After splitting with co-scriptwriter John Berger following Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, Alain Tanner began to translate the cultural non-man's-land in which his characters struggled to make a life into landscapes of stark and stunning originality-landscapes that carry a magnetic pull equal to that of the narrative. "(Tanner has) worked at developing a sensuous intellectual cinema founded upon open-ended situations and improvised shooting scripts," J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice. "Rethinking narrative, he's also attempted to reimagine contemporary Europe." Even a Tanner masterpiece like Messidor can come and go relatively uncelebrated, and No Man's Land has been virtually overlooked. Its title refers to the strip of land along the Franco-Swiss frontier, an area of chronic unemployment and an emotional grey zone, where Tanner's host of characters, united only by their wanderlust, are all directly or indirectly involved in smuggling goods and souls across the border. They include Madeleine (Myriam Mézières), who runs a disco but dreams of a pop music career in Paris; her garage-mechanic lover, Paul (Hugues Quester), who wants to emigrate to Canada; Mali (Betty Berr), an Algerian living in France and working in Switzerland, and Jean (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), a formerly content farmer now smitten with Mali. A score by Terry Riley captures the sense of entrapment as a police web tightens around them and a free-form narrative becomes excruciating.