The director Claude Goretta, best known for the Oscar-nominated film The Invitation (1973) and for The Lacemaker (1977), which launched Isabelle Huppert as an international star, was a leading figure in the New Swiss Cinema from the early 1970s, subverting the view of a comfortably well-off Switzerland.

With Alain Tanner, Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange, Goretta, who has died aged 89, formed Groupe 5, a collective of Swiss film-makers, who got Télévision Suisse Romande, the national French-speaking TV company, to fund the group’s full-length narrative features for cinema release.

Goretta had never studied film formally. “I learned by watching good films,” he declared. Born in Geneva, he initially took a law degree. In 1955, he and Tanner, both in their mid-20s, travelled to London, where they worked at the British Film Institute, organising archives and subtitling French-language films. Two years later, with a grant of £250 from the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, they co-directed and co-wrote Nice Time, a 17-minute documentary on Piccadilly Circus at night, as part of the UK Free Cinema movement. Shot in 16mm on low-light-level film stock over 25 weekends, in what was designed to represent a single average Saturday night in the West End of London, it showed toffs and plebs, buskers, teddy boys, young couples, striptease joints and people queuing for the cinema, with no commentary.

Goretta said that his years in London and the making of Nice Time, which won the experimental film prize at Venice, marked him deeply, and influenced his attitude towards independent film-making in French-speaking Switzerland.

When he returned to Geneva, he joined Télévision Suisse Romande, for which he made a number of documentaries. His first TV movie, Jean-Luc Persécuté (1966), an adaptation of the 1908 novel by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, was a bleak drama, set in the mountains, which focused on a peasant (Maurice Garrel) who descends into madness after discovering that his wife has betrayed him.

His first feature, Le Fou (The Madman, 1970), starring a Goretta favourite, François Simon (son of the actor Michel Simon), also had a man driven to insanity, this time by financial circumstances. It failed to find a distributor, and Goretta retreated to television. However, after making a successful TV film with the pop singer Julien Clerc, Le Temps d’un Portrait (1972), Goretta was tempted back to the big screen.

L’Invitation (The Invitation), which was nominated for the Academy award for best foreign-language film and shared the jury prize at the Cannes film festival, told of a mild-mannered, middle-aged bachelor (Michel Robin) who buys a country house with an inheritance and gives his office colleagues a garden party. As the afternoon wears on, social decorum wears off. A wry, observant comedy, the film eavesdrops on a group of recognisable types – loud-mouthed joker, avuncular boss, giggly young woman – who know each other well in one context, and are brought unfamiliarly together in another.

Pas Si Méchant Que Ça (The Wonderful Crook, 1975), written and directed by Goretta, told of a hitherto carefree man (a young and ebullient Gérard Depardieu), having to take over the running of a small furniture factory, when his father, the owner, has a stroke. On discovering that the business is in dire financial straits, he takes to holding up banks and post offices and, although happily married, becomes romantically involved with one of his victims, a postmistress (Marlène Jobert). Filmed in the Swiss locale of flat fields and provincial towns, it was dubbed by Le Monde “Bonnie and Clyde à la Suisse”. The New York Times critic thought it “delightful”.

This was followed by La Dentellière (The Lacemaker), adapted from the novel by Pascal Lainé, and Goretta’s most accomplished and celebrated film, for which Huppert won the Bafta award for most promising newcomer. She played a reticent young Parisian hairdresser, nicknamed Pomme because she likes apples. While she is on holiday in Normandy, she has an affair with a university student. However, back in Paris, the gap in class and education causes a rift and Pomme’s breakdown. Huppert does well to retain our sympathy despite the passivity of the role, in this perceptive study of an incompatible couple, which discreetly moves from a romantic comedy to a tragedy.

Goretta followed The Lacemaker with another fable about “a typical ordinary Frenchwoman”, as the eponymous heroine of La Provinciale (The Girl from Lorraine, 1981) is described. With great expectations, 30-year-old Christine (Nathalie Baye) leaves her friends, local choir and dog, in her small hometown in Lorraine, to find work in Paris. After having an affair with a married Swiss businessman (Bruno Ganz), and struggling to make a living, she returns home disillusioned. Because of its gentle satire and sincerity, the film somehow manages to prove the contentious point that existence in the provinces, no matter how hard, tedious and unrewarding, is morally superior to that of the big bad city.

The underbelly of Switzerland was explored in La Mort de Mario Ricci (The Death of Mario Ricci, 1983), for which Gian Maria Volonté won best actor at Cannes. Volonté played a Swiss journalist who, having been partly crippled in the course of duty in South America, returns home to interview a world-famous expert on famine who lives in an Alpine village. He discovers that the man is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and learns that mystery surrounds the death of Mario Ricci, an Italian worker killed in a motorcycle crash. Compelling visual images hint at the dark secrets harboured by the community, with an elevating use of the music of Vivaldi and Monteverdi on the soundtrack, though the film’s existential musings are slightly undermined by an overload of red herrings and subplots.

Much of Goretta’s subsequent film work, including his second adaptation of a Ramuz novel, Si le Soleil Ne Revenait Pas (If the Sun Never Returns, 1987), remained little known outside francophone countries.

Goretta also made a name for himself as a director of thoughtful television biopics such as Les Chemins de l’Exil (The Roads of Exile, 1978), with François Simon as the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and Sartre: l’Age des Passions (Sartre: Years of Passion, 2006), which dealt with the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Ronald BERGAN
first published in
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/21/claude-goretta-obituary