Director
Writer
January 1957, in a small town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A middle-class house, the home of two sisters, Clara and Thérèse, whose characters could not be more different. After their father is institutionalized, the two women take over the family business, which specializes in precision optics. One day, the floor of the music room collapses after being ravaged by termites. Karoly, a Hungarian refugeee and jack-of-all-trades, is hired to repair the damage. The Hungarian's presence causes ripples in the seemingly unchangeable life of the two sisters...
Director
January 1957, in a small town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A middle-class house, the home of two sisters, Clara and Thérèse, whose characters could not be more different. After their father is institutionalized, the two women take over the family business, which specializes in precision optics. One day, the floor of the music room collapses after being ravaged by termites. Karoly, a Hungarian refugeee and jack-of-all-trades, is hired to repair the damage. The Hungarian's presence causes ripples in the seemingly unchangeable life of the two sisters...
Camera Operator
Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.
