The Fateful Films of Alain Tanner

The UCLA Film Archive’s “The Films of Alain Tanner” continues this weekend in UCLA’S Melnitz Theater with a screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. of the quirky and amusing “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1975). The film is set in a Geneva commune whose young inhabitants were attempting to sort out their lives in the aftermath of May, 1968, that period of rebellion in France that sparked only to quash so many dreams across Europe. One of the things that it pondered was what life might be like for the baby son of a couple in the commune when he reaches 25.

Tanner couldn’t wait until 2000 to explore the answer, and the result is his 1981 film--his first in English--”Light Years Away” (which will be screened after “Jonah”), a fable at once earthy and otherworldly and centering on the relationship between the 25-year-old Jonah (Mick Ford) and an eccentric old recluse (Trevor Howard), living on the desolate west coast of Ireland. The recluse is his own kind of mystic, and the idea is that Jonah is to learn from him to commune with nature and himself. Life, prophesies Tanner, will be the same in 2000 as now in that we will still have a need to dream.

Saturday at 7:30 Tanner’s 1983 “In the White City,” a shimmering pipe dream of a movie in which Bruno Ganz, an engineer for whom an oil tanker’s cabin has grown too small and the ocean too big, turns deserter in Lisbon, drifting into a state of mind in which he launches into an odyssey of self-discovery; Tanner has always been fascinated with dropouts and what their actions reveal about highly conventionalized life in Switzerland. Even if Ganz’s engineer learns only how elusive the meaning of life finally is, his need to discover this truth is so overpowering that, for better or worse, it does transform his life.

Playing after “In the White City” is the superb “Messidor” (1979), which takes its title from the month of harvest in the French Revolutionary calendar. As two teen-age hitchhikers (Catherine Retore, Clementine Amouroux) drift into aimless wandering, the film reveals lots about what life can be like in Switzerland, which emerges beneath its picture-postcard appearance as a rather dull place where boredom flourishes amid prosperity and order. For all such commentary, which also deals with the role of television and the media in the teen-agers’ subsequent adventures, Tanner is above all preoccupied with the nature of fate, and what happens when people give themselves over to it, letting it direct their lives.

Information: (310) 206-FILM, (310) 206-8013.