Two worthwhile foreign films that have been likened to Thelma and Louise, a film familiar to many Americans, are the ultra-violent and semi-pornographic French film Baise-Moi (which is best left untranslated for the present) and this brilliant and poetic Swiss film, called Messidor. Produced in 1978, it was a product of director Alain Tanner, who shines as a near solitary light in Swiss film-making. It is a film about alienation and the paradoxical nature of freedom. Freedom carried to the absolute becomes its own kind of imprisonment. In the words of Janis Joplin, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”, which, I suppose, really only applies to freedom carried to its ultimate limit – its purest and, hence, most perverted form.

Two girls, not previously acquainted, meet while each is hitch-hiking. Marie (Catherine Rétoré), a French country shopgirl from Moudon, and Jeanne (Clémentine Amouroux), a college student from Geneva, are each thumbing a ride, coincidentally, a small distance from one another on a roadway in Lausanne. When a car stops near Jeanne, who sees that there is room in the back for two, she spontaneously invites Marie to share the ride. Jeanne is tired of her studies and her boyfriend and has decided, on a lark, to hitchhike for a bit around the countryside. Marie is on her way home after visiting her father. The two girls are kindred, directionless spirits and are vaguely attracted to one another. Jeanne asks Marie if she may accompany her home. When their ride leaves them a ten mile distance by foot from Marie’s home, they spend the night sleeping in the woods, which feels quite natural to the country girl, Marie, but makes Jeanne uneasy. Come morning, the girls resolve not to continue on to Marie’s home, but, instead, to hit the road together, with little money and no destination. Bit by bit, their aimless travels become a game of mental “chicken” – to see which of them can go the longest wandering through a meaningless existence of their invention before giving in to life’s demands.

When they are soon confronted by a policeman asking their identities, Jeanne, a history major in college, invents the surname “Messidor”, which she recalls as the name of a month on some ancient calendar. The girls have now, symbolically, become sisters.

The first major crisis occurs when they are driven down a back road through woods by a couple of men with sex on their minds. Since Jeanne exhibits the more aggressive vocabulary of the two girls, she is singled out by the men for first attention. Marie initially attempts to disrupt the assault by wrestling the men off Jeanne, but, when that fails, slams one of the men over the head with a handy rock. Both girls are then able to bolt.

They soon hitch a ride with a military officer. When he stops at a gas station to relieve himself, the girls rifle through the glove compartment and discover a gun. As they are inspecting it, they spot their driver returning and with no time to replace the gun in its compartment, stuff it into one of their bags.

The girls now proceed through a haphazard series of adventures, sometimes walking, sometimes hitching rides to nowhere and anywhere. They sleep in barns and huts, steal and beg food, curry favors when they occasionally meet sympathetic travelers, steal eggs, swim in the nude, take a brief climb into the mountains, and round about some more. They are tired at times, edgy at other times, but mostly meander aimlessly, as if sleep-walking through a dream, through the gorgeous and serene Swiss countryside and a variety of sleepy towns and villages. When, for example, Marie asks, “Where are we headed?”, Jeanne accurately replies, “The usual – straight ahead!”

As their hunger and tiredness increase, the gun gets pulled from their bag increasingly often, once to be flashed at a store clerk as they exit with pilfered goods, another time to back down an irate farmer who has caught them in his barn. Other times, it is simply to admire the gun for the potency that it confers to them. They practice firing it with the bullets removed at a plane passing overhead. Later, hearing that a plane has crashed, their power seems momentarily limitless.

They learn from a woman that they have been featured on a popular television show equivalent to “America’s Most Wanted.” They begin to be occasionally recognized as they travel and are now being hunted by the police. They brandish their gun to dissuade a group of vacationing soldiers from trying to apprehend them and hide from police cars.

The conversations between the girls as they wander are as empty and meaningless as their travels, reflecting their deep alienation. They watch passersby and wonder who all these people can be, what they do, where they can be going? It’s as if they are asking how so many people can be acting as if there is purpose and direction in life. The self-destructive finale is only surprising in its specific details, as it is clear that the moral and psychological collapse of these girls has been long in the making.

For the viewer, the challenge is to reconcile the general appeal of these likable and, in some ways, innocent girls (sensitively portrayed by the lead actresses) with the pointless waste that their young lives have become. You just want to hug each of them and whisper in their ears, “Snap out of it!” Yet, the film succeeds in riveting the viewer's attention by engaging core questions of purpose and meaning, but with total unpredictability.

Messidor is filmed in color in Swiss language and appears with yellow English subtitles in the American release. It has a running time of 118 min. It is suitable for adults and, probably, older teens -- at least emotionally stable ones.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Switzerland:

Dangerous Moves
Journey of Hope
The Last Chance


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older