MACAO, OR BEYOND THE SEA
With Max Ruedlinger, Christine Lauterburg, Hans-Dieter Jendreyko, Shirley Wong, and Che Tin Hong.
At a time when U.S. distribution of foreign-language films has shrunk to a paltry fraction of what it used to be, making this country a backwater and last stop for many of the most important and challenging features that are currently being made, Lidell has come up with one of the few solutions around for beating the system. By booking her current cycle into about 30 “nontheatrical” sites across the country–museums, universities, film clubs, and so on–she is giving her intriguing batch of films a much wider circulation than any of them could possibly have gotten in an ordinary commercial run (which, given the conservative practices of most distributors, would mean only limited engagements in a handful of major cities).
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At an airport in Zurich they’re still discussing the Oberland dialect as Mark prepares to leave for Stockholm, a trip that’s clearly connected to his work in philology. After he departs, Alice drives home, singing a strange, lyrical yodeling song.
By now, I’ve given you almost two-thirds of the plot, and I’ve hardly told you anything.
The sheer weirdness of Alice’s yodeling in the film may strike some viewers as camp. But camp, after all, implies an essential knowingness on the part of an audience –what might even be regarded as a surfeit of knowledge–which in this case implies that (a) yodeling is corny by definition, (b) we know that yodeling is corny by definition, ergo (c) Alice’s yodels have to be campy. Maybe they are, but I found them evocative and beautiful, and the film, in its self-generating and self-defining context, wouldn’t be nearly as lovely and as enticing without them. (By and large, the film’s sound track is as pleasurable as its images.)
