A plane crash in the desert – absurd, beautiful and impressionistic in its rendering – sets off a chain of oppressive coincidences in one of Volker Schlöndorff’s lesser-discussed films. Just a year after his high-profile but much maligned adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Schlöndorff turns to Swiss author Max Frisch’s 1957 novel Homo Faber. Conceived by Frisch in large part as an allegory for his country’s complex relationship with its own neutrality in WWII, the film – written for the screen by Rudy Wurlitzer, the mercurial scribe behind Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop and Alex Cox’s Walker – eschews much of the political probing of the book in favour of an inward-looking, near-mythic interrogation of a man’s capacity for denial, solipsism, and folly. After a chance encounter with a fellow crash survivor leads Walter Faber to seek out an old friend, reminisce over an old love, and fall into the path of a new one, he tries in vain to ignore the importance of all these coincidences, or that they could be anything other than just that. His journey leads him to travel Europe with the effervescent Elizabeth – decades his junior – remaining aggressively self-assured throughout, failing to ascribe meaning or consequence to his decisions. He routinely dismisses art, antiquity and myth. Anything that might deal in fate, grand design or predestination is anathema to his perception of himself and the world he moves through. With this adamance, he remains able to justify his actions, his very existence, until the weight of his personal histories and futures are brought illogically and unavoidably to bear.
The film itself is so full of breathtaking images, off-kilter choices and arcadian locations, we are tempted to share in Faber’s cultivated blindness and simply wrap ourselves in the immediate pleasures of it all, avoiding further interrogation until it’s too late. Perhaps then, the bones of political allegory remain.

Will Watt