La salamandre (The Salamander). 1971. Switzerland/France. Directed by Alain Tanner. Screenplay by Tanner, John Berger. With Buller Ogier, Jean-Luc Bideau, Jacques Denis. 4K digital restoration by Florian Leupin for filmo-Verein CH. Film, in collaboration with DNA Films SA, the Association Alain Tanner and the Cinémathèque suisse. In French; English subtitles. 124 min.
Very much of a piece with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall —who is this woman, who may or may not have committed a crime?—The Salamander brought Bulle Ogier together with the Swiss writer-director Alain Tanner on a great, though still underappreciated, film about ways of seeing and the slipperiness of truth. Perhaps fittingly, this was the second of Tanner’s ongoing collaborations with the English art critic and novelist John Berger. (Their first was a documentary portrait of Le Corbusier’s remaking of the ancient Indian city of Chandigarh; their most successful came a few years later, in 1976, with Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, a cult hit that seemed to speak for an entire generation of disaffected post-1968 youth.) Bulle Ogier finds in The Salamander one of her most satisfyingly elusive roles: a woman who ultimately remains as much a stranger to herself as to the two writers who try to pin her down through fiction and documentary as they write a television script. New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed, “Its sense of comedy reminds me of both Truffaut (Jules and Jim) and early Godard, whose love for the young Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie and Bande à part is recalled by Tanner’s fascination with Miss Ogier. She is sometimes beautiful, sometimes brilliant, sometimes a slob, sometimes beyond mortal comprehension—and always infinitely appealing. She is a woman loved.”