The Middle of the World describes a love affair between Paul, a Swiss engineer running for political office, and Adriana, an Italian emigrant working as a waitress. Paul offers to leave his wife and marry Adriana; she walks out on him. Why? Tanner takes the materials of a classic femme fatale tragedy and refashions them - as they should have been refashioned long ago - 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 society and politics.

“...The movie takes a profound, though subtle, stand against treating women as objects; it really is a feminist statement.”
-Nora Sayre, The New York Times

“One of the very few intelligent films about passion, and on a par with Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage... one of the very best films about eroticism.”
-Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker