The film depicts a week in the life of a travelling cosmetics salesman, inspired by Homer's Odyssey and the novel Ulysses by James Joyce.
On a grey autumn morning, a middle-aged man named Krieger leaves his Swiss Plattenbau home in a housing estate called Wohninsel Webermühle,[2] driving a Citroën CX.
Krieger visits beauty and hair salons, trying to sell products of the Blue Eye label, especially the Blue Dream Eau de Cologne, advertising with the slogan "That's how this winter smells in Switzerland" (in Swiss German: "Eso schmeckts dä Winter i dr Schwyz").
In Basel, Krieger visits the autumn fair (Basler Herbstmesse) after having phoned his wife from the hotel room.
He drinks in a bar and in a dance hall, though rather observing the night life surrounding him than taking an active part in it.
The hairdresser, talking in Basel German and smoking a lot, asks Krieger about his life and his relationship to his wife while they drink champagne.
As Krieger argues with an employee on the floor, a big Blue Eye logo painted on a glass pane is carried to another room, followed by a photographer and female models.
At a bar, a middle-aged woman offers him sex; it remains unclear whether he accepts, but in the next scene, he sits alone, smoking and drinking before a stage where an Asian female singer performs Strangers in the Night.
A young man in a leather jacket comes in, takes a seat at a table, and starts drumming fast rhythms with his hands and feet.
In the early morning, they drunkenly talk in the Shopville subterranean shopping mall under Zürich Main Station, telling of their lives.
Reisender Krieger was produced in the autumn of 1979,[4] first aired on 6 August 1981 on the ZDF television channel, and premiered in cinema on 12 March 1982.
[7] While the film follows stations and themes from the Odyssey, transferring them "to our country and our civilisation",[7] a large part also consists of documentary shoots, showing places and landscapes in German-speaking Switzerland.
Wolfram Knorr described it in a Weltwoche article on occasion of the 66th Locarno International Film Festival (2013) as a "masterpiece of form and fantasy about Switzerland" and as by far the best Swiss movie, which, however, didn't inspire others to follow with similar studies.
[12] The German Lexikon des internationalen Films attests the movie to be "excellently photographed"[1] and describes it as trying to show alienation and the inability to communicate in modern society by the example of Krieger's conduct of life.