Word: jonah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is part of this new genre. Eight leftovers from the '60s, each holding fast to a different--but always unorthodox--ideology, come into contact through an organic farm on the outskirts of Geneva, where for a little while they seem to have found a viable alternative to the bourgeois life they disdain. Each character is as individual as the ideology he or she has adopted, ranging from Max, a former revolutionary whose total cynicism masks his despair, to Marcel, an artist who finds animals more interesting than people...
...social institutions. And at the end, as Mathieu returns to his factory, the camera returns to the philosopher's statue, suggesting that little has changed, that these idealists will never put their dreams into effect. Only their hope for a future world will sustain them. And a shot of Jonah in 1980, a small boy scribbling on a now-faded mural of the lunatic group, confirms that hope--he turns an impish smile to the camera, his rosy cheeks promising that somehow the future may be different...
...times the interaction of the characters in Jonah becomes a little tedious, as their exchange of philosophies and dreams forms much of the film's movement, and film is probably not the best medium for philosophical debates. But you have to hear them out in spite of that--writer-director Alain Tanner presents each of the characters as a kind of minor prophet, and you have to respect their ideas. Like his characters, Tanner seems to have rejected the bourgeois world--the eight of them are brought together as they fight against a bank's corrupt land-speculations. Like...
...group's newly-discovered hope reaches a high point in a beautiful, colorful scene in the kitchen, where Mathilde announces she is pregnant. Laughing, teasing each other about their eccentricities, they sing together of the future, when the 20th century will disgorge the unborn Jonah into a future remodelled for his benefit. Here on the farm they have found a retreat from the capitalist world in the communal spirit that has given them hope again...
...Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is not a movie for either cynics or idealists. It reaffirms the faith that the outbursts of the '60s did in fact change something, that the demonstrators did not go back to the traditional values of bourgeois society; but it offers no hope for an immediate revolution. The characters are touched with a delightful madness, but their lunacy is about as helpless in the face of the establishment as it is hopeful. Their illusions are all these refugees have to sustain them; but only the distant future offers...