La Vallée fantôme (1987) - film review

An ageing writer Paul is determined to make a film but he cannot decide on the subject or location.  Instead, he chooses to concentrate his efforts on finding the actress who will star in the film, believing that she will define the lead character and content of the film.  He recruits a young man, Jean, to try to find an Italian actress, Dara, whom he has lost sight of.  Jean finds Dara in a small Italian town, serving in a modest restaurant, but she refuses to return to acting...

Typical of Tanner’s later works, La Vallée fantôme is a pessimistic, loosely structured film which is centred around one man’s futile attempts to regain his lost inspiration.  A sombre and melancholic work, it portrays a world that has lost it way and, like its central character, goes on drifting without any clear purpose or passion.  In some ways, it is Tanner’s bleakest assessment of the way the world is heading – not towards economic disintegration or social fragmentation (themes of his 1970s films) but towards a dull, meaningless conformity.

The plot shifts rather awkwardly between four locations (set in France, Switzerland, Italy and New York) and lacks the cohesion and impact of Tanner’s earlier films.  However, the film features pleasing performances from the three lead actors – particularly Jean-Louis Trintignant who is perfectly cast as the slightly cynical introverted screenwriter who has a wonderfully naive view of human relationships.  The film also differs from much of Tanner’s other films in its abundance of dry comedy, making this one of the director’s lighter and most accessible works.

© James Travers 2002

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If you, the viewer, like to be not just a consumer of art but its creator or a co-creator (a qualified interpreter of works of art), this film is made for you. It will teach you what demands art has for those who dare to come close to its magic aura. It will show you how art influences the people who are involved in its creation and co-creation. And it will demonstrate to you how psychologically mature these people should be to be able to continue to live with art, not to lose rapport with its fascinating and stimulating emanation.

To watch this film means to experience the power of art to ignite life, to awaken people who are tired and have lost the zest for living into a readiness for existential experimentation and intellectual breakthroughs. In this sense art is uniting people around itself - it has the power to attract like a magnet attracts metal sawdust. But it is the responsibility of the people to stay united - art intensifies the life in them, but life is a great discord creator.  Art and life are antagonists. Art makes human emotions centripetal, life centrifugal.

Everything that happens with the characters of this film is a personification of complicated ontological relationships between art and life. It is very difficult for human beings not to be crashed by the encounter with these two angelic/demonic powers - art and life. Only those who are able to develop psychologically are capable to monitor frustrations about behavior of each other, to sublimate their reactions and unify again around the art will be enriched by the contact with it to become more creative in life and more vital in their contact with art.   The whole film is a psychodrama of the love affair with art and with life. Jean-Louis Trintignant with his rich intellectual and spiritual experiences in art and life is our reliable guide through the Phantom Valley.

To read articles dedicated to films by Godard, Bergman, Kurosawa, Bresson, Bunuel, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Bertolucci, Alain Tanner and Liliana Cavani please visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com
© Victor Enyutin 2010  

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