Höhenfeuer

Because I am a big fan of both movies and lame generalisations, welcome to the first exciting installment of

Unfair Assumptions Brought To Us By The World Of Swiss Cinema*

Yesterday I watched Höhenfeuer, a (Swiss) movie about a family living in an isolated house on a mountain. The parents are quite old, the mother has a bit of a religious mania, the daughter left for a while to go to school and study to be a teacher, but then she was brought back to teach the son, who is deaf. They never really see anyone, apart from the parents of the mother who live in a similarly isolated house on the next mountain, and who they can see only with the use of binoculars. This movie was two solid hours of dramatic scenery and meaningful looks, and very little dialogue. Actually, it was a lot better than I have made it sound, being chockablock full of complex personal relationships, wild scenery and claustrophobic atmosphere (which is a bit ironic given all the bracing open air and space to be found on an isolated mountainside).

To what unfair assumptions about the Swiss does Höhenfeuer lead us? Unfortunately, I think a lot of the potential lessons are not really Switzy-specific. There are things like "don't raise your children in weird isolation on top of a mountain and then be all surprised when they turn to each other for love and solace" and "being judgemental isn't really beneficial for anyone", but I don't know that you really need movies to tell you these things.

Perhaps the most (potentially) useful lesson that we can fandangle from the movie is "be careful what you say to a Switzy, because if it sends him into a mad rage he's probably only a few steps away from his gun which he keeps conveniently stashed behind the door/under the bed and which he would be perfectly content to use in order to satisfy his seething inner turmoil". And possibly also something about how being a family of semi-hermitty and potentially nuts mountain-dweller types isn't necessarily as "Heidi" as it's cracked up to be.

* Incidentally, because I am quite the movie buff and was for seemingly ever in a pesky international relationship with a Switzy, for a long time I looked all over the place for some Swiss movies to watch. The only one I ever found was this weird movie about a mad girl and some sort of big castley house and an inept assasin who was trying to kill her but kept on failing. I think there might have been some philosophising policement involved too, and a lot of fog, but I am not really sure any more. Happily the local library here seems to have a clutch of arty and aging Switzy movies (complete with english subtitles, yay) for my generalising pleasure. Oh, and I also realise that it's not really "world" of cinema if it's only Swiss, but quit your nitpicking, I say. Plus a "world of Swiss cinema" sounds much more statistically valid than "the three or four Swiss movies to be found at the Aargauische Kantonsbibliothek".