Screenwriter: Alain Tanner

Producer: Yves Gasser, Yves Peyrot

Messidor ’s pair of vagabond teenage girls hitchhike their way across the Swiss Alps and are unwittingly drawn into a life of crime through their sordid encounters with predatory men. Within Alain Tanner’s gripping and at times funny road movie lies a bitter critique of cold materialism and the commodification of women. Critic David Robinson, speaking for the film’s many admirers, wrote that “[the roads] seem like the alleys in some gigantic rat-trap, always leading back to the same scenes and the same faces, the mountains, the neat villages and towns, the hygienic bars and restaurants which seem always more unfriendly and threatening…. The girls’ progress from a cheerful game to a desperate last-ditch battle against hunger, weakness, hallucination and an alien society is impeccably charted by Tanner and his actresses.”

Film Note courtesy of MOMA.

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