Hors Saison is a 1992 comedy film by Daniel Schmid, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Martin Suter

Martin Suter

Martin Suter is a Swiss author. He became known for his weekly column Business Class in the Weltwoche newspaper , now appearing in the Tages-Anzeiger, and another column appearing in "NZZ Folio". Suter has published seven novels, for which he received various awards...

. The film is semi-autobiographical for Schmid, who reimagines the hotel he grew up in in the Swiss Alps

Swiss Alps

The Swiss Alps are the portion of the Alps mountain range that lies within Switzerland. Because of their central position within the entire Alpine range, they are also known as the Central Alps....

. The French-Swiss-German co-production premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival

Locarno International Film Festival

The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...

 in August 1992, followed by a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival

Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...

 on 12 September, 1992. The film was the Swiss submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

.

Plot

Adult narrator, (Sami Frey) recalls his myserious childhood at a mountainside hotel which he shared with his mother, grandmother and the hotel's guests. The hotel is host to a series of interesting guests, from the actress, Sarah Bernhard (Paredes), an anarchist assasin (Chaplin), torch singers and seductive women.

Cast

• Sami Frey
  Sami Frey
  Sami Frey, born Samuel Frei is a French actor. Perhaps his most famous films are En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud and Bande à part...
  
   as Narrator
• Maria Maddalena Fellini as Grandma
• Marisa Paredes
  Marisa Paredes
  María Luisa Paredes Bartolomé, , better known in show business as Marisa Paredes, is a Spanish actress.-Biography:...
  
   as Sarah Bernhardt
  Sarah Bernhardt
  Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...
  
  
• Geraldine Chaplin
  Geraldine Chaplin
  Geraldine Leigh Chaplin is an English-American actress and the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin first came to prominence for her Golden Globe-nominated role of Tonya in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago . She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville...
  
   as Anarchist
• Ingrid Caven
  Ingrid Caven
  Ingrid Caven is a German film actress and singer. Her younger sister Trudeliese Schmidt was an opera singer and also an actress.Caven has appeared in over 50 films since her film debut in 1969 in the short film...
  
   as Lilo
• Andréa Ferréol
  Andréa Ferréol
  Andréa Ferréol is a French actress, officer of the Ordre national du Mérite .Her debut is in the 1973 film La Grande bouffe, which made a big scandal at the Cannes Film Festival....
  
   as Mlle Gabriel
• Arielle Dombasle
  Arielle Dombasle
  Arielle Dombasle is a French-American singer, actress, director and model. Her breakthrough roles were in Éric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Blue Villa...
  
   as Mme. Studer
• Maurice Garrel
  Maurice Garrel
  Maurice Garrel was a French film actor.Garrel was born in Saint-Servais, Isère. He appeared in over a hundred films and was nominated twice for a César Award for best supporting actor: in 1991 for La Discrète and in 2005 for Kings and Queen.Garrel was the father of producer Thierry Garrel and...
  
   as Grandpa
• Dieter Meier
  Dieter Meier
  Dieter Meier is a Swiss musician and conceptual artist who is best known for the electronic music group Yello he formed with music producer Boris Blank...
  
   as Max
• Ulli Lommel
  Ulli Lommel
  Ulli Lommel , is a German actor and director, noted for his many horror films, and for his career as an actor on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films.-Career:...
  
   as Prof. Malini
• Carlos Devesa as Valentin
• Irene Olgiati as Couple

Reception

The film was well-received by Variety

Variety (magazine)

Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

, "Hors Saison is an unabashed cinematic circus populated by a Fellini-like cast of caricatures. It is irony and good humour make it high-class, entertainment for family audiences as well as the director's art house fans." David Robinson wrote in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

that the film offers "rich nostalgia" and that it "delights in the colourful ghosts of the place [hotel]".