NO MAN’S LAND, Tanner’s ninth full-length feature, is an adventure story. ? Not an adventure in the conventional sense that it sets out to be entertaining, but that it tells the story of four people trying to fulfill their most basic desires in life. A group of young people meet up regularly in a nightclub situated in a former customs house on the Swiss-French border, as a means of escape from their drab lives. NO MAN’S LAND is an ?in- between? film. Between staying and leaving, between Paul and Jean, about friendship, between Paul and Madelaine, Jean and Mali, Jean and Lucie, about love. Between Paul and his route of escape, Jean and his territory, Madelaine and her music, Mali and her exile. A sparse, beautiful film as a philosophical reflection on and a poetic, atmospheric representation of human homelessness. ?Alain Tanner has taken up and rearranged his recurrent topics: the state of suspension, a wavering between the home that we seek and the urge to flee combined with the inability to actually go to the station and board a train; the necessity of work and the hope of one day escaping the constraints of work; the yearning for distant lands, the unknown, the other, which in the end turns out to be more of the same old thing and is thereby an anticipation of the inevitable return.
Cast – Myriam Mezieres, Marie-Luce Felber, Betty Berr
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