The Swiss Alain Tanner’s French-language film is a fable for the post-sixties. It brings together the life-threads of eight characters who have been forever changed by the 1968 student revolution, in whom the roots of protest have twisted down deep and then sent shoots breaking up through the mundane sidewalk again. The greening takes different forms--insistence on organic gardening, eroticism according to the Tantra, devotion to animal life. Indeed, these individuated forms of revolution are the story of what happened to protest in the seventies.
To Max, a disillusioned Trotskyite played by Jean-Luc Bideau, these alternatives are poor substitutes for social change, “Nothing changed after the movement,” he complains. “Every thing is just crazes and fads. I see only Kissinger circling the globe.”
But as the expression of humans breaking away from societal institutions, the film loses some of its pure cinematic virtue and becomes tainted by the director’s didactic impulse. Set in Geneva, the film uses frequent shots of a statue of utopian Rousseau, and sprinkles the script with quotes from Piaget, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and the like--to the extent that bibliographic citations are run with the credits.
Tom Stoppard’s plays Travesties and Jumpers suffer from this same non-dramatic conflict of interests. The characters talk too much--much too much. They talk positions at each other instead of acting and interacting. The characters do not really affect each other; there is no chemistry, thus no community.
One impediment to this sort of relational development is sheer numbers. We attempt to follow all eight characters’ dreams, daydreams, and political ideas, without any more than a sketchy story line. This is conscious on director Tanner’s part, who disdains “Hollywood’s mindless narrative technique.” He intends to stir up the viewer’s ideas and motivations by presenting one with embodied attitudes and the emotional fields they exert.
Yet Robert Altman managed in Nashville to follow and develop several characters while conveying an overall artistic idea. Jonah is both too explicit and incoherent; hazy in cinematic virtues, it is overclear in its “message.”
The characters are all daydreamers and some are visionaries as well. Marcel, played soporifically by Roger Jendly, is a misanthropic artist who draws animals’ portraits from photographs he takes. His diatribes against the folly of human beings remind me of the filth-obsessed hitch-hiker in Five Easy Pieces. “Only animals have mystery,” he declares. “We’re the least interesting animals. We have no mystery.” By mystery he seems to mean the “inexpressive” cries of whales, in contrast to the meaningful sounds cats and dogs make.
In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Marcel convinces Mathieu (played by an actor called Rufus), a printer and union organizer out of work who has come to work on Marcel’s organic farm, that there is a conspiracy to force us all to eat shrimp--because they are killing the whales who ordinarily eat the shrimp--in order to make us wear whale-oil lipstick--and so there are mountains of uneaten shrimp crowding the sea--which we must eat with breakfast, dessert, and coffee! All this he declares while vehemently circling the apologetic Mathieu, who hardly knows whether to offer his human hand as he leaves.
Theirs is the only observable inter-influence in the film. All the rest of the characters bounce ideas off each other and so further define themselves, but remain unaffected. The only identifiable protagonist, Mathieu decides to conduct his own alternative school in a greenhouse, teaching the farm couple’s children. He plays tape-recorded whale cries and the children imitate them, sounding like a stranded seal colony, pleased with their successes. This idyllic enterprise lasts until Marguerite, Marcel’s hard-faced wife and manager of the farm, threatens to fire Mathieu if he doesn’t get back to shoveling manure. Riding his motorcycle away in anger, Mathieu reasons with himself and decides to use the others’ hopes as “levers”--to allow himself to be exploited, to go back to work to keep the group of eight idealists together.
His dreams of community (in a black and white sequence in which the eight have their life-size portraits chalked on a wall) contrast with the simply juvenile and vengeful fantasies of Marguerite (Dominique Laborer), who in imagination replaces a scheming bank executive with a snuffling pig in his desk chair. The blatancy of the symbol gives it away as a mere stand-in for verbal rhetoric, with none of the suggestive mystery or hints at further abstract-concrete correlations that a good symbol should have. It is a cartoon sledge hammer where a sculptor’s chisel is wanted.
Most of the dream sequences disturbed me. Sometimes they revealed a character’s significant memories and associations, as in Max’s sudden mental newsreels of the 1968 riots or of German troops marching. But even then they were simply black and white sequences spliced into the film, apparently arbitrarily, without the kind of continuity between them that could have made for another stratum of ideas lacing the film. Instead they were isolated vignettes of the interior lives of the eight, as unrelated to other fantasies as the characters were to each other. The haphazard editing threw the viewer’s attention from one character to the next and from his waking thoughts to his dreams, with no indication of organizing principle or conceptual line. Political positions and emotions were set out in a curiously flat, didactic way.
These failures must be laid at the doors of Tanner and his editor, Brigitte Sommelier. Not enough attention is given by the scenarist to deliberately guiding the thoughts and associations of the viewer by anticipating and imitating his responses. So the dream sequences and certainly muddy course of events, as the eight meet and come to live together, tend to rebuff each other.
The acting injects streams of mirth. Miou-Miou creates her own Goldie Hawn world, playing with an unself-conscious zest refreshing to watch. Her and Mathieu’s emotional authenticity mark them out as three-dimensional in a cast of two-dimensional figures, perhaps because (with the possible exception of Marco) they are the only vulnerable characters open to influence and change. By contrast, Myriam Boyer’s Mathilde seems trapped by phony-sounding lines: “I hate empty spaces--a womb or a breast. You’ll have to give me a baby.” Myriam Meziere as the erotic philosophe Madeleine suffers the same disbelieved/unbelievable fate. She is obnoxiously static. This collection of social ideas only in some cases translated well into the acted life of the film.
The title comes from a song sung around the supper table as the group proposes names for Mathilde’s expected baby. Jonah, "who fell off this ship of fools we’re on," to be saved and birthed by whale-rounded Mathilde, will be their own age in the apocalyptic year 2000. The ironic and hopeful suggestion is that the child may succeed where his forebears have fallen short in realizing their dreams for a more free, more human society. The final shot of a cheerful Jonah scribbling over the group portrait on the garden wall points with humor to the fragility of our plans, and takes joy in the dialectic of the generations.
Jonah is a vastly entertaining, if not fully artistically realized, treat. It is like a penny arcade moving picture machine, flipping through these leftover dissidents’ thoughts.
Nancy L. McCann was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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