On the one hand, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is a very dated film. Its main characters are clearly products of their very specific time and place (they are early boomers in Francophone Switzerland, who came of age during the late 1960s), and even if you have no idea what the film is about, the title alone is very much giving us an idea of the passage of time (as Jonah is pushing fifty now).On the other hand, however, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is also timeless. It tells a story about a group of adults in their early 30s, who are at a point in their lives where they still have the ideals of their youth, but already started to compromise, because lofty ideals can only bring you so far, and because working as a proofreader is ultimately a better way to survive than writing political pamphlets. Their specific set of dreams and ideals may feel dated, but it's a story that every generation will inevitably go through sooner or later.The film doesn't have much of a plot beyond the dissatisfaction of an intertwined group of people whose lives don't quite compare to the ideals of their youth. The standout from the strong cast is the luminous Miou-Miou, who plays Marie, a supermarket cashier who undercharges the poor and elderly until she is caught by her bosses. Also very memorable is Jacques Denis, who plays Marco (for some reasson all eight main characters of the film have names beginning with the letter M), a history teacher who is very much a dreamer and philosopher, and falls in love with Marie.Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is a film all about characters, ideas, and indiviual moments. There is one particularly memorable scene in which Marie and Marco visits her elderly neighbour, a retired railroad engineer, who is reminiscing about driving a train - not sitting in it as a passenger and watching the landscape go by, but actually sitting in the driver's seat and going into it and into it. It's a beautiful speech (and, one might guess, a metaphor for life), and one that stuck with me over all the years since I first watched this film.The film is a gem. Watch it to fall in love with Miou-Miou, if nothing else.
Wrote about John Berger's relationship to the cinema in the Brooklyn Rail, on the occasion of his centennial: brooklynrail.org/2026/10/film/john-berger-and-the-cinema/"It's telling that the quintessence of Berger and Tanner’s collaboration, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1975), is not at all Cubist in filmic style, but rather in approach. (Berger is no literalist, and in the still-fresh Tanner films, hides most traces of his busily critical thought.) In Jonah, eight men and women, whose names all start with “M” (Madeleine, Mathieu, Marie, etc.), live around Geneva where, chastened by the “failure” of May 1968, they attempt to preserve the revolutionary promises borne of that fateful month through ecologically-minded farming, teaching kids history they’ve never been exposed to, experimenting with the Wilhelm Reich-ish possibilities of Tantric sex rituals, and living together on a sustainable commune. Their messy, stumbling actions are all for the goal of teaching the new generation, particularly the eponymous boy, that another world is graspable within the next generation’s lifetime. Jonah’s fascinating, rich conversations about life, love, and politics are presented in a series of tableaux wherein Tanner’s camera tracks slowly in and out of the lost soixante-huitards. It is the ideal visual container for the ping-ponging, brain-tickling question: where do we go from here?"One character in particular keeps coming back to me weeks after the Metrograph screening of Jonah presented by Film Comment: Marie the cashier (played by Miou-Miou, star of Éric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon [1972]). She lives in Annemasse, France and is French, but is a frontalière, a cross-border worker who commutes to her deadening job at a Geneva supermarket. Her rebellion against the system that oppresses her? She gives certain groceries away to people for free. She is eventually brutally arrested for her empathy by the supermarket managers, deported, and tagged a criminal by the state. Her tiny humane gestures result in her being tagged as scum and sent packing across an arbitrary border. She is criminalized for knowing the worth of a Coca-Cola can, for realizing that a small gift like a bottle of cheap pinot noir can be the luxury that gets a class through its drudging day."Later, one member of the commune, the teacher Marco (Jacques Denis), develops an attraction to Marie. After a while, he asks her out; she says yes. At school, Marco brings Marie to class and instructs his history students to ask her questions about herself. This, he says, will count as their final grade. One student, a girl, immediately turns the tables on him: “Are you in love with her?” Taken aback, but realizing that his students have learned from him well, he responds, “Yes. I’m in love with Marie.” The banking system by which a student learns and a teacher teaches is upended, Paulo Freire style; now, the student teaches, the teacher listens.It is the same with cinema chez Berger: One reads, yet one makes sense anew of the world around, animated by, what else? Love. One is an active participant, not merely a heaper of admiring, stupefied praise onto clever prose art. With her gesture of solidarity with the female student, Marie becomes more than just a symbol; she is a living body navigating her way between reality and dreams, enmeshed in the struggle of communicating her thoughts, moods, feelings, and desires to an uncomprehending world. Berger, like the cinema represented by Tanner, worked in the service of clarity and beauty—which are always political."
