Having gone through the recent pathetic attempts of USA voters to elect a halfway respectable president, it comes as a shock to see people take voting seriously. It's hard to imagine not being able to vote and really wanting to. And as a force standing in the way, God is the last thing that comes to mind. Yet, as recently as 1971, Swiss women could not vote. The reason given was the all-encompassing cosmic organization that kept kings on their thrones, birds in the skies, and women barefoot and pregnant. This year's Swiss Oscar hopeful, "The Divine Order," opens Friday at Landmark's Opera Plaza and Shattuck.
What a shock to the perfectly calibrated Swiss social clockwork enmeshed in the eternal valleys and hillsides of towering Alps, among belled cattle and running rivers of milk chocolate, to awake to the uncertainties implicit in women's rights. "Divine Order" follows Nora, wife of Hans, sister of Theres, and mother of two small boys in handknit sweaters, as she gets a whiff of freedom - wafting over from France, perhaps, although that infinitely more scandalous country goes unmentioned. Suddenly her personal circumstances are revealed as inherently political, and she starts to see everything in her life as overdue for a makeover.
Writer-director Petra Volpe gives her nostalgia-laced homage to the everywomen who cast off their psychopolitical chains the standard melodramatic treatment. You laugh and worry watching "Divine Order," wondering how close to the bone it'll cut. Not very close. This fond glance over the shoulder at the generation coming to consciousness in the 1970s never exhibits any revolutionary zeal, only hints of rebelliousness. Possible dramatic conflicts are simultaneously sketched in and left non-finito. A spirit of equilibrium or stasis stifles promising counterforces before they can fully express themselves.
Nora, named for Ibsen's famous anti-husband door-slammer in "A Doll's House" (1879), is a simple, earnest, loving, pig-headed, uppity working-class housewife who'd like to have a job outside the home. Hans, newly promoted to manager of his machine shop, is afraid he'll lose the respect of his men if he can't control his wife, and who'll take care of the children? His boss, factory owner and spinster Charlotte Wipf, is a mouthy anti-feminist harpy in the Margaret Thatcher mold who cries out for a climactic smackdown with our heroine. Maybe it's simply not in the Swiss genes to milk a dramatic conflict for maximum clash, tears, and triumph.
All conflicts in "Divine Order" resolve themselves in mysterious ways that suggest an underlying principle of clocklike dependability hardwired into the Swiss psyche. Maybe this levelheaded gene, so screechingly absent from the increasingly nasty USA cultural divides, is what moved the Tribeca Film Fest to give the film its audience award for best feature. The ultimate fantasy for Americans, far more unbelievable than space aliens, superheroes, or talking dinosaurs, is a civil society in which adults can rationally argue for well-defined goals and gracefully step away from positions proven detrimental to the general welfare.
"Divine Order" works as a dream. Every dream fulfills a wish, Freud observed. We wish to have what we want without disturbing the underlying status quo we don't even notice is there. Every change in human social consensus alters the cultural landscape in ways unforeseen and deeply regrettable. For every action there is a reaction. Now we're stuck with the Kardashians as role models for young women, grotesque collateral damage diametrically opposed to the purest intentions of the women's liberation movement. Where do we go from here? Swissair, Swiss chocolate, Swiss watches, Swiss bank accounts, Swiss brains.
A scene from "The Divine Order," a film by Petra Volpe. Photo: Zeitgeist Films