Lenz

The other day I watched a movie and I had all sort of intentions of making some more

Unfair Assumptions Brought To Us By The World Of Swiss Cinema

but as it turns out, I find it a bit tricky with this film. It was called Lenz, and it was semi-German, semi-Swiss, entirely odd. It was about a tormented german filmmaker with a Swiss ex and a son, and tormented filmmaker man spent the whole time wallowing about in Zermatt in various states of lunacy, pining for the return of said son and ex. Which he actually had more success with than you would have thought, but happily for us, he also had a lot of disappointment and wackily erratic behaviour.

Unfortunately, I don't know if I should attribute the craziness to Switzies or to Germans, so I am going to make do, instead, with talking about how everyone in Switzerland eats the same kind of butter and the same kind of milk. Not that this is surprising, because there are very few different brands of supermarkets, and they don't really have a vast choice in most things (unless you are talking about the cheese section or the yoghurt section, because there you are wallowing in choice. Which doesn't sound very sanitary, everyone wallowing in the yoghurt section, but of course this is Switzerland and so it is only figurative wallowing, and even if it was literal, I'm sure someone would come along with a mop soon enough). I enjoyed seeing them buttering their toast with the same butter that I would butter mine with if we had toast-appropriate bread or a toaster, and drinking the same milk that i have on my cereal every morning, though. And then there was the scene on the balcony where their glass wall had the same stick-on bird pictures (to stop other birds from flying into the glass) as you see all over the place here.

Aah Switzerland, home of diversity.

Nachbeben

Unfair Assumptions Brought To Us By The World Of Swiss Cinema

Today I watched Nachbeben, a movie actually from this century (2006!) and it told me that Switzies are morally bankrupt, cruel and dishonest, but they are all rich and have really nice stuff.

It was about a bloke (HP) and his wife (Karin) and HPs best pal and business partner (Phillip) and his wife (Sue) and Phillip's business protégé (Toni) and the son of HP and Karin (Max) and Max's hot Danish nanny (Birthe. Although why Max needed a nanny was a bit of a mystery because he was at least 14 or so). They all got together for a barbeque at HP and Karin's super-fancy house, and then, in the manner of all those movies where a bunch of people go to someone's house, have a bit too much to drink and watch their lives fall apart, they all, unsurprisingly, had a bit too much to drink and watched their lives fall apart.

Nachbeben was an okay movie. I didn't like any of the characters much, and I thought that they sometimes did fairly inexplicable things, but their problems, although ludicrously predictable (who thinks someone was having an affair with the hot Scandy nanny? Anyone?), were interesting enough. I like these movies where all the action is contained within a certain space and time (like Peter's Friends, The Anniversary Party, The Big Chill etc. Or Festen, which I have somehow never seen. Incidentally, Nachbeben had a bit of a Dogma feel to it. The lighting was funny and the sound seemed to be a bit distant at times (although maybe that was just my computer) and the camera was quite wibbly occasionally. None of it in a bad way, more of a grainy realism kind of thing) and where, by the end of the party (or whatever) everything is out in the open but nothing is really fully resolved.

As it turns out, though, apparently no one else much cared for this movie (or possibly they had just seen it too many times already, because it really has been made a lot in the past). Reto had never even heard of it, and let's face it, if a Switzy who is reasonably interested in movies hasn't heard of it, then chances are that no one else in the world has either.

Die Schweizermacher

Carrying on my series of

Unfair Assumptions Brought To Us By The World Of Swiss Cinema

welcome to Die Schweizermacher.

Die Schweizermacher ("Swiss-makers") is about these two men whose job it is to interview and investigate people who have applied for Swiss citizenship (and in case you don't know, the Swiss are not really very enthusiastic about handing out passports willy nilly). The two main characters are Bodmer, who has been doing his job for years and is all grizzled and diligent and humourless, and his new young sidekick, Fischer, who has yet to learn to be quite as thorough and anal as Bodmer. Together they investigate an Italian man with a Swiss wife and children (and a wacky fondness for William Tell), a german psychiatrist and his wife, and a dancer of eastern-European origin who has lived in Switzerland all her life.

Die Schweizermacher is allegedly a satire, but as we all know, the Swiss have no sense of humour*, and so I shall consider the film as a documentary. Bearing that in mind, I'm not sure that we really learn anything new and surprising about Switzies. They are all nosy busybody types (like the neighbour of the dancer, Malena, who is only too pleased to report at length on Malena's fondness for distinguishing herself by using a brown garbage bag when everyone else in the building uses black), they are obsessively punctual, they expect the worst of foreigners (Bodmer looks through Malena's handbag when she is out of the room and steals from it what he suspects are drugs that she bought from her Turkish colleague but in reality is some sort of foot powder), they have appalling double standards (Bodmer tells Malena that she really should be married because Swiss life is all about family and children, but the middle aged Bodmer is single and lives with his mother). Oh, and once again we learn that the Swiss are not to be trusted with their guns and that they will probably do something insane with them (like the lunatic neighbour of Malena who shoots pigeons from his apartment window).

I really enjoyed Die Schweizermacher. Apparently it's one of the few Swiss movies that non-Swiss people have ever heard of (although it was made in 1978, so if you haven't heard of it you don't need to worry too much. I think it's heyday was a long time ago), and obviously when you watch it you realise that it is not a documentary. That being said, though, I do wonder how much truth there is behind it all, and I am inclined to suspect that a lot of the movie is more of an exaggeration of the truth rather than total fiction. It sort of reminds me of The Castle, actually, but obviously all the characters in The Castle were far nicer people than all the characters in Die Schweizermacher**. As you would expect.

* I am not only making Unfair Assumptions based on movies.
** I don't necessarily agree with this point, actually. I just felt obliged as a patriotic Australian to say it.

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".