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
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=TBD, viewers=86)
Blu-ray
Blu-ray review

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

 

Love at the Top (Le mouton enragé) (1974) [R] ****

Nicolas Mallet (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a timid, middle-aged, bank clerk, sees Marie-Paule (Jane Birkin), a beautiful but lonely young girl, gazing out at the Seine. She smiles at him and he offers to buy her a drink. When she agrees, he assumes that his luck has finally changed. But when later on they rent a room in a cheap hotel, he discovers that she is a prostitute. Before they make love, he hits her out of frustration, and then forces her to tell him that she came to the hotel because she truly wanted him.

Feeling expansive after his tryst, Nicolas meets his old friend Claude Fabre (Jean-Pierre Cassel), a frustrated, second-rate novelist, in their favorite bistro and tells him about his experience with Marie-Paule. Intrigued and inspired by Nicolas' accomplishment, Claude decides to teach him how to manipulate wealthy, influential people within the Parisian socio-economic system of which he is presently just a victim, in order to transform him into a man whom women cannot resist and with whom wealthy, politically-connected men will want to do business. And then Claude will use Nicolas’ transformation as the basis for his next novel. It’s a brilliant idea but will have unforeseen consequences.

Claude begins by suggesting that Nicolas seduce Roberte (Romy Schneider), the sexually frustrated wife of an aging professor. For a while Claude allows the lovers to enjoy their affair, and even plan to marry and have a child together, but eventually he decides that Roberte is not necessary to his plan for Nicolas and suggests that they separate, which Nicolas resists. Under Claude’s influence, Nicholas quits his job at the bank and begins to meet a succession of increasingly politically and economically influential men and women. Over time Nicholas changes and evolves until he has become the wealthy publisher of a National Enquirer-like scandal sheet, lives in a mansion, drives a Lamborghini and seduces movie actresses. Unfortunately, there are tragic consequences to Claude’s suggestions and Nicolas’ actions, and by the end of the film corpses litter the landscape.

Michel Deville directed Love at the Top (in French: Le mouton enrage) nearly a half-century ago, but its visual style and very intelligent social commentary give it a strikingly contemporary feeling. Love at the Top blends cynicism and social awareness to expose the hypocrisy of a society in which everyone has a price. Trintignant is the star of the film, but Cassel, Birkin and Schneider are equally impressive.

Labels: comedy, drama, Paris, Romy Schneider, satire, tragedy
IMDb 71/100
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Forever My Love (1962) [UR] ****

Forever My Love, written and directed by Ernst Marischka, and starring Romy Schneider and Karlheinz Boehm, (Böhm) is a dubbed-in-English compilation of the three films of the Sissi trilogy, about the romance between Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and Duchess Elisabeth (Sissi or Sisi) in Bavaria, who became his wife and Empress of Austria in 1854 at the age of sixteen. We follow their brief courtship, Sissi’s many issues with her mother-in-law regarding the raising of her children, Sissi’s role in bringing about the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867, and Sissi’s diagnosis of tuberculosis and her convalescence on the island of Corfu, Greece.

The three films of the Sissi trilogy are Sissi (1955, 1h 42m), Sissi: The Young Empress (1956, 1h 47m) and Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress (1957, 1h 49m). Given that the total length of the trilogy is 5h 18m, and Forever My Love is only 2h 27m, the compilation is less than half the length of the trilogy so a great deal has been left out. Arguably, the compilation was released to acquaint American audiences with the trilogy. The compilation can be accepted as a lavish, royal love story with all the pomp and circumstance one might expect. The costumes and scenery are grand, and Romy Schneider (1938-1982), aged 17-19 during filming, is at the height of her beauty. Judging from the Wikipedia biographies of Franz Joseph and Sissi, however, the story is rather fictionalized.

Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria (24 December 1837 – 10 September 1898) was born into the royal Bavarian house of Wittelsbach, Elisabeth (also called Sissi and Sisi) enjoyed an informal, undisciplined upbringing. Some might even say she was a wild child, enjoying horseback riding, hunting, fishing and simply being outdoors, especially with her father. At the age of fifteen, she met Emperor Franz Joseph I, who was being pressured by his mother to announce his engagement to Sissi’s older sister Helene (Nene). However, Franz fell deeply in love with Sissi, proposed to her and would not take no for an answer. Sissi was sixteen when the two married and she became Empress of Austria.

The marriage thrust Sissi into the much more formal Habsburg court life, for which she was unprepared and which she found uncongenial. She came to develop a deep kinship with Hungary, and helped to bring about the dual monarchy of Austria–Hungary in 1867. The death of her only son Rudolf, and his mistress Mary Vetsera, in a murder–suicide tragedy at his hunting lodge at Mayerling was a blow from which Sissi never recovered. While travelling in Geneva in 1898, she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni.

Blogger’s comment: Forever My Love meets the criteria for a Cinderella story of a royal falling in love with a commoner because, while both Franz and Sissi are royalty, Franz thought Sissi was a commoner when he met and fell in love with her, and Sissi had no interest in marrying Franz and becoming Empress of Austria and even tried to reject him.

This Cinderella story, the story of the celebrity/royalty/titled/wealthy falling for the commoner/governess/maid/nanny is found throughout life and art, as this list of films labeled (tagged) Cinderella-story and reviewed in this blog will confirm.

And in real life, Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederick was attending the Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia in 2000. While in the Slip Inn Pub in Sydney, he met and fell in love with an Australian commoner named Mary Elizabeth Donaldson. They became engaged in 2003, married in 2004, have four children, and Mary is now Crown Princess of Denmark.

Labels: Cinderella-story, drama, period, romance, Romy Schneider

IMDb 69/100

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Blu-ray 

Amazon - The Sissi Collection

Flickers in Time review

HKFilmNews review

The Sissi Collection in Blu-ray includes four films: the Sissi trilogy and Victoria in Dover, a film about the young Queen Victoria, also starring Romy Schneider.

 

Boccaccio ’70 (1962) [NR] ****

In his famously bawdy collection of 100 tales, The Decameron, humanist author Giovanni Boccaccio cast a critical eye on 14th century Italian culture, mocking religious hypocrisy in the wake of the Black Plague, detailing the differences between newly defined social classes, and attempting to change the country's Church-stultified attitudes towards sex by portraying love as complicated and the source of much folly, but entirely natural—that is, not shameful or sin-ridden.

In 1962, some six-hundred years later, four of Italy's greatest filmmakers -Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio de Sica - would borrow the frame-story device of The Decameron and take a similarly askew glance at the pretensions and sexual standards of their own time in Boccaccio '70, a four-part anthology film that's sexy and strange, elegant and comic, sometimes all at once. Made after Italy's post-war prosperity began to kick in, but before the cultural revolution of the mid-to-late 1960s, the film documents a society in transition, with widening generational / gender gaps and morality - especially sexual morality - in a state of flux. The film itself seems caught between two times; neither prudish nor especially explicit, it might best be described as coy, batting its eyelashes and beckoning to the audience with a come-hither gaze. It's damn near irresistible. No one did sexy, nonchalant cool like the Italian directors of the 1960s.

In Act I, Renzo e Luciana, director Mario Monicelli introduces us to Renzo, an errand boy (Germano Gilioli), and Luciana, a bookkeeper (the gorgeous Marisa Solinas) who are deeply, secretly in love. Luciana's been feeling nauseated, and suspects she may be pregnant, so the two get wedded in a makeshift, spur-of-the-moment ceremony that's met with disapproval by her stern parents. Since they don't make enough on their meager salaries to buy a place of their own, Renzo and Luciana have to move into her family's cramped apartment, which leaves them no privacy on their wedding night - or any other night, for that matter. The sexual tension is palpable. All they want to do is do it, but the walls are thin, dad is playing poker in the next room with his buddies, and someone is blaring a boxing match on television. The mood isn’t exactly right. Making matters worse, they have to keep their nuptials a secret from their manager, a lecher who enforces the company policy forbidding female employees from getting married, partially because there was no maternity leave in those days. At its core, the film is about pressure - the pressure to have (or not have) premarital sex, the pressure to get married if you are pregnant, and the financial pressure of being young and immaturely married - and the sexually stymied couple is portrayed beautifully by Gilioli and Solinas as sexually frustrated and not in control of their own lives.

In Act II, Fellini's Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (The temptation of doctor Antonio), the false virtue under fire is prudery - specifically the fiery, religious brand of indignation towards sex that's typically the result of repression and guilt. Peppino de Filippo stars as Antonio Mazzuolo, a self-righteous citizen who takes it upon himself to crusade for public decency. He's a pious tyrant, basically, the kind of guy who goes down to Lover's Lane to shine bright lights on the couples making out in their cars. What really gets his goat, though, is when an advertising agency erects a billboard in the vacant lot across from his home, with the image of a sultry, large-chested sex-bomb blond Anita Ekberg, looking like a precursor to Anna-Nicole Smith - reclining bare-legged on a couch and holding a frosty glass of milk. Antonio calls it an offense to the most sacred aspect of maternity – breastfeeding - and makes it his mission to get the sign taken down. His quixotically sanctimonious obsession leads gradually to all-out insanity, as Antonio imagines the woman coming down out of the billboard and parading around town, a curvaceous giantess intent on exposing her lewdness to the innocent and pure of mind. It's Fellini's take on Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and it's every bit as bizarre as you'd imagine, with double entendre imagery galore - see the fire hose spraying the breasts on the billboard - and a great deal of comedy at the intersection of the supposedly sacred and so-called profane.

Act III, Luchino Visconti's contribution, Il lavoro (The Job), is the film's strongest, and at the same time weakest entry. Strongest because it's a rather serious, dialogue-heavy parlor drama that best stands alone if viewed separately, and weakest because it doesn't fit as well with the others, which are essentially sex farces. Like several of Visconti's films, it's about the unsatisfied lives of the rich and fabulously bored. In this case, it follows the crumbling relationship of an aristocratic couple who married to join her father’s money with his title. The husband, Ottavio (Tomas Milian), a count, has just become embroiled in a Silvio Berlusconi-esque sex scandal - he was caught frolicking with high-class prostitutes - and he's being lambasted daily in the press. This has obviously upset his wife Pupe, played by the supremely elegant Romy Schneider, who has retreated to her bedroom, comforted by a litter of kittens. As the story unfolds, we discover that Pupe has interviewed the madam and several of the prostitutes Ottavio is accused of having sex with. We also find out that she is considering separating from him, and has made a large wager with her father, who is sure she will not be able to find a job and support herself. She spends much of the story trying to decide if she will go out or stay in, getting dressed, getting undressed, taking a bath, asking Ottavio to help her dry off, getting dressed again, in a series of fancy outfits. On one level her actions reflect her boredom and indecision, but on another level they are designed to tease her wayward husband. Schneider's performance aches with sad beauty, and as always, Visconti is a master of control and perception, finding the cracks in the gilded veneer of a moneyed life. By the end of the story Pupe has awakened in Ottavio a burning desire to take her, and what she does with this is the most poignant and strangely satisfying, moment in the entire film.

Act IV, Vittorio de Sica's sweet and funny La riffa (The Raffle) - is perhaps most faithful to the bawdy tone of The Decameron. Appropriately, it stars that bombshell embodiment of female sex, Sophia Loren, who looks positively fertile here, hips sashaying to a kettledrum beat and breasts spilling out of her cinched and fitted top. She plays Zoe, the unobtainable object of desire at a small-town carnival, where she runs a shooting gallery, scrapping together just enough money each month to get by. When her family gets slammed with ten year's worth of back taxes they can't afford to pay, they hatch a sexual scheme, selling raffle tickets for the ultimate prize - one night alone with Zoe. The various lurkers and male chauvinists who haunt the carnival are obviously enthused, and have no troubled parting with their money for a shot at, shall we say, sowing their oats in that fallow field. But of course, nothing goes according to plan, especially not after Zoe falls for an itinerant cowboy who saves her from an on-the-loose bull. The wayward bovine is naturally attracted to her red shirt, which she quickly removes, revealing a slinky black bustier that can barely contain her, and, FYI, this isn't the last time she takes off her top. When the film debuted in New York, the always starchy New York Times critic Bosley Crowther had this to say about La riffa: The display of Miss Loren's figure is excessive to the point of tedium, and the portrayals of her various grunting suitors are more callow than comical. In the spirit of Boccaccio '70, I'll just observe that it seems like old Bosley just needed to get laid.

Labels: comedy, fantasy, romance, Romy Schneider, satire
IMDb 71/100
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Ennio Morricone - "Le Vent Le Cri" (Romy Schneider 1970 - 1982)

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Romy Schneider - la chanson d'hélène

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Romy Schneider - A simple tribute

Diva: Romy Schneider

Romy Schneider: Emotional Intensity in Film

Women and Time: Romy Schneider

Alain Delon & Romy Schneider - Crazy Love

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider - It's Not Goodbye

Romy Schneider - La Piscine (the Swimming Pool)

La Piscine Trailer

Les Choses de la Vie

Les Choses de la Vie (2)

Cesar and Rosalie (1)

The Romy Schneider Tribute

Noch einmal Romy (yet another Romy)