Main Cast: Jean-Luc Bideau, Myriam Boyer, Dominique Labourier, Myriam Mezieres, Rufus, Roger Jendly
Release Year: 1976
Country: FR/CH
Run Time: 116 minutes
Plot
The revolutionary upheaval of 1968 rocked Europe, and led to many changes. For a while, it was possible to think that the radical idealism of the youth protests would finally take form in the world. In this film, eight people in their late tweties and early thirties try to keep the radical flames burning. From a man continuing his mystic quest to a Robin Hood-like grocery worker, each of them seeks an alternative to the mainstream vision. One of them is married, and his child Jonah, born that year, will be 25 in the year 2000. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
Review
Swiss director Alain Tanner remains one of the few mainstream European filmmakers capable of incorporating an extreme leftist political sentiment into a feature-length screen comedy while gingerly avoiding preachiness. With Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 -- undoubtedly Tanner's masterwork -- the director builds his story on a simple yet profound theme: as the Rousseau voice-over at the outset states, the film takes as its central "message" the idea that Western man has become enslaved to civilization and its institutions. The basic story thus crosscuts events from the lives of eight "radicals" in Geneva who wish to liberate themselves -- loveable oddballs who spend their weeks challenging the social norm (or "damning the man") in hilarious and occasionally bizarre ways: supermarket checker Marie (Miou-Miou) undercuts the capitalism of her grocery store by significantly undercharging customers; history professor Marco Perly (Jacques Denis) bucks standardized teaching methods by illustrating principles of time with blood sausages and discussing his desire for a ménage à trois in front of students; Matthieu Vernier (Rufus) gives up proofreading work for shoveling horse manure on a farm but later establishes a kind of alternative classroom in a greenhouse for elementary schoolers; and Max Stigny (Jean-Luc Bideau) defies an entrepreneur's attempts to swindle farm families by warning the agrarians of the scam ahead of time -- and these are only a few of the many examples. As a kind of stylistic accessory to the characters' attempts to break out of the fabric of civilization, Tanner scatters throughout the picture periodic dream sequences that represent wild formic challenges to our standard expectations of what narrative film can and cannot do: characters engage in singalongs, their sexual fantasies are visualized, Tanner cuts to wartime newsreel footage, and one character even delivers a direct aside to the camera. The eight central characters' constant, heady philosophical musings (from Diderot, Rousseau, Piaget, and others) bring the film close to Rohmer territory, but Tanner's stylistic playfulness gives the picture a giddy, effervescent quality, a wonderfully lighthearted unpredictability, and the spirit of high comedy throughout that -- per the characters' gleeful anarchism -- make us believe almost anything is possible. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Jacques Denis - Marco Perly; Miou-Miou - Marie; Raymond Bussières - Charles; Maurice Aufair; Gilbert Costa; Pierre Holdener; Jean Schlegel; Christine Wipf; Francis Reusser; Daniel Stuffel; Guillaume Chenevière; Michel Fidanza; Robert Schmid; Nicole Die; Domingo Semedo; Mady Deluz; Jiairo Daghini
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (French: Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000) is a 1976 Swiss film directed by Alain Tanner and written by Tanner and John Berger. The location of the shooting was Geneva.
The film follows the lives of couples in the wake of the social and political tumult of May 1968 in France, the various people including a history professor, a trade unionist and a bohemian.
The film was favourably reviewed by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. : "There are eight key characters in Jonah, all in their twenties or thirties, and all seeking solutions to the problems brought to general consciousness by the events of 1968. Not one of them is a comfortable bourgeois; they're the sort of fantasists and obsessives who were considered marginal before 1968...Each of the eight characters is a utopian of some sort, except for the disillusioned former activist, Max..Each of these people is autonomous, looks for his own answers, and acts upon them, and together, the film suggests, they can give birth to a Jonah who will have the acumen to connect their visions..Miou-Miou's the most purely enjoyable person in the movie. This tumble-dried blonde, the Brigitte Bardot the cat dragged in, doesn't look as if she could be an actress, but she certainly is...Marie has a friend in France, Old Charles, a retired railroad worker, to whom she brings stolen groceries; he is played by the veteran French character actor Raymond Bussières, familiar from Casque d'or and films by Clouzot and René Clair. Together, Miou-Miou and Bussières act out fantasies in brief set pieces..The whole film is designed as a collection of little routines..Jonah is so ingeniously constructed that one can enjoy it the way one enjoyed Renoir's egalitarian films of the thirties, relating to each character in turn. " [1]
