Word: tanners
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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...
Directed by ALAIN TANNER...
Screenplay by ALAIN TANNER and JOHN BERGER...
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...
...Middle of the World, steady and bright and acted with well-modulated intensity by Carlisi and Leotard, is on less certain ground as political metaphor. The movie begins with some narration about political flux and the process of "normalization" that gives the plot a somewhat schematic cast. Tanner takes trouble to establish the class differences between the two lovers, but he is better at dealing with sexual politics than theoretical ones. The Middle of the World is truer as object lesson than tract, better on the realities of love than the stalled struggle of the classes...