No need to make invidious comparisons, but the films of Alain Tanner came closer to me than Godard’s. If you dug Jonas who will 25 in the Year 2000, click the link above and watch Jonas and Lila, Until Tomorrow, which Tanner made in 1999. In this film, Jonas (Jerome Robart) is…25, has studied cinema and lives with Lila (Aissa Maiga) — the Afropean woman he’s loved since they met in nursery school. A savant in the movie muses the world will be saved by a European-African axis. Jonas and Lila represent that axis in their bold as love-sexy scenes. Their connection is tight, though they’re scuffling at temp jobs and despair is in the Millennial air (as it was at the end of the first Jonas). For me, the movie builds to the scenes when Lila goes back to her country of origin, Senegal, as Jonas films her with his tiny camera. He’s not the sole director in Dakar. Lila weighs in: “At home you can film whatever you want, but not here. Don’t film refuse. [Jonas had been shooting garbage dumps in Europe.] Ecology is only for the rich.” Not that Jonas needs to be told. He’s alive (like Lila) to the difference between poverty and destitution (which he knows “you must not film”). And both of them understand Sens are not (in general) bereft of dignity. There’s a sweet climax when Lila appears out of Europa to her grandmother who lets out an Afro-blue yodel. It reminds me of how my own wife’s surprise-arrival shocked her beloved youngest sister on her last trip back home to Senegal. (Awa fainted dead away and it took a while to revive her.) Tanner’s Lila grew up in Europe (unlike my wife). She’s at ease in Dakar but not at home and her trip leaves her thinking about what it means to be a human being: “Someone once said only trees have real roots.” I’m not with Lila (entirely) when it comes to roots vs. routes, but I feel her earned clarities along with Jonas’s affirmation that his country doesn’t exist yet.
Tanner never settled for the way we live now. Yet his movies don’t fade into futurist fantasies or sur-reality. Nor are they cut off from the legacy of true solidarities. Maybe that’s why you can’t take your eyes off Lila’s red panties as she lies on her stomach next to her lover and reads aloud: “We’re the children of a devastated world, who are trying to born into a new world. Learning to be human is the only radical thing.”
Not that Tanner was a permanent Red. He had no illusions about “Communism.” (Lila will take those panties off!) But maybe he guessed Europe won’t get to a left-of-red future without remembering what the people there once believed was possible. B.D.