The Middle of the World describes a love affair between Paul, a Swiss engineer running for political office, and Adriana, an Italian immigrant working as a waitress. Paul offers to leave his wife and marry Adriana; she walks out on him. Why? Tanner and Berger take the materials of a classic femme fatale tragedy and refashion them-as they should have been refashioned long before-into a subtly observed but invigorating tale of the growth of a woman's consciousness. Set in "a period of normalization," and punctuated with landscapes of startlingly original beauty, this cool, highly erotic, teasingly ambiguous film is one of the few convincing, truly modern treatises on the nature of love-but a love not divorced from the contexts of politics, class, and geography. (PFA '79)