An
edited film review by Roger Ebert, September 27, 1973.
Someone
once said that Yves Montand seemed
born to play doomed European leftwing intellectuals. And so he has, most
memorably in Z and La Guerre est Finie, and against the
type in State of Siege. But nothing
in those films could possibly prepare us for the loud, gentle, awkward,
jealous, childlike, impulsive Montand of Claude
Sautet’s Cesar & Rosalie.
The
movie tells a love story of sorts, or a love-hate story, and even if it does
lose its way toward the end it presents not one but two unusually good
performances: by Montand, as Cesar, a wealthy, scrap-metal dealer with
international connections, and by Romy
Schneider as Rosalie, the woman who loves him sometimes and lives with him
sometimes, but not always at the same sometimes.
It’s
the sort of thing the French, with their appreciation for the awesome
complexities of a simple thing like love, do especially well. American movies
tend to treat love as a vast magic spell; if you’re in love nothing else
matters and you’re surrounded by your own special miracle, etc. And you’re also
young, of course. Movies about the loves of older people - Montand’s age, for
example - tend to be comedies revolving about absurd domestic situations.
Not
here. Sautet gives us a complicated situation and contrives to elevate it to
the level of the completely impossible. Rosalie is presented as a character who
was in love with David (Sami Frey),
but married Antoine when David disappeared without explanation. As the movie
opens she has divorced Antoine and is with Cesar, but not living with him. David,
the first, younger lover returns and Cesar immediately becomes insanely
jealous. He uses all the tricks he can muster to scare his rival off, but succeeds
only in driving Rosalie into David’s arms.
But
then, well, the passion of jealousy can be attractive at times, and Cesar is an
attractive man, all bluff and growl and wounded masculinity. So Rosalie wavers,
and then Cesar plays a trump card by buying the childhood vacation home she
loved so much. So then she goes back with Cesar, but then she’s lonely and
depressed. It’s a classic reversal on a standard romantic theme: Rosalie can’t
love the man she’s with, and can’t be with the man she loves. In desperation, Cesar
appeals to David to move in with them in the summer home. And after a fashion,
he agrees. The two men are caught in a cruel trap. They both love Rosalie, and
she loves both of them, but the situation is so psychologically contorted that
there’s no happiness anywhere. And it’s even more labyrinthine because,
wouldn’t you know, the two men begin to like each other.
All
of this sounds more like musical chairs than a Gaelic comedy, but Sautet pulls
off a nice erotic juggling act that almost works, all except for the very
ending of the film, which seems not only unlikely but perverse. We don’t much
care, though, because we’ve had a good time and enjoyed, as we enjoy few
things, the way Romy Schneider can make a half-shy smile into the suggestion of
unimaginable carnal possibilities.
ENDING SCENE SPOILER: Rosalie and her daughter Catherine left the summer home
while David and Cesar were out on a boat fishing. She moved to Grenoble, and
Cesar and David stopped looking for her and began living together. Then, after
some time, Rosalie drove up to their home in a taxi, got out and the two men
saw her out of a window. End of film. [Ebert’s rating: 3 stars out of 4]
Labels:
comedy, drama, French-language,romance, Romy Schneider
IMDb 74/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=71, viewers=82)
Blu-ray
Kanopy
Roger Ebert’s review
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