From: leung@gold.cchem.berkeley.edu (Kevin Leung)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: THE VOYAGER
Summary: r.a.m.r. #01320
Keywords: author=Leung
Date: 10 Apr 92 17:29:52 GMT
Reply-To: leung@gold.cchem.berkeley.edu (Kevin Leung)
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Organization: University of California at Berkeley


				THE VOYAGER
			       [**Spoilers**]
		       A film review by Kevin Leung
			Copyright 1992 Kevin Leung

Title   : THE VOYAGER
Director: Volker Schlondoff
[Adapted from the novel HOMO FABER by Max Frisch.]

     The first few minutes of THE VOYAGER is revealing of everything
that is to come.  It opens black-and-white, outside a generic 50-ish
airport populated by generic 50-ish people and automobiles.  The
voyager shows up, hugs this handsome woman farewell, sits down in the
utterly familiar waiting room, and buries his head in his hands in a
sea of felt hats and cigarette smoke, thinking of a certain woman who no
longer exists.  He does not want to be there or anywhere.  Then color
filters back on screen as the camera takes him two months back in time,
to another waiting room straight out of faded photographs, poised to
miss another plane.  Over and over again the film would echo this
strong sense of spatial dislocation, address the circular nature of
time, narrate the story as some sort of a chronicle of a death foretold
and of human endeavors foredoomed, and enhance it with flashbacks and
voice-overs by someone precisely situated in a certain period in history
and thus make the events twice removed from us, and do all of these with
plenty of sardonic humor and self-irony.  It is a good, solid beginning
for (in my opinion of course) an much overlooked, excellent film.

     Sam Shepard plays the voyager, Walter Faber, a globe-trotting
American engineer who sets his bearings by his faith in technology and
treats metaphysics as an exercise in the laws of probability.  He
carries with him a bored, presumptuous air which of course makes him
irresistible to women.  We watch him snatched and shepherded aboard a
gorgeous propeller plane, turn into an entry in plane-crash statistics
(things definitely *happen* to him), survive the landing, and become
witness to a suicide in a strange land -- all appropriately meaningless
and absurd, except that they call to him memories of a woman he once
knew before the war, Hanna, whom he sees in crisp flashbacks.  He
returns to civilization, haunted by memories.

(Some spoilers follow)

     The "train of coincidence" runs on; he hops on a boat to France to
escape a female acquaintance and to resume his anonymous, moment-to-
moment existence atop the bell-shaped curve.  Instead, he runs into a
young woman (Julie Delpy, of EUROPA, EUROPA) he names "Sabeth" whom
reminds him of his lost love.  He sees more flashbacks (the film would
gracefully unfold simultaneously on parallel tracks twenty years apart
in time and unerringly converge to an ending we can easily guess but
will find spellbinding all the same).  She is something of an paradox,
this Sabeth, terribly young and vulnerable, a lover of ancient art and
its timeless mysteries, and at the same time devoted to Camus and
Sartre, those unabashedly contemporary writers who write of freedom and
transparency and of experiences created ex-nihilo, unencumbered by a
troublesome past.  He sees her a lot, and there are some delicate scenes
of glances exchanged in crowded ballrooms and slow-dancing on the
moonlit deck.  (The soundtrack is moody but very pretty.)  Stranded on
an oceanliner in the middle of the Atlantic, the voyager who shuns
entanglements finds himself locked on to this young woman, a beckon that
arose from the depths of his past and destined to guide him to complete
an act of destruction he set into motion some twenty years ago.

     They land in Paris where Faber delivers speeches on the Future of
Mankind and stalks Sabeth in art museums.  They encounter the
inevitable scuffles in Parisian cafes and graffiti protesting the
Algerian war.  The heart of the film consists of the couple's journey
across the continent, from metropolitan Paris, through blazing
wheat-fields in the south of France, to nameless historic Roman ruins
in Florence and Rome, finally to arrive at the ancient villages of
Greece.  Along the way are scattered sequences of great tenderness and
discipline graced with extremely evocative camera work (this film is no
small-time affair, by the way, it is loaded with "production values"
and is very beautiful physically; unfortunately it falls into that
category somewhere between mainstream Americans and flashy, exotic
European hits like EUROPA, EUROPA or TOTO THE HERO and simply won't
attract crowds, which is a damned shame).  In Athens they are touched by
tragedy and reunite with Hanna; swiftly unfolding events bridge the
twenty years that separates them, and simultaneously the memories that
has been tormenting Faber passes into the present.  The acting is
particularly impressive in this more somber half of the film: e.g,.
Delpy's Sabeth sitting dry-eyed and crushed in the cafe where Faber
left her; Shepard and Barbara Sukowa's Hanna maneuvering to wait each
other out over dinner; it is all quite extraordinarily restrained and
dignified.

     There is something about the adaptation (or maybe it is the
cinematography) that makes the tale's symbolic dimension leap off the
screen and highlights the cyclic quality of this improbable tale of
strong-willed, self-centered people forging their fate only to get
ensnared by it.  Yet the characters never come across as mere
mechanical parts reenacting an ancient drama, nor do Faber's relations
with Sabeth or Hanna seem at any time less than genuine:

	.... What was the use of looking anymore?  There was nothing
	for me to see.  Her hands that no longer existed anywhere,
	her movements as she tossed the pony-tail toward the back of
	her head, her teeth, her lips, her eyes that no longer existed
	anywhere -- where could I look for them? ....  She is gone now.

(The opening monologue, from memory.  It's quite different from the
passage in the book.  My guess is that Shepard, a decent playwright
himself, shortened it.)

     There is always this sense of the immediacy of *seeing*, of sights
and experiences so perishable they have to be captured with 8 mm's or
constantly rehashed in memory, of the moment-by-moment nihilating power
of Time, that absolutely transcends the premise of the story.  Yet Time
also has great viscosity, as Faber the technologist-modern man finds
out while getting caught in its backflow.  This tremendous tension (as
well as the memorable acting and effortless direction) makes watching
THE VOYAGER the most rewarding film experience I have in months.  I
recommend it without reservation, but don't ask me for refunds.

Kevin Leung, April '92.