Sexual Politics

By J. C.

THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD

Directed by ALAIN TANNER

Screenplay by ALAIN TANNER and JOHN BERGER

A young Italian girl (Olimpia Carlisi), having just emigrated to Switzer land, finds a job waiting on tables in a railroad cafe. Adriana has a quiet single-mindedness that could be mistaken for stubbornness. She also has a distinct pride in herself, a trust in her own heart, that makes her seem both vulnerable and accessible.

A Swiss engineer named Paul (Philippe Leotard) finds that she is not quite either. The circumstances of his comfortable life are so neatly arranged that his passions remain unthreatened. He is indeed such a model citizen of his small town that some of the local burghers choose him for a local political post. Paul has the sort of model anonymity that in politics can pass for an identity. As he starts to run for of fice, making the rounds of small political interest groups, he also runs into Adriana. He is drawn to her immediately, and his equilibrium becomes a poor and tenuous thing.

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 it.

The relationship between Adriana and Paul seems so alive that at first the deadening quality of it is not apparent. Paul has been careful and loving with Adriana, even runs the risk of losing the election. But really he has been sparing himself from some final commitment to Adriana by regarding her, however lovingly, as just a bedmate. When Adriana finally recognizes this and acts on it, Paul is baffled, and we are startled. With Paul, we have been beguiled by the very qualities that Adriana, intuitively, has started to out grow. In the end she moves on.

The 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.

-- j.c.

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