Telluride 2023: Alain Tanner's <<Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000>>
Alfonso Cuarón notes the great collaborations of Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner and British writer-artist John Berger
At the time of Roma, Alfonso Cuarón readily name-checked Tanner’s bittersweet seriocomic masterpiece, 1976’s class-straddling Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000… (Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000…). Cuarón presented the film as guest co-director at Telluride 2023,/
When I was discovering films as a child in college, the witty, hearteningly earnest Jonah from Swiss director Alain Tanner and British writer-artist John Berger landed in the middle of a world of possibility. It's radical yet down-home, with an offhanded sophistication, far from didacticism. It's a roundelay of romance, hope and fear, politically inflamed, yet effortlessly compassionate.
Tanner's film features an ensemble of eight characters, casually attractive, fierily alive, all aware of impermanence. Four men and four women—“ten are too many, six too few,” Tanner said of the story’s structure and the characters he dubbed his “little prophets”—who are living precariously through their moment in 1975, in the city and suburbs outside Geneva. They face unemployment. Perhaps more uncomfortably, they face employment. Transactions are made again and again. The rising price of a packet of Gitanes is a marker of time.
They teach, they learn. “They are both in the mainstream end on the margins,” Robert Stam wrote in Jump Cut in 1977. “Earning their daily bread in the capitalist kingdom of means, they have their eyes affixed and their ears attuned to a distant kingdom of ends.” He writes later, “Jonah demystifies high art. Rather than something special and exalted, frozen into monuments and artifacts, art is shown to form part of the process of everyday life. Jonah locates art everywhere—in a casual pun, a stylized gesture, an eloquent statement, a well-sung song.”
“Their prophecies are little,” Tanner wrote about the film, “and they themselves are not conscious of being prophets in the traditional sense of the term. They never announced their prophecies, which only exist for them at the individual and existential level... This is why they are absurd, the way clowns can be. They would reply that it’s the world around them that is absurd. They would be right.”
Jonah is comprised of extended takes within a couple of dozen sequences—that are playful, kaleidoscopic, softly partaking in Brecht-like notions of alienation. In the end, it becomestender Brechtian spectacle about arriving at one’s failure and accepting it. Not embracing failure or ennobling it, but recognizing how our perception of our battles transform over time.
The world is good. Food and fucking are good. The rich are terrible. “Politics” is death. “Jonah” is both prophetic and post-apocalyptic, even the belly of this whale of historical moment. Berger and Tanner have a character highlight years when progressives expected change: 1905, 1945, 1968. The world would be different… Yet the world roils on. Cycles of fertility, cycles of agriculture, cycles of inflation also structure Jonah, and I remain grateful to again witness how something so intellectual and intellectualized can be also nimble, adroit, translucent.
Jonah feels particularly prophetic and post-apocalyptic in our moment. One of Berger and Tanner's characters highlights years when progressives hoped for the world to change: in 1905, 1945, 1968. And in 2023? Jonah would have been forty-eight.
Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000… (Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000… is not available for viewing in the United States.