Alzire, or the New Continent

Koerfer made an extremely impressive debut with The Death of the Flea Circus Director, a genuinely Brechtian entertainment, and then promptly fell into the trap of making prettified political historiography in his second feature The Assistant. He hauls himself back into the real world impressively with this film, which has odd twinges of Tanner-esque liberal conscience-stroking, but mainly reconciles its politics and its fiction interestingly. It deals with a ramshackle group of actors who struggle to resurrect a Voltaire play about the conquistadors. Their internal problems and their campaign for subsidy from the Swiss authorities are counterpointed with glimpses of Voltaire and Rousseau, still hammer-and-tonging each other after all these years.