Word: tanners
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...critic that shows through most plainly. Tanner has watched Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer closely, and he has learned his lessons well. His story, realistic enough in substance, has that fringe of the unlikely which made the best of the New Wave so eminently palatable. Pierre (Jean-Luc Bideau), a struggling young writer, is commissioned to produce a television script to be based on a recent incident in the news: a young girl called Rosemonde was accused by her uncle of attempted murder with his old army rifle. The girl, for her part, claimed the gun went off while the uncle...
...turn into repetition on the one hand and polemic on the other. Chabrol churned out Chabrols and Truffaut, Truffauts. Daniel Cohn-Bendit gave Godard politics. No one gave Resnais money. This same vacuum which so facilitated the ascension of Eric Rohmer seems likely to do similarly for Alain Tanner. But like Rohmer. Tanner at his moment of success is no fresh young talent. He is a middle-aged Swiss with a varied career behind him that includes apprenticeship with the BBC, a stint in the Swiss navy and, most recently, time spent as a film critic...
...progressive entanglement of the three figures--they become inseparable friends a la Jules et Jim--makes the original writing project more and more problematic until it is abandoned altogether. At this point, the focus shifts entirely to the characters themselves. But here, as always. Tanner's method depends on calculated understatement, and the complex triangle of interrelationships is always submerged, never obtrusive...
This is the core of Tanner's method, to tease up a raft of dramatic possibilities and leave them suggestively unresolved. Events are never permitted to reach any sort of well-defined conclusion, and by the end of the film, the initial themes and dramatic situations have all been discarded What remains is the figure of Rosemonde herself. A poor working girl of rural origin she has little formal education and no political consciousness. She likes rock music and sex and has a poster on the Beatles on her wall. What she has most importantly, though are all those characteristics...
THIS KIND OF CULT of the character has always lurked in the background of the New Wave. In its least excusable forms, in something like Truffaut's Bed and Board, the idiosyncratic appeal of a central character is used to cover weaknesses in argument or narrative structure. But Tanner is thoroughly conscious of the distracting quality of his Rosemonde, and in fact it is this that forms the underlying thematic concern of the film. La Salamandre is ultimately about this process of the single character preempting all argument. Rosemonde listens tolerantly to the quasi-Marxist arguments of her two lovers...