Alain Tanner “Light Years Away” (Les Années lumière, 1981)
Alain Tanner’s film “Light Years Away” (Les Années lumière, 1981. Grand Prix at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, film adaptation of the novel by tantra teacher Daniel Odier “La Voie sauvage”, 1974) is a complete tragicomic metaphor of frustration with the realization of the goals and practical tasks of the left ideology of socialism and communism in modern bourgeois society.
The son of a Russian emigrant Yoshka Polyakoff (Trevor Howard) keeps a car repair shop and a gas station in the Swiss wilderness, which are more like a cemetery of old cars, which he takes there everywhere with his disabled tow truck (this cemetery is, of course, a vivid embodiment of the former dream of a communist paradise). And his whole life is like ruin and decline. One evening near the samovar, the old man realized that he needed to find a young heir, so he went to town, found in the bar a young man Jonas, who was tired of washing dishes, working for a penny for a greedy owner.
It’s just the perfect rookie for a communist utopia! Yoshka learned his address and threw a mysterious blue book right into his apartment (This is, of course, a metaphor for Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party). The young man read the phrase “He left the city just in time to understand what he is capable of” and the address of the Yoshka’s garage. The next day, Jonas resigned with the scandal and went to Yoshka. Yoshka did not wait for the boy and did not rejoice at his arrival. In the end, he took the last money from his new student (because the money spoils) and promised to teach him how to work at a gas station if he would work for free, only for bad food.
Jonas raked up the rubbish a bit and repaired a long-defunct gas station, but old Yoshka’s entire business was in such a remote place that cars just couldn’t reach him. Yes, and gasoline in this station has long been none and not even expected. It’s just a dummy. However, Jonas soon realizes that the decline of Yoshka’s business is due to the fact that the old man does not need him: the Communists are not engaged in business, because business is the exploitation of the proletariat.
This oldman likes to drink vodka on the mountain during a strong lightning storm (reminiscent of the 1917 revolution in Petrograd and the student barricades in Paris in 1968), and then asks to bury him up to the chin in the ground and leave him for three days to heal wounds.
In addition, the old man talks to vultures and owls (this is clearly a metaphor for reading the classics of Marxism-Leninism) and forces Jonas to do meaningless work, shifting debris from place to place. While he is toiling, Yoshka plays Hanns Eisler’s “Kominternlied”
(in Russian peculiar translation:
“The fire of Leninism illuminates our path,
The whole world is rising to storm capital!
The two classes clashed in the last battle;
Our slogan is the World Soviet Union! “).
At night, a crazy old man often has a dream where all the old cars from his landfill are repaired (communist theory proved effective and led to economic prosperity). He instructs Jonas to repair all the cars without money, tools and spare parts and constantly scolds him for various trifles. After another quarrel, a guy out of hatred for the old idiot just sets fire to this dump at night.
After the fire, Yoshka brought Jonas several books about eagles. Then he asked the boy to bring him a real eagle: that is, to put into practice communist theories. Jonas found a real eagle specialist in the mountains (this is a metaphor for a practical communist from the USSR or Eastern Europe), and the specialist began to laugh at the fact that the boy had read books about eagles from some old man: real eagles are not like they are written about in books). The specialist asks if Jonas does not work at the zoo, that is, if he does not work at the department of a French or Swiss university, where communism is studied purely theoretically, not going to put into practice the “World Soviet Union”.
Eventually Jonas brings a living eagle, and Yoshka, having studied the construction of his wings, begins to build his flying machine (that is, to prepare a communist revolution in modern bourgeois society) and fly on it forever in an unknown direction “to the “bright future” or to Moscow. ).
During the joint construction of the aircraft, Yoshka has mysterious conversations with Jonas about the dark that covered some areas of the earth, of course, he meant bourgeois exploitation. In addition, Yoshka says that one should reject the mind and prefer beauty, that is, reject logic and choose the fate of serving communism.
Eventually, the eagle breaks free, tearing all the clothes and skin on Yoshka. But the old man completes his flying machine and flies away at night for light years away. In the morning, the police come to Jonas: the corpse of old Yoshka was found in the field. The eagle attacked him in the air and pecked out his eyes. This is obviously a metaphor for the political struggle for power within the communist government, when the vanquished flee but cannot hide from the wrath of the triumphants even on another continent, as happened with Leo Trotsky.
Alain Tanner was once fascinated by left-wing ideology, believing in the victory of socialism in the 1960s and using left-wing methods in filmmaking. “Once,” he says, “while talking to a class at a film school, I asked students, ‘Do you know why they say decoupage (adding film) is on the right and editing (film cutting) is on the left?’ Thirty years ago, someone would have had an answer, and today it ‘s as if I spoke Chinese”.
«Un jour, en discutant avec une classe d’une école de cinéma, je posai aux étudiants la colle suivante: «Savez-vous pourquoi on dit que le découpage est de droite et le montage de gauche?» Silence effaré dans les rangs. Trente ans plus tôt, quelqu’un aurait eu la réponse, et aujourd’hui, c’est comme si j’avais parlé chinois».
Tanner has been making movies for over 60 years, has become a true classic, but among moviegoers is virtually unknown. This, in particular, was facilitated by his principle: “Cinema should not make money on beautiful fairy tales, but tell the truth about life.” Following this principle, you can only come to a commercial failure and complete oblivion, which eventually happened to Tanner.
