosemonde
Rosemonde is an existentially gifted girl from a poor family who is neglected by the culture, abused by people and exploited by the system that keeps her on mechanical job and cheap mindless entertainment. When impoverished intellectuals appear in her life she gradually starts to feel that she as if was waiting for them since her childhood. Relations with them make her understand her weaknesses and potentials and taught her to respect her humanity and be intellectually alert.
“The Salamander” is Tanner’s early attempt to find a political meaning in personal friendship in an epoch when progressive political agenda either becomes petty and purely financially oriented or streamlined and dissolved into conformism.
The most fascinating aspect of the film is Tanner’s depiction of the creative process of trying to understand the world better as a part of personal relations. What always was considered as the function of individual mind became a function of actual existential togetherness. We see how intellectual process can be not retrospectively but future-oriented and be the very living through friendship.

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…C’est un objet étrange, qui ne se donne pas à la légère, et dont la poésie impure - entre cinéma du réel, film d’avant-garde, drame social et comédie enjouée - peut enthousiasmer, ou lasser, c’est au choix. Forcément affublé de la triste réputation de film intelli-chiant ici et là (la palme revenant au "fameux" Rogert Ebert, inventeur du mythique Two Thumbs Up et qui nous gratifie sur son site web d’un "le film aurait du s’appeler L’escargo (sic)" comme seul appareil critique), le film risque forcément de rebuter les cinéphiles déjà rétifs aux essais de la Nouvelle Vague - quand bien même La Salamandrereste dans sa globalité d’une facture assez classique. Les plus curieux, ou les cinéphages déjà sensibles aux charmes de Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000, seront eux bien avisés de (re)donner leur chance au film d’Alain Tanner. Tract politique railleur et joueur, La Salamandre est une œuvre d’art funambule, tristement gaie, joyeusement triste, portrait amouraché de trois freaks suisses qui "cherchent à maintenir leur indépendance, leur intégrité morale, dont ils ont un besoin vital, au sein d’une société qu’ils critiquent et qui les ennuie" (Jacques Lourcelles). Balançant constamment entre anarchie burlesque (désopilante scène de la machine à saucisse, interventions incongrues des représentants du gouvernement…) et spleen urbain (la très belle voix-off finale), le film fait au bout du compte forte impression. Il remporta à l’époque un succès tout bonnement inimaginable aujourd’hui, entraînant un quart de la population de Lausanne dans les salles, et un million de spectateurs en rab de par le monde.Magie d’un cinéma contestataire et subversif qui avait alors le bon goût de ne laisser personne sur le bord de la route. A redécouvrir d’urgence.

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…Viewers start to understand that there is something wrong in addressing human problems with scientific vigor alone, that understanding should be completed by caring about development of intelligence of concrete people. Paul’s project of writing Rosemonde’s story collapses in spite of him being correct about her behavior and motivations – her real presence as if dissipated the spirits of ideas. While watching the film we start to feel the artificial overemphasis on science including humanistic science in today’s democracies by the price of under-emphasizing the care about people’s intellectual and existentially spiritual development.

The film pays attention to the idolatrous tendency in human culture (our proclivity to idolize realities instead of living with them) which tends to separate the idea of love from the idea of sex, and the idea of sex from the common humanity of all human beings. Culture idealizes love into the idol of eternal love, and simultaneously fetishizes sexuality into sex as a goal in itself. According to the film, we underestimate our common humanity as the most basic and sacred commons we have – its precious emotional reservoir – the source of our intuition and thinking, the ability to disinterestedly love each other and of our creative gift to modify our ways of life.

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