“A little-known, avant-garde and poignant masterpiece,

A radical aesthetic and ethical approach is asserted from the very first shot: the sound of slow footsteps against a black screen that barely lights up to reveal a prison corridor where a guard goes from door to door after the prisoners’ meal, simply repeating Das Geschirr ! – the dishes! Arriving in front of the protagonist’s cell, he nevertheless adds, in a tone of observation, a You’re getting out tomorrow, aren’t you? to which the latter simply responds with Yes before the camera approaches to frame the hand turning the key in the lock.

Dialogue is rigorously reduced to the bare minimum (entire sequences are completely devoid of it); very elaborate editing worthy of the most avant-garde experiments but effects never gratuitous; mobility of the camera that explores space and manages to embrace the characters’ perception of a world that is not really threatening but irreducibly strange, where objects and especially sounds take on an obsessive and indecipherable character, conducive to misunderstanding; rhythm that is resistant to the dramatic mechanics that seeks to communicate the sensation of an empty duration , of an existential floating that the happy ending does not completely dissipate.

Its poetic force (the sequences of the merry-go-round; of the woman alone in the apartment or the café or caught in the downpour) and its originality make it an unknown masterpiece to be rediscovered urgently.”
avoir-alire.com [Claude Rieffel]