Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life, 1970) [PG] ****

NOTE: While there are no actual spoilers in this review, certain elements of the plot of Les choses de la vie have to be discussed in order to make sense of the film, and that discussion borders on spoilers.

On one level, Les choses de la vie is a fairly standard story of that staple of French film, and life in general, the ménage à trois, although the film is rather deceptive about this particular element. The film opens with allusions to a catastrophic event, before finding a couple, Pierre Berard (Michel Piccoli) and Hélène Haltig (Romy Schneider), in bed. As the film progresses, it's implied that they are married, and perhaps married for quite a while, although there is definitely still passion in their relationship. Only later is it revealed that Hélène is not Pierre's wife, but rather his mistress, although given the state of Pierre's marriage to Catherine (Lea Massari), Hélène may be Pierre's more constant companion.

On the structural level, Les choses de la vie is an intriguing viewing experience, since it uses the element of a devastating car crash to avoid using linear time. There are brief seconds inserted into the film that depict Pierre driving at high speed through the French countryside on the way to a meeting in Rennes, 350km southwest of Paris, and we get the distinct impression that his journey will not end well. Director Claude Sautet uses these interruptions in the narrative to offer several vignettes that show us the dysfunction in the two relationships, leaving us with the question of whether Pierre will go back to Catherine, or divorce her and marry Hélène. In fact, this question is uppermost in Pierre's mind as he journeys toward Rennes and, at one point, he even pens a letter to Hélène, the contents of which we cannot know, except indirectly by listening to Pierre. The ultimate outcome of the horrifying auto accident is left until the film's closing moments, although the sort segments shown earlier in the film leave us with little doubt.

While this film is often cited as being Sautet's first film to really connect with both audiences and critics, it's just one of three films often cited as a comeback for Romy Schneider, along with La piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969) and Cesar et Rosalie (1972) in a tribute to her successful career. Schneider, Piccoli and Massari all give perfectly fine, natural, believable performances. Some critics have identified elements of the film that are superfluous, such as the family flashbacks on the Île de Ré, or the couple with the overheated vehicle that Pierre picks up. However I found them necessary to the film. The idyllic scenes of the Berard family, Pierre, Catherine and their two children, sailing in the Atlantic offshore of the Île de Ré, show that Pierre could have had a perfectly serene, uncomplicated life had he not been a driven architect-engineer, continually dissatisfied with his situation. And the couple with the overheated car are later shown in a taxi, driving by the scene of the wreck and being silently grateful that they were not in the car.

Personally, it’s hard for me to watch films that I know are going to end in tragedy, as Les choses de la vie does. Also, there are subtleties of language in a film like this about relationships that probably do not translate well, so reading the subtitles I am sure I missed something important. The film itself has not aged especially well. Most of the characters smoke cigarettes, and Pierre is a chain smoker. Also, Michel Piccoli (1925-2020) was 44 and Romy Schneider (1938-1982) was 31 when the film was shot in the summer of 1969, so the two are thirteen years apart, although Piccoli looks like he is at least twenty years older than Schneider. This caused me to wonder what she could possibly see in him, which made it hard for me to believe in them as a romantic couple.

Music in films is important to me, and one of the most beautiful things about this film is the haunting melody La Chanson d'Hélène, music by Philippe Sarde, lyrics by Jean-Loup Dabadie and sung by Romy Schneider. Here is the link to the song on YouTube, as part of the soundtrack. LINK

And, finally, Les choses de la vie was remade in 1994 as Intersection, with Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich. The general consensus is that it is not as good as the original. IMDb link

Labels: drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 76/100
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Cesar & Rosalie (César et Rosalie) (1972) [R] ****

 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
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Roger Ebert’s review

 

 

La piscine (The swimming pool) (1969) [R] ****

SYNOPSIS (INCLUDES SPOILERS):

It’s the heat of summer in the south of France. In the foothills overlooking the resort town of Saint-Tropez and the blue Mediterranean sits a villa occupied by Marianne (Romy Schneider) and her current lover Jean-Paul Leroy (Alain Delon), house-sitting for some friends who have gone to India.

The centerpiece of the property, which is surrounded by vineyards, is a swimming pool (la piscine in French) which is where most of the action takes place. Jean-Paul and Marianne have known each other for over two years. They are both writers but Marianne is the more successful; after Jean-Paul’s latest failed effort he has given up serious writing and gone into advertising.

They are lying beside the pool, engaged in foreplay, when they hear the phone ring and their housekeeper says it’s for Marianne. It turns out to be Harry Lannier (Maurice Ronet), an old friend, and on impulse, Marianne invites Harry to come and stay with them for a few days.

Harry is a highly successful music producer who drives a brand new and very expensive 1968 Maserati Ghibli. He’s been a friend of Jean-Paul’s since the latter was a 17-year-old, and he was Marianne’s lover four years earlier. If we use the actors’ actual ages as a guide to their characters’ ages, Ronet (b. 1927), Delon (b. 1935), Schneider (b. 1938), at the time of filming in the summer of 1968 Harry was 41, Jean-Paul was 32 and Marianne was 30. Harry arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin, b. 1946) in tow, a daughter that neither Jean-Paul nor Marianne had known about.

As Pénélope tells Jean-Paul, she had never met Harry; her mother had said he was dead, and now that she’s all grown up he shows up and wants to be a part of her life, know everything about her and take her everywhere. He admits to fawning over her and getting a thrill when people think she is his girlfriend. Clearly his relationship with her borders on the incestuous. She also tells Jean-Paul that Harry doesn’t really like him and thinks he has no talent. She observes that Harry really doesn’t like anyone, but wants everyone to adore him.

As the drama unfolds, Harry clearly wants to rekindle his relationship with Marianne, and Jean-Paul is determined to seduce Pénélope while protecting his relationship with Marianne.

Harry continually taunts Jean-Paul, reminding him that he was Marianne’s lover, that he is more successful in business, and that he has a desirable young daughter. Meanwhile, Marianne watches what is happening, and as Jean-Paul’s interest in Pénélope becomes more obvious, Marianne retaliates by becoming more playful and affectionate with Harry.

Finally, one afternoon, Marianne tells them she needs to go shopping in Saint-Tropez and asks Harry to take her in his Maserati. After they leave, Jean-Paul invites Pénélope to go swimming with him at a nearby beach on the French Riviera. By the time Jean-Paul and Pénélope return, it is dark, Pénélope’s hair is wet and matted, she is holding her bikini and is wearing Jean-Paul’s jacket. It is obvious they have had sex. The dinner, which Marianne and Harry had prepared, is tense. At the end of the meal Harry tells Marianne that he and Pénélope will be leaving in the morning, that if he left her with Jean-Paul and Marianne, her mother, with whom Pénélope lives in Lausanne, would kill him.

Harry then goes out, to see his friend Fred in Saint-Tropez before he leaves. After he leaves, Jean-Paul tells Marianne he also will be leaving in the next day or two. Marianne assumes it is to go to Lausanne to see Pénélope.

Harry comes back drunk and runs his Maserati into the partially-open villa gate. Then he begins an argument with Jean-Paul beside the pool. He tells him that it is over between Jean-Paul and Pénélope and that he’s taking her away in the morning. Harry taunts Jean-Paul about his relationship with Marianne, calls Jean-Paul a spoiled brat who always had to be handled delicately, with kid gloves.

Jean-Paul accuses Harry of being jealous. Harry swings at him, misses and falls into the pool. He reaches out to Jean-Paul for help and Jean-Paul half pulls him out, then lets him fall back into the pool. Harry, cold and drunk with a stomach cramp, cannot get out on his own and Jean-Paul pushes him back in every time he tries to get out. Then Jean-Paul takes his hand, pushes his head under water and drowns him. Then he undresses Harry, leaving him in just his undershorts, as though he stripped on purpose to go for a swim, hides his shirt and pants, rolls Harry back into the pool, goes to his room for a dry shirt and pants and leaves them folded on a table beside the pool.

The police inspector Leveque from Marseilles suspects Harry’s death wasn’t an accident, because Harry had worn his expensive non-waterproof watch in the pool and because Harry’s folded up clothes had nothing in the pockets and no sweat in the fabric, as though they had not been worn. The questions he asks make Marianne suspect it wasn’t an accident and that Jean-Paul had drowned him. He claims that if someone had pushed Harry into the pool, drowned him, then changed his clothes, the result would be the same. By the time the inspector leaves after his second visit, Marianne is sure Jean-Paul drowned Harry.

When Jean-Paul tells Marianne that he is driving Pénélope back to Lausanne, Marianne realizes that Pénélope has replaced her and that her love affair with Jean-Paul is over. She begins to see Jean-Paul in a new light, as the murderer of her former lover and the seducer of his daughter. And then Jean-Paul, believing Marianne has found Harry’s clothes in the woodpile, tells her the story of what happened, and Marianne makes the decision to protect Jean-Paul, to be complicit in Harry’s death, and to send Pénélope home.

And at the Nice airport, Pénélope tells Marianne she doesn’t believe anything that Jean-Paul said, and when she asks Marianne how her father died, Marianne says he drowned, and it was an accident.

The inspector knows what really happened, that Marianne is protecting Jean-Paul, and that if she ever has any regrets or changes her mind, she should come to him and he will reopen the case. In the final scene Marianne plans to leave Jean-Paul, but inexplicably, at the last minute she changes her mind and decides to stay with him.

La piscine, co-written and directed by Jacques Deray, is a masterpiece of flirtation, jealousy, lust and seduction, male competition and a sophisticated amoral view of love in 1960s France. It was the fourth most popular film in France in 1969, partially because former real-life lovers Delon and Schneider were reuniting, bringing a palpable erotic chemistry to their performances, and partially because Birkin’s lover, Serge Gainsbourg, had publicly warned Delon and Ronet in the tabloids to stay away from her.

Although Pénélope has the smallest role, she is the key to this story. While Harry and Jean-Paul are ostensibly friends, the basis of their relationship is hatred, and it is Pénélope who brings that hatred to the surface. In fact, La piscine can be viewed as a take on the Greek Oedipus myth: Jean-Paul (the son) kills Harry (the father) so he can seduce Harry’s daughter.

Alain Delon’s image was solidified by La piscine; Schneider’s was liberated. Though she had been working steadily, she had not yet distanced herself from the wholesome Sissi Trilogy that had made her internationally famous as a child actress in the 1950s. But her performance as Marianne not only announced her arrival as a performer of sensuality and maturity, but led to a career-revitalizing, award-winning, five-film partnership with director Claude Sautet, beginning with 1970’s The Things of Life.

THE CRITERION 2021 BLU-RAY RELEASE:

Taking advantage of its four lead actors' multilingual abilities, La piscine was shot simultaneously in French and English near Saint-Tropez, France, from August to October 1968. The Criterion blu-ray disc offers both the French version and a slightly shorter English-language version (The Swimming Pool: “First Love Never Dies), which had been released outside of France in 1969. For it, director Jacques Deray made his edits based on performances, rather than doing a shot-by-shot re-creation of the French version.

The English-language version contains a brief 20-second alternate ending showing the police inspector and uniformed officers returning to the villa and getting out of their police vehicle. The assumption is that they are there to arrest Jean-Paul, or perhaps both Jean-Paul and Marianne. Deray and his producers added the brief final shot to La piscine upon its release in Spain in 1969, to appease Franco-era censors upset by its morally ambiguous original ending, and the same shot concludes the English-language version of the film.

The blu-ray disc also contains Fifty Years Later, a 2019 half-hour documentary made by Agnès Vincent-Deray, widow of director Jacques Deray, on the occasion of the film's fiftieth anniversary. It features interviews with actors Alain Delon and Jane Birkin as well as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean-Emmanuel Conil, who wrote the novel on which the screenplay was based.

It also contains a 20-minute interview with scholar Nick Rees-Roberts on the film’s cinematic and aesthetic legacy conducted by the Criterion in which he traces the influence of La piscine on the worlds of film and fashion in the half century since its release.

Finally, there is archival production and promotional footage, and trailers in French and English, and the package has a liner notes booklet with an essay by film critic Jessica Kiang.

Labels: crime, drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 71/100
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1968 Maserati Ghibli

 

Masculine Feminine (1966) [NR] (Original title: Masculin féminin) *****

A film review by Roger Ebert on November 21, 1967.

The curious thing about Jean-Luc Godard's recent films is that (like good chili) they seem better the next day. This is particularly true of Masculine Feminine, which I like a great deal more at this instant then I did at any time while I was watching it.

The film is made out of 15 scenes of varying lengths, each one introduced with a quizzical title. We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, one says, and another observes that the mole has no intelligence, yet tunnels in a specific direction.

We meet a young man named Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who is engagingly naive. At one time or another in almost every scene he tries unsuccessfully to flip a cigarette into his mouth in the tough-guy manner perfected by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's first film, Breathless (1960). Perhaps we are to understand that he is, not only the child of Marx and Coca-Cola, but also the child of Godard, and that the French New Wave is coming full circle and recording what has happened to those influenced by it.

These young people, as a narrator tells us, go to the movies all the time: We went seeking greatness in movies, and were most often disappointed. We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live. Can it be that this is a movie about kids trying to speak and live as if they were characters in a Godard movie

This impression is reinforced by Paul's girlfriend Madeleine (Chantal Goya). She looks astonishingly like a younger version of Anna Karina, Godard's former wife and the star of many of his films. She sits for hours in cafes, as Anna Karina did in A Woman is a Woman. In that film Karina was an unsuccessful movie starlet turned prostitute. In Masculine Feminine, Miss Goya is a hopeful young pop singer who admits to fascination about the prostitute's life.

The young people of Masculine Feminine demonstrate against the Vietnam war, hold deep conversations, walk around Paris, dance, make love and observe wearily of one of their number: She knows everything of Bergson and Sartre and nothing of anything else. Most of what they do is inconsequential. In one long scene, Godard holds his camera on a girl sitting on a windowsill as she answers a long stream of questions from an interviewer. Does she use birth control? Who is her favorite singer? Does she know where there is a war on? (Answers: None of your business, no one, and no, where?)

This sort of thing isn't terribly fascinating while it's happening. But Godard works with a bright style and a sense of humor and his pictures leave a cumulative impression. We understand something -- we can't say exactly what -- about Godard's young people after seeing this film. We know them, although not very well. They have communicated to us, but not very coherently. [Ebert's rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Labels: drama, French-language, Paris, romance, Sixties
IMDb 74/100 
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Summer Hours (L'Heure d'ete) (France, 2008) [UR] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net, May 6, 2009.

Summer Hours is about death, but not death in the way that it is often packaged and sold to us in movies. Defining grief is a difficult thing. Why do we mourn? Do we grieve for the person who has died or for the ones he (or she) has left behind? Or is there something deeper to it? Do we perhaps feel a sense of loss that there will be no new memories of this person to reside in our thoughts alongside those that have long since taken root? These are ideas filmmaker Olivier Assayas explores with Summer Hours, a picture that examines the repercussions of death with almost clinical precision. He does not manipulate; there is no melodrama. However, by employing such exactingness, he permits us to consider how the experiences of his characters mirror our thoughts and actions in similar circumstances. These are not superheroes doing unusual things; these are men and women working through seemingly mundane matters. Nothing much happens during the course of Summer Hours, and it will bore some viewers to distraction, but those who relate to what Assayas is attempting to do will come away from the experience in a contemplative mood.

The plot is as minimal is one can get. A family - consisting of adult children Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), and assorted grandchildren - gather at the longtime home of matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) to celebrate her 75th birthday. She doesn't live long enough to see 76. In less than a year, Hélène has died and her children are left to divide her considerable assets (her uncle was a famous painter and art collector). This process is presented in detail. Frédéric would like to keep the house and some of the possessions, but he lacks the money to buy out his siblings and, since they live abroad (Adrienne in New York and Jérémie in China); they have no desire to retain ownership.

For Frédéric, who holds a romanticized notion of his mother's house, losing the property as well as the woman who inhabited it is a tremendous blow. It forces him to become reconciled to an immutable fact of life: the status quo is largely an illusion. His fondest hopes (expressed to Héléne before her death) are that the house can stay in the family so his children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy summer vacations there as he and his siblings once did. What he has not understood, however, is that retaining ownership of the house means little. The memories are the same regardless of whether he owns the place or not, and the changes in times and attitudes mean that the setting in which those memories were created has passed as surely as his mother has died. Assayas underscores this point in the movie's final scene, which illustrates that a summer holiday for today's youth is not the same as it once was.

There's a telling symmetry in the way Summer Hours is structured. It begins and ends in the same physical location but, even though only a year of physical time has passed, the gap is one of a generation. Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), Frédéric's teenage daughter, is the constant. At the beginning of the film, she is living in the fragile, idealized world that her father holds dear. At the end, freed from the constraining presence of her parents and grandmother, she acts as one might expect a girl of her age to act. She represents the exclamation point at the end of Assayas' commentary.

It goes without saying that Summer Hours is talky and therefore satisfies stereotypes of what constitutes a French film. The dialogue lacks the compelling quality of Eric Rohmer, but is interesting for a different reason. The conversations represent the kind of logical, down-to-Earth discussions people in this situation might have. Under normal circumstances, it can be a trying and sometimes contentious act to divide the property of a deceased relative. Here, there are added complications: two of the beneficiaries are leaving the country and many of the possessions are valuable. Estate tax issues must be resolved and some of the furniture and artwork will be donated to the d’Orsay Museum in Paris. There's a poignant (yet not overdone) scene late in the film where Frédéric and his wife see Héléne's Art Nouveau period desk on display, and he remarks that it looks caged. It is no longer his; it is now available for public viewing but, for the most part, the passing individuals don't care. It's just another seemingly unremarkable object in a collection.

Summer Hours attracted two of France's acting luminaries, and their presence elevates the material. Charles Berling has the central role; the movie is largely told from his perspective. Juliette Binoche, with blonde hair, has a secondary part. Also noteworthy is that Kyle Eastwood (the son of Clint and brother of Alison) has a small part as Adrienne's younger American boyfriend. Assayas is a big enough figure in international cinema to be able to attract significant names, like Binoche, even when their parts are not especially demanding.

The title is entirely appropriate because it evokes the kind of pleasant memories that form the foundation of Frédéric's longing. It's easy to see how some viewers will find Summer Hours an uninvolving experience. Emotionally, it's a little chilly, and the kind of intellectual investment it seeks to stimulate will work only with some viewers (those who have suffered a recent loss will relate more intimately that those who have not). Anyone who discovers more to this movie than much talk and little action will develop a rapport with the characters. They are reflections of us, and therein lies their ability to compel attention. [Berardinelli’s rating: *** out of 4]

Labels: drama, family, French-language, Paris, reunion

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Metacritic 84/100 

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Belle Époque (1992) [R] *****

Belle Époque or Belle Epoque (The Age of Beauty), is Spain's brief period of freedom and tranquility between the end of the monarchy and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The film stars Jorge Sanz as Fernando, an innocent, young army deserter wandering the Spanish countryside. He finds himself at the home of Don Manolo (Fernando Fernan Gomez) a wealthy, aging artist with four beautiful daughters. Unable to believe his good fortune, Fernando cannot decide which of the girls to romance. The girls decide for him and each of them seduces Fernando in turn. The daughters include Violeta (Ariadna Gil), adventurous and bisexual; Rocio (Maribel Verdu), glamorous, sensuous and free-spirited; Clara (Miriam Diaz Aroca), a repressed widow who yearns for a companion; and Luz (Penelope Cruz) - the youngest, a virgin who wishes she were not.

Don Manolo's home becomes a kind of paradise for Fernando. He has everything he could wish for: freedom, friendship, love, sex, stimulating conversation, cuisine, art... all the things that make life interesting. Of course we know that it cannot last. There is political turmoil under the surface. Four forces - the monarchy, the church, fascism and communism - are contesting for control of Spain, just as Don Manolo's four beautiful daughters are competing for Fernando's affections. Belle Époque won nine Goyas (Spanish Oscars) in 1992, as well as the 1994 Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film. It can be appreciated as a light bedroom farce, as a social commentary on 1930's Spain, or as an anti-war political statement. You can watch the DVD in Spanish with English subtitles, or with the English language soundtrack.

Labels: comedy, drama, French-language, romance
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