In Alain Tanner’s Messidor, two young women
randomly meet while hitchhiking, sharing a ride and then getting out together
when they decide the driver’s a creep, continuing along together for a while,
spending the night in the woods, and then just going on and on, in a vaguely defined
game of no clear purpose and with no way to win, especially after some of their
actions (including stealing a policeman’s loaded gun) have their names and
faces on TV as wanted and possibly even dangerous criminals. Looked at one way,
the film presents a slow stripping-away of resources and possibilities, the
girls visibly worn and hungry, and yet they keep going, surmounting occasional
frictions, unlocking occasional ecstasies, getting help even from some people
who recognize them. Tanner takes them through a dizzying volume of encounters
and pivots while eliding some major points: whether the women at one point have
sex with each other, or at another with two bikers (notwithstanding all the other men
they resist, sometimes violently); there’s even a faint suggestion that a bullet
fired into the sky as a plane flies overhead might have caused it to crash. It’s
very much a product of the old Europe, with frequent language barriers and a
recurring awareness of borders, but allowing glimpses of elevating release from
stifling convention (the title, we’re told, refers to one of the months in the alternative
calendar used during the French revolution). Near the end, one of the women
muses on where all the people in the street can be going to or coming from,
recalling how as a child she was amazed at the knowledge that everyone went
home to their own bed; it’s both a fundamental incomprehension of the world’s organizing
principles and also thereby a liberation, an ability to transcend, albeit only
briefly, and in inevitably doomed fashion, such stifling structure.
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