A man turning 50 (Walter Faber) narrates his liaisons with three women: Hanna, who was pregnant and left him many years ago in Zurich; Ivy, who broke up with him recently in New York; Sabeth who is 20 and whom he just met on a boat to Europe. Sabeth and the narrator travel to France, Italy and Greece. But who is Sabeth? What does she feel towards the narrator? What does he feel towards her? The entire movie is shot in subjective view (we only see what the narrator sees); there are no dialogues, just his post-synchronised voice.
Adapted from the Max Frisch novel "Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän". It tells the story of an old man, isolated from the outside world in a little mountain village in Ticino, Switzerland, who fights against oblivion. From books that he has there he cuts out texts and images about geology and geological history to fix and arrange them on the walls of his cottage. Frisch adds these articles to his novel to assemble human history with individual decay.
Walter Faber has survived a crash with an airplane. His next trip is by ship. On board this ship he meets the enchanting Sabeth and they have a passionate love affair. Together they travel to her home in Greece, but the rational Faber doesn't know what fate has in mind for him for past doings.
A “filmic re-reading” of Max Frisch's novella Montauk (1974) and of excerpts from his published diaries. It is neither a biographical portrait of Frisch – who was one of the greatest 20th century Swiss writers – nor a filmed adaptation of the novel. Instead, Dindo returns to the locations the author describes in his texts, searching for traces of past events that may turn out to have been more imagined than real.
