La Salamandre (1971)
Directed by Alain Tanner

Film Review

Despite being made on a modern budget and with what was, even at that time, pretty crude technology, La Salamandre stands as a landmark European film.  It comes from a time when the Swiss film industry was beginning to gain international interest for the first time, thanks to the emergence of a wave of talented young directors.  The film is both a wondrously tongue-in-cheek assault against the staid phoney morality of the Swiss bourgeoisie and a timely ironic riposte to the well-meant offerings from the politically minded French New Wave film-makers of the time.

The events of May 1968 was still fresh in most people's minds when this film was made, with most of Western Europe experiencing a dramatic cultural and political transformation.  Whilst some European directors (most notably Jean-Luc Godard) were actively promoting the cause of left-wing politics in their films, others - such as Alain Tanner - were more preoccupied with loss of individuality as society became increasingly homogeneous and regimented, helped by American-led consumerism and the power of big business.

In this, the second of his full-length films, Tanner shows how rebels are regarded in his native Switzerland.  In that most conformist of states, where everyone is expected to conform to the letter, there is no place for eccentricity or a rebellious temperament.  The film implies that anyone who fails to toe the line in this most ordered of countries is either mad or a criminal.  Tanner is of course being provocative, but his observations are not too far removed from reality, and the film offers an insight into Swiss society in the early 1970s as well as being an entertaining piece of satire.

In what is very probably her most memorable film role, the incomparable Bulle Ogier skilfully portrays Tanner's vision of a free-spirited rebel who is constantly abused and taunted by a mindlessly ordered society.  Her commanding performance - pitched somewhere between Nikita and Eliza Doolittle - allows us to sympathise with the plight of her character, even if she appears flighty and dangerously unpredictable.  Along with her two exemplary co-stars, Jean-Luc Bideau and Jacques Denis, Bulle Ogier is clearly having a great deal of fun, something which gives the film a feeling of warmth and light-heartedness which is noticeably lacking in Tanner's subsequent work.

The search for individual freedom and the need to rebel against a cold mechanistic world are themes which Alain Tanner returns to again and again, with increasing pessimism, in his later films, but never as playfully and obliquely as in La Salamandre.

Film Synopsis

Pierre, a writer, enlists the help of a friend, Paul, to investigate a real-life story in which a young woman, Rosmonde, was tried for the attempted murder of her uncle.  The courts accepted Rosmonde claim that her uncle accidentally wounded himself whilst cleaning his rifle and she was acquitted of the alleged crime.  Intrigued by the rebellious young woman, Pierre and Paul gain her confidence and try to discover whether she did indeed try to kill her uncle.