Manuela Dahm

Die sündige Kleinstadt

On a rainy vacation day in a hotel room in Yugoslavia, a 40-year-old father and his adolescent daughter are bored. In the free-flowing surroundings, the dreams he once had in his youth come back to life in him. The game becomes almost serious. Only the presence of his daughter makes him realize that there is no way to start a new life without acting irresponsibly towards his child. And so he is left with a quiet resignation and the hope that his daughter will do better one day.

The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness - until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William's life - a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews.