18/08/2014 - In Italian: The first feature film by young director Mathieu Urfer has given the Locarno Piazza Grande an underground comedy which is characteristically Swiss

With Pause [+see also:
trailer
film profile], presented in the Piazza Grande as part of the Locarno Film Festival, Mathieu Urfer demonstrates once again that Swiss cinema can also churn out some brilliant comedies steeped in scathing humour and much-needed moments of self-derision. 

Sami, a naive musician who lives life as if it were a country love song, finds himself experiencing a painful period in life, otherwise known as a “pause for thought”. His girlfriend, Julia, a brilliant lawyer with whom he’s been living for four years, suddenly decides to leave him. Though “suddenly” probably isn’t the right word, given that Julia had given off countless warning signals. But, lost in his imaginary world dominated by music, Sami failed to pick up on them, meaning that Julia was forced to issue her terrible ultimatum. With the help of his old friend Fernand - an alcoholic country singer living in a social-medical facility - Sami decides to win back his Juliet, proving to her once and for all that he’s her one and only Romeo.

Pause is a refreshing comedy dominated by a compelling and seductive soundtrack which winds its way inside our ears like siren song. Mathieu Urfer urges us to think about our fears and the loss we feel when the person we love leaves. Even the certainty of a love which we believe might be eternal doesn’t stop our subconscious from telling us to be on guard, because nothing lasts forever, not even love. Sami, the young protagonist of Pause, forgot, or intentionally decided to ignore, his inner voice and always saw Julia as a permanent feature in his daily life. Music, which is a protagonist in and of itself in the film, helps him to hold onto hope for some sort of reconciliation, but it also opens his eyes to the ephemeral nature of a love which seemed as solid as a rock.

As Mathieu Urfer has stated himself, Pause was an opportunity to depict a musician fantasy of his, whereby a desperate situation can be brought to a happy conclusion through music. In this sense, in an ideal world, relationship issues could be resolved by way of a song as an antidote to the world’s evils, a kind of magic-infused anaesthetic. Pause is characterised by an exquisitely retro setting, and this outdated flavour somehow lends it an incredibly modern feel. Even if Mathieu Urfer’s film is set in our hyper-technological contemporary times, the backdrop does nothing to foreground this fact. His film is universal, timeless, a time capsule secretly and carefully put aside for safekeeping. It’s no coincidence that Mathieu chose to collaborate with director of photography Timo Salminen, the faithful collaborator of Aki Kaurismäki, a wizard of retro environments with a decadent flavour. Another reference to the Finnish director comes in the form of André Wilms, who’s another of Kaurismäki’s “regulars” and who plays the character of Fernand with a strength and sensitivity that puts him up there with the best.

Pause makes us believe in the power of music to persuade and, as Warren Beatty and Buck Henry insist in Heaven Can Wait: "Try with music (...), it’s always convincing".

Pause is produced by Box Productions and RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera.

(Translated from Italian)