Although Alan Tanner will celebrate at the end of this year (2009) his 80st birthday, there is not a single one of his films available on DVD. For the New Yorker Film releases of his videos high prices are paid. Does Switzerland care so little about their very few internationally know film makers? First, Alan Tanner is and was practically unknown in German speaking Switzerland, where most of the Swiss movies are made. Second, besides a few recent movies by Fredi Murer, Xavier Koller, Markus Imhoof, also the German language Swiss movies are not available outside of Switzerland.

"Charles mort ou vif" is a typical Tanner-movie insofar as it describes uncompromisingly the inner road someone has to go almost with necessity to the bitter end after he or she had decided to break with society. This central topic in Alain Tanner's work is later treated splendidly in "Messidor" and "La Salamandre". In the present movie, 50 years old Charles Dé does not see any sense anymore in leading his watch factory. Similarly like Marie et Jeanne from "Messidor", he starts his new life-experiment by just vanishing. Like the two girls, he dislocates into a cheap hotel and spends his days by experiencing the emptiness of space and time - like Paul in "The White City". However, like all his Tanner-relatives, also Charles alias Carlo has to make the bitter experience that the emptiness gives birth to monsters. Finally, he meets a couple of dropouts or drifters (there is no real word in English) who live from occasional work that nourishes more or less. Together with his new friends, "Carlo" reads now Bakunin, paints, cooks and learns calender quotations by heart. Sometimes he has break-downs, and these he cures with schnapps in the next inn. When his new friend has a heavy accident, he incites his daughter to break into his company by night and open the safe. Besides regular contact with his daughter who is as Marxist as he is, "Carlo" has no contact with the rest of his family anymore. But Switzerland is a free state, and based on this freedom, his son succeeds in convincing a physician to classify Carlo's newly discovered political maxims and his new way of life as insane. So, one bright day, Carlo has to start his trip into the light, brutally forced by two madhouse-nurses who take him away in an ambulance.