At the end of the nineteenth century, Italian anarchists, ten men, one woman, libertarian, collectivist emigrate to Brazil to start a leaderless community, without hierarchy, without a boss without police, but not without conflict nor passion.
This black-and-white film explores the dividing line between the theatrical imagination and everyday reality in its story of a narcissistic silent movie actor who believes his screen image as a great lover but is in fact a confused bisexual. His girlfriend, also an actress, is also caught up in the fuzzy space between fantasy and reality but feels this as a loss and tries to do something about it.
A modern-day Socrates leaves behind his life as a philosopher to live off the land. When a police inspector is assigned to follow the man and question his motives, the cop gets caught up in the charming philosophy of the man who has left his material possessions behind. He encounters a pretty young woman and her nihilistic boyfriend, the latter who makes a living with his psychedelic side shows. The boyfriend gets the newspapers to print the philosopher's thoughts, prompting him to acquire a bevy of believers. There is some nudity in this comical thought-provoking story, but the main focus remains the words of the man who left behind creature comforts to find himself.
Filmed clandestinely in Czechoslovakia on 16mm. It's one of the films Godard made with the Groupe Dziga Vertov - a Marxist film about the political situation after the '68 revolution.
In Lausanne, Léon is involved by accident with a small Leninist group and gets to know Léa, a dedicated activist and the group leader's mistress. The police keep a close watch on them and trouble is bound to follow.
An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, "those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence", Alain Tanner's third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director.
