Off Season

Hors saison

Switzerland, Germany, France

1992

91 Min

Color

1.75:1

French, German

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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SCR Daniel Schmid, Martin Suter

CAST Sami Frey, Maddalena Fellini, Ingrid Caven, Andréa Ferréol, Arielle Dombasle, Ulli Lommel, Marisa Paredes, Carlos Devesa, Dieter Meier, Maurice Garrel, Luísa Barbosa, Rosa Castro André, Hilde Ziegler, José Pedro Lisboa, Béatrice Stoll, Geraldine Chaplin, Vittorio Mezzogiorno

SOUND Barbara Flückiger

Rotterdam, San Francisco, London, BAFICI (Foco Daniel Schmid)

Synopsis

Valentin returns to the scene of his childhood: an old hotel in the Swiss mountains, which has long been sold and is about to be demolished. As he wanders through the empty building, his memories fill the hotel with life, as if their very transience had brought forth an inner melody. The narrative structure of Off Season resembles a game of billiards: one ball glances off another, setting it in motion and at the same time altering its own course. One episode triggers another, until their paths cross or they merge, creating a kaleidoscope of memories interspersed by what is ostensibly the present. About this movie it has been said that "If Stanley Kubrick set nightmares in the Overlook Hotel, Schmid has only the happiest magical memories to animate his grand hotel nestled in the Swiss Alpes. Off Season is an unabashed cinematic circus populated by a Fellini-like cast of caricatures”. –BAFICI

Director

Daniel Schmid

Daniel Schmid (1941-2006) was a Swiss film and theatre director. In 1992, at his 51 years of age, he created Hors saison, a film that is sort of the key to his oeuvre and his life.

Unlike many other filmmakers of his generation who, following the spirit of the ’60s and the New Swiss Film movement, were not averse to being regarded as socially and politically committed cultural professionals, Schmid considered himself, first and foremost, an artist. In the truest sense of the word, that which defines the artist as a master of a craft out of which something genuinely new, artificial as well as artistic, is created. For Daniel Schmid, what we call reality is the raw material from which he shaped new worlds and realities. –BAFICI