The year is 2000, and Jonas is 25, a fatherless youth (played by Mick Ford) drifting about Dublin and the countryside. He encounters, not entirely by accident, an eccentric old garage owner named Yoshka (Trevor Howard), who exists in a world of ancient car carcasses and rusty solitude. Yoshka has a secret, which Jonas is challenged to learn. Theirs is the stormy and sometimes brutal partnership of master and apprentice, and finally of guru and follower. Alain Tanner's first English-language film polarized his international audience; many felt he had abandoned the political acuity of his earlier films (La Salamandre, Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, et al) for a journey into the occult. There is no denying the spiritual content of Light Years Away--but even in his choice of a profoundly austere Irish landscape, Tanner eschews hazy mysticism. The film is a fable about transcendence, and about a search for knowledge. It is all the more fascinating for a fine performance by Trevor Howard as the cantankerous Yoshka, who is not particularly likeable but is sympathetic in his search for a young “son” to whom he can pass on his knowledge and his passion, before he takes off for parts unknown.