Charles, Dead or Alive

It is the hundredth anniversary of a watchmaking firm in Geneva. Charles Dé, the founder's grandson, gives an interview in which he calls his grandfather a craftsman and his own son a businessman, but says nothing about himself. The next day he slips away from his family and disappears. He moves in with a young couple he meets by chance; he cooks, reads, drinks and argues. Alain Tanner's first feature carries the air of 1968 directly: leaving bourgeois security behind and trying to live some other way. The telling neither declares Charles a hero nor makes him ridiculous; it shows that running away has a price too. François Simon is in the lead. The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1969 and was taken as the start of the new Swiss cinema.