Word: adriana
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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...
...PAUL and Adriana leave the restaurant and reach the engineer's flashy red sportscar, the waitress, until now aloof, looks her suitor in the eye and says in a low, seductive voice. "And now I want to show you the real middle of the world." The scene cuts to her bedroom, where the two quickly doff their inhibitions and their clothes and slip under the sheets, quickly reaching the first of the many climaxes that shape their deepening affair...
...middle of a social world to an insistently personal universe, the couple's ties to the external world are rarefied into a complicated universe of pallid symbols. The political bosses' strategy to address only non-controversial, non-political issues and to sell Paul as a Mr. Clean figure: Adriana's difficulty in keeping her customers' hands off her backside; her mysterious departure from her working-class neighborhood in Italy--the very relations that lend this affair between a married middle-class engineer and a lower-class waitress more than merely psychological significance become only ponderous ornaments adorning a theme...
FROM THE FILM'S start, when an elusive voice perfunctorily declares that "this film, like all events, takes place at a particular time in a particular place," we are prepared for a violation of the usual rules of narrative. To say that Paul and Adriana's relationship "develops" as it would, say, in a nineteenth-century English novel, would be to misrepresent Tanner's technique, which, with its series of furtive, sometimes unconnected glimpses into their lives, attempts to reproduce on film the texture of everyday life. Just as affairs in reality are a series of fits and starts, with...
Besides this seemingly more "faithful" representation of reality. Tanner uses a disjunctive montage--scenes begin and end arbitrarily--that endows trivial gestures and cursory phrases with a heightened significance. Paul, driving his car along a country road after visiting Adriana, pulls into a dirt lane, pushes back his seat, rolls up the window, and closes his eyes to go to sleep--then another date announcing a new day flashes on the screen. Adriana sits alone nude in her drab room, cooking some broth on her hot plate; she gets up from her chair and slips into a robe; she returns...