Here is a very literate movie from director Alain Tanner about alienation, self discovery, and time. Paul's escape from responsibility enables him to live totally in the present. He drinks, brawls, dances and takes movies of the city with his Super-8 camera.
The seaman begins an affair with Rosa (Teresa Madruga), who works as a chambermaid and bartender at the hotel where he's staying. But Rosa wants someone other than a person on vacation from reality. Paul shares his innermost thoughts with Elisa (Julia Vonderlinn), a girlfriend back home in Switzerland. Eventually, Paul loses all sense of time and his passivity starts to frighten him.
Tanner, director of La Salamandre and Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, draws a top-grade performance from Bruno Ganz; it is a blend of melancholy, pensiveness, sensuality, and ennui. Only after Paul is robbed and wounded by a thief and abandoned by Rosa does he awake from his reverie.
Emerson's thought could serve as an epilogue to this drama: "The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us back to it."