A landmark film that put the Swiss cinema on the map, La Salamandre is filled with an infectious high spirit reminiscent of the films of the French New Wave of the 1960s. But Swiss director Alain Tanner and his co-scriptwriter, British novelist and art critic John Berger, had their fingers on the pulse and the intelligence of a very contemporary, very Swiss generation of rebellious youths who have modulated into bemused and out-of-place adults--the same generation that they were to explore in Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. The script seems spiced with the spontaneity of writers and actors alike. Tanner's most important achievement is his awareness of the oblique, casual, but all-important ways in which people interact. Jean-Luc Bideau and Jacques Denis portray two writers--one who relies on intuition, the other on facts--who attempt to construct a t.v. script based on the purported attempt by a young working girl to murder her uncle. Bulle Ogier is marvelous as the kinky, defiant girl who makes herself at home in the writers' real and fantasy worlds alike.