Charles, Dead or Alive (1969) User Reviews

"Hope is going away slowly" (Charles Dé)

[hasosch · 10/10 · 16 April 2009]

Although Alan Tanner will celebrate at the end of this year (2009) his 80st birthday, there is not a single one of his films available on DVD. For the New Yorker Film releases of his videos high prices are paid. Does Switzerland care so little about their very few internationally know film makers? First, Alan Tanner is and was practically unknown in German speaking Switzerland, where most of the Swiss movies are made. Second, besides a few recent movies by Fredi Murer, Xavier Koller, Markus Imhoof, also the German language Swiss movies are not available outside of Switzerland.

"Charles mort ou vif" is a typical Tanner-movie insofar as it describes uncompromisingly the inner road someone has to go almost with necessity to the bitter end after he or she had decided to break with society. This central topic in Alain Tanner's work is later treated splendidly in "Messidor" and "La Salamandre". In the present movie, 50 years old Charles Dé does not see any sense anymore in leading his watch factory. Similarly like Marie et Jeanne from "Messidor", he starts his new life-experiment by just vanishing. Like the two girls, he dislocates into a cheap hotel and spends his days by experiencing the emptiness of space and time - like Paul in "The White City". However, like all his Tanner-relatives, also Charles alias Carlo has to make the bitter experience that the emptiness gives birth to monsters. Finally, he meets a couple of dropouts or drifters (there is no real word in English) who live from occasional work that nourishes more or less. Together with his new friends, "Carlo" reads now Bakunin, paints, cooks and learns calender quotations by heart. Sometimes he has break-downs, and these he cures with schnapps in the next inn. When his new friend has a heavy accident, he incites his daughter to break into his company by night and open the safe. Besides regular contact with his daughter who is as Marxist as he is, "Carlo" has no contact with the rest of his family anymore. But Switzerland is a free state, and based on this freedom, his son succeeds in convincing a physician to classify Carlo's newly discovered political maxims and his new way of life as insane. So, one bright day, Carlo has to start his trip into the light, brutally forced by two madhouse-nurses who take him away in an ambulance.

More dead than alive

[federovsky · 4 November 2020]

A small-scale industrialist decides he's had enough, for no clearly elucidated reason, and does a runner. He discards his glasses, adopts a false name and lands first in a seedy hotel where he lies morosely in bed all day. Up to this point--apart from a dull television interview (did the French really take that kind of thing seriously?)--the film was intriguing enough, but once Mr Dé hooks up with a funky Bohmenian couple there is little further development. And thanks to the overbearing character played by Marcel Robert--some kind of gentle giant--the film becomes an irksome labour to watch, like a morose 'Jules et Jim'. The film would have been better off without the Bohemians altogether, and, we cannot but help suppose, so would Mr Dé.

The action is mainly static and bereft of interesting images or cinematic movement. People sit around or stand around lamenting about nothing in particular in mournful tones and spouting philosophical epigrams with a degree of pretentiousness that only the French don't realise is pretentious. The film is almost entirely composed of these conversations. Some scenes only serve to disengage, with odd behaviour (running up a gravel mound), blatant symbolism (pushing a car off a cliff), much awkward, self-conscious acting as if the actors were embarrassed to be bogged down in all the forced meaning, and terrible directing, such as when Mr Dé is sitting at a table in a cafe absurdly squeezed up to two other people who don't even look at him when he starts an unpleasant drunken tirade.

This is the fag end of the leftist utopia that went up in flames the previous year. Yes, we get the loss of identity and sense of despair, but was there no other treatment than this? In 'The Bedsitting Room', Spike Milligan also dealt with the last flickering of the human spirit in a wrecked world, but that was a work of surreal genius. This humourless and tendentious allegory of lost hope is hard going and only fans of wintry atmosphere will find it worthwhile.