Au Sud des Nuages

Adrien (Bernard Verley) embarks on a trip of his life after spending a full seventy years in the cold, comfortable lonliness of the swiss alps. This follows his adieu to his cows after his wife, Marie died too. He is initially accompanied by some of his village friends - Leon, Willy and Lucien Prolong. Things look set for a wonderful trip, when Roger, Leon's nephew - a nit-wit who is more of an irritation than company and a know-all busybody, with a whole array of travelling aids with him - joins them. Slowly the other three leave Adrien and Roger and go back home. Adrien, inspite of his fits of anger at Roger slowly learns to manage with him. The trip is by now, almost over from the swiss alps, to germany, to russia, china, and now mongolia. Roger encounters a young woman ,Odma (a mongoilan) who needs help and protection in the train from someone who had tried to harm her. Ultimately, he falls in love with her. Truly, madly, deeply in love, Roger dosen't let go of his love even after she disembarks from the train and follows her without Adrien's knowledge. Disgusted and worried at the same time, Adrien tracks him down (with the help of Odma's photograph which she had given him), only to find that Roger has given himself so completely to Odma that he had decided to marry her and live in the small hamlet in Mongolia. Thus we are left with the only member of the initial group of five who completes the trip by reaching the chinese bull-fight festival. Adrien also keeps remembering his wife at times, in his effort to forget her on the trip. Only at the end does he speak out about the pain he suffers. How you feel about this story and about its main character will probably depend on where you come from. While some of the background and people are uniquely Swiss, the stoicism of the hero is known in many other parts of the world, mountains as well as prairies; any place where men (and women)live alone, in rural isolation, proud of their independence yet suffering from a deep loneliness that they can't even articulate to themselves. I would like to add that this is neither a depressing film nor a slow one -- the journey moves swiftly, there are many humorous and poignant moments, and at 85 minutes, you find yourself getting to China almost too soon. And if the end is more allegorical than realistic, it has a poetic quality that I found touching and memorable.