Michel Soutter
2021
The Apple
Michel Soutter
Elsbeth Schoch, André Widmer
Interspersed with jokes, visual puns, and philosophical discussions, the story follows the attempts of a girl who has spent the last year living outside her native Switzerland to rekindle a former love affair. When her immature young friend fails to demonstrate the requisite interest, she takes up with someone the boy disapproves of. When the boy kicks the man, the man leaves both the boy and his erstwhile ex-girlfriend to their own devices.
The Apple
La lune avec les dents
Michel Soutter
The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness - until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William's life - a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews.
The Moon by Our Teeth
Signé Renart
Michel Soutter
Tom Novembre, Fabienne Barraud
The vicissitudes of showbiz take the hero Renart (Gerald Battiaz) and his wife Hermeline (Francoise Dupertuis) from up to down and back again in this brief drama. Renart entertains at a nightclub by pulling objects out of a suitcase on stage and creating a wide range of sound effects with his collection of odds and ends. All goes well until his wife is fired from her job at the club because she is pregnant. That infuriates Renart, and he quits. The couple then take off for the mountains and open up a club of their own, but now when he is the owner, Renart is transformed for the worse.
Signé Renart
Les arpenteurs
Michel Soutter
Jean-Luc Bideau, Michel Cassagne
A lazy surveyor is thwarted by two women whose houses he is surveying for destruction to make way for a park. In another realm of the story, a man is given a hat by another man, who asks him to give his fiancé a gift. However, he mistakenly gives the gift to another girl entirely, and makes love to her.
The Surveyors
Repérages
Michel Soutter
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Delphine Seyrig
After 10 years separation from his wife, a film director (Jean-Louis Trintignant), imagines he can make up with her by giving her a part in his next film, an adaptation of Tshekov's "Three Sisters". He goes location scouting and stays in Bex, a Spa near Lake Leman, together with the three actresses : Julie, his ex-wife (Delphine Seyrig), the mysterious Cecilia, that his producer wants him to take (Lea Massari), and Esther (Valérie Mairesse), a teenager. They all stay in an old decaying hotel. In this isolated mansion the four of them will fight but also discover each other.
Location Hunting
Les nénuphars
Michel Soutter
Jean-Luc Bideau, Jacques Denis
Arthur and Marcel, two firemen, keep boredom at bay by improvising on stage, one on a keyboard the other on drums, tunes, poems and songs. Carol arrives, in search of her lover Armand. Accompanied by the musicians, she sings of her strange loves.
Les nénuphars
L'amour des femmes
Michel Soutter
Jean-Marc Bory, Pierre Clémenti
Although there are women in the lives of the three main protagonists -- a middle-aged architect, his construction designer, and a journalist -- the women are not as crucial to the men's search for an identity as the title might suggest. When the three men run into a former professor of the architect and designer, they are inspired by his fanfare and expansive nature. Still in search of solutions to their particular problems, the men head out to visit the professor and get to the bottom of their own issues. Unfortunately, the professor turns out to be more "loco" than otherwise, and the three men watch their hopes burst like a popped balloon -- it seems like their ability to assess human character should now be added to their list of problem spots.
L'amour des femmes
L’Eolienne
Michel Soutter
Michel Schopfer, Arié Dzierlatka
In preparation for a feature-length film about windmills, an assistant director travels through the Vaud region to search for locations with windmills. The research leads to a serious engagement with the meaning and purpose of windmills, which has something Don Quixote-like about it in the age of nuclear power stations. The transitions between document and fiction flow constantly and result in a charming and intellectual mixture of seriousness and fun, determination and coincidence, weightlessness and the weight of meaning.
The Windmill
