Saving the Landscape

Nestled within the beautiful countryside – which allows no distance to observers and whose beauty we know to be spurious – is a foreign object, a nuisance, a widower who, since the death of his wife, has retreated from his working life into an internal world populated only by his own imaginings. His son finds it increasingly difficult to reach his father, and is overwhelmed by the task of managing the estate. When the local mayor offers his help for both friendly and authoritarian reasons, the son is deeply sceptical about the proffered aid. The father, meanwhile, carries on building his machine, a device to swallow up the countryside, the world and, finally, also himself. A catastrophe looms on the horizon with consequences that might extend far beyond it. Two city girls seem to prefigure the time after the impending disaster; astounded by the beauty of the landscape, the existing frontiers and borders of their own world have been redrawn.