Années Lumières, Les
Switzerland / France,
1981, 105 min
Shown in 1981
CREDITS
- dir
-
Alain Tanner
- prod
-
Bernard Lorain
- scr
-
Alain Tanner
- cam
-
Jean-Francois Robin
- cast
-
Trevor Howard, Mick Ford, Bernice Stegers, Henri Virloguex, Odile Schmitt
This is Alain Tanner’s first film in English. Since his return to Switzerland in 1960, after living abroad for eight years, he had gained an international reputation for a series of intense, psychological observations of Swiss heroes and heroines, in their private ideological realms, hermetic and emotionally restless. Two of his features, La Salamandre and Jonas Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, have been successful with film devotees, and Messidor has recently been released in the United States. His newest work was controversially received at the 1981 Cannes Festival because it is totally unlike Tanner’s previous films: it is a parable, half-real, half-fantasy, with firm implantation in realistic Irish locations. Whimsy was not expected and, yet, no one denied that Light Years Away is a haunting, elegiac motion picture: the film of a poet. A 17-year-old drifter, Jonas, has reached a dead end in his pursuit of experience and mature self-confidence. By chance, he is led to seek out an eccentric 60-year-old garage owner named Yoshka. The garage has been out of business for two decades, but the old man continues to live in its dilapidated surroundings, littered with the hulks of rotting autos. A neighbor tells Jonas that Yoshka has been studying birds for years (the garage is full of them) because the ultimate goal in his life is to be able to fly by himself. Yoshka is hostile to Jonas at first but, little by little, a relationship grows, one that is like a rite-of-passage for the youth, toward possession of whatever secret wisdom Yoshka might reveal. The old man has glimpsed, somehow, a Utopia still beyond reach, and the drama becomes Jonas’ burgeoning spiritual awareness and his final understanding of Yoshka’s dreams. The legendary quality of Ireland’s landscapes and its disordered mystery are completely opposite to the signaled banality of Switzerland’s beautiful surroundings—the proper, but new, environment for Tanner’s unusual characters. Trevor Howard’s portrait of testy, enigmatic senility is a wondrous creation, a perfect complement to Mick Ford’s altogether realistic image of Jonas. Light Years Away is a clever, philosophical challenge, speaking to each spectator in a personal way—it dares one to question if he is apprentice or master, moving toward eternity.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #85
In 1996, Harvey Keitel was the first recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award, honoring “brilliance, independence and honesty” in acting. Honest he was. During the clip show at his tribute Keitel, unhappy with one of the clips, began waving his arms and shouting until the screen went black. The screen lit up with a new clip and the tribute continued.
