13/07/2023 - Swiss director Felix Tissi’s film is a sardonic yet wholly compassionate reflection upon the themes of growing old, death, love and friendship

“Time is voracious, it eats away at us. We exist in order that time can eat away at us. We’re its breakfast”. This sardonic reflection made by one of the characters in Felix Tissi’s Aller Tage Abend – hitting Italian cinemas today, 13 July, via Solaria Film, and Swiss cinemas at the end of August, courtesy of Xenix Film Distribution, following the film’s selection at the Solothurn Film Festival – is central to the delicate mosaic which the Swiss director, who graduated in 1955, wanted to piece together around the ideas of death, love and friendship, which are themselves part and parcel of the reality of growing old (or falling ill) in later life.  It’s no coincidence that the series The Kominsky Method, thought up by the multi-award-winning Chuck Lorre and starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, enjoyed such resounding success. Laughing as our joints slowly seize up, our short-term memory becomes increasingly patchy, and our bladders empty to the sound of morse code, is one way of accepting the nearing of the end, with no need for religious ceremonies or complicated superstitious acts. Thankfully, the imaginative world of TV and film has replaced the terrifying paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Felix Tissi’s approach to this theme is far from Hollywoodian. Aller Tage Abend adopts the dark humour typical of a German-speaking Swiss canton, if that’s possible, which is more akin to the Scandinavian/Nordic laconism characterising – for example – The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Swiss director Felix Herngren. But Roy Andersson is arguably the director who first springs to mind when watching Tissi’s dark comedy. Aller Tage Abend is divided into chapters, exactly in the style of the tableaux we find in A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Roy Andersson
film profile], with protagonists walking on or beyond the boundaries of the plausible. It’s a small theatre of the absurd, which examines the absurdity of life, punctuating its reflection with visual comedy and cutting lines such as “My wife hits me. Every Wednesday” - “Not on Thursdays? That’s a blessing”. This exchange takes place between two men, Leopold and Alex (Uli Krohm and Vilmar Bieri respectively), who forge a friendship after Leopold crashes into the back of Alex’s car and destroys it. It makes total sense that Alex subsequently moves into his new acquaintance’s home.

Other characters whose lives are touched upon in the film include a disillusioned florist who sells her flowers to all those hypocritically looking for redemption or for a desire to be fulfilled; a man who’s just been released from prison, owning nothing but a post box; a doctor who cries when he looks at his patients’ medical records; a group of terminally ill people who find themselves smoking cigarettes in a cramped room and who end up singing the Brechtian Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), which goes “I tell you we must die”; two Beckettian gravediggers; and, last but not least, an elderly couple, Henri and Irma (Sandro Di Stefano and Hiltrud Hauschke), who are so attuned to one another that when her back itches she asks him to scratch himself… Even after death. The guiding thread in the film is a long limousine snaking its way through the small Swiss town with a troubling figure on board (and it’s easy to guess who or what it is). Seemingly cynical but actually full of human compassion, Felix Tissi’s film teaches us that even a prospect such as death can be braved. As Leopold says to Alex:” Imagine life without death. What importance would anything have?”

Allter Tage Abend is an Italian-Swiss co-production by Solaria Film and Peacock Film.

(Translated from Italian)