Word: adriana
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately, the movement of Alain Tanner's direction mirrors the course of his protagonist's development. As Paul begins to miss appointments, muff speeches, and generally lose interest in his own campaign, as he becomes involved with the waitress, Adriana (Olimpia Carlisi). The Middle of the World loses its promised dialectical interweaving of the social with the personal, collapsing into a solipsistic world of passion and despair. The turning point, both in Paul's fortunes as well as the potential of the film, occurs one evening when Paul and Adriana dine in a local restaurant named appropriately enough, the Middle...
...young Italian girl (Olimpia Carlisi), having just emigrated to Switzer land, finds a job waiting on tables in a railroad cafe. Adriana has a quiet single-mindedness that could be mistaken for stubbornness. She also has a distinct pride in herself, a trust in her own heart, that makes her seem both vulnerable and accessible...
...town that some of the local burghers choose him for a local political post. Paul has the sort of model anonymity that in politics can pass for an identity. As he starts to run for of fice, making the rounds of small political interest groups, he also runs into Adriana. He is drawn to her immediately, and his equilibrium becomes a poor and tenuous thing...
Aloof and Sexy. Alain Tanner, a Swiss film maker (La Salamandre), is especially smart in his portrait of the affair between Adriana and Paul, a romance that teaches truths only the woman is prepared to accept. Tanner seduces his audience, just as Paul is seduced, with the heat and affection of the affair. The Middle of the World is both aloof and sexy, qualities Tanner employs to characterize the romance and, finally, to limit...
...relationship between Adriana and Paul seems so alive that at first the deadening quality of it is not apparent. Paul has been careful and loving with Adriana, even runs the risk of losing the election. But really he has been sparing himself from some final commitment to Adriana by regarding her, however lovingly, as just a bedmate. When Adriana finally recognizes this and acts on it, Paul is baffled, and we are startled. With Paul, we have been beguiled by the very qualities that Adriana, intuitively, has started to out grow. In the end she moves...