The screenplay for the 1976 Best Screenplay winner from the National Society of Film Critics. As a metaphor for the changing political climate in Europe in the late 60's, "Jonah..." is a story of a former political activist and his contemporaries learning to live with the materialism of their age. Max's involvement with a real estate deal, as well as Madeline's interest in Hinduism--in order to expand her sexual horizons--are a clear indication of the shift in modern thinking--from the idealistic to the practical.

The cinema of Alain Tanner has always made room for society’s dropouts and dreamers, and nowhere more so than in his most celebrated work (coauthored by John Berger), which tracks a ragtag group of Swiss strangers, brought together by chance and a shared anticapitalist spirit, and the little refuge they create for themselves in the face of political and economic failures. A bracing reminder that change indeed begins at home, over dinners and conversation, Jonah “strikes a mature balance between being realistic about the world and thinking that another world is possible,” notes Vogue’s John Powers. “Seeing it today . . . its undefeated sanity is bracing.”174