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| Director Claude Sautet |
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| Sautet with Romy Schneider |
CÉSAR AND ROSALIE (César et Rosalie) B+ France Italy Germany (104 mi) 1972 d: Claude Sautet
With thanks to the monumental achievement of Bertrand Tavernier’s Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016), an exhaustive re-examination of French cinema, the considerable talents of Claude Sautet came to light. Passionate about the fine arts as a child, he made sculptures before moving on to painting film sets. Working as a social worker after the war, he joined the Communist Party for a few years before shifting his interest to music, writing for the left-wing journal Combat as a music critic. His experience watching Marcel Carné’s LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939) left a profound impression, convincing him to pursue a career in filmmaking, making a short film NOUS N’IRONS PLUS AU BOIS in 1951 before spending the next decade working as an assistant for several directors before making perhaps his best known film, Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) (1960), which was released nearly simultaneously with Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960), both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and was completely overlooked with the explosion of the French New Wave, with critics typically viewing his film as passé. Unable to direct another, as no producers were interested, it would be another decade before his own career took off, so he continued to work behind the scenes with Marcel Ophüls, Jacques Deray, and Jean Becker, among others, transforming scripts by bringing more life into them, described by Truffaut as a “script doctor.” Heralded by the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, and Pauline Kael, Sautet’s films were a constant fixture in arthouse theaters during the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, yet were largely derided and misunderstood, as he remains curiously absent from most discussions of major postwar French filmmakers. His films defy easy categorization, known for their psychological acuity, yet he was a contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague without being part of it. But LA CHOSES DE LA VIE (1970) marked a turning point in his career, with Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider making the difference with her magnetic presence and completely unpretentious beauty, making a series of five films together within the decade, where Rosalie is one of the great female characters in contemporary film, coming very close to her own personality, acknowledging that Sautet was her favorite director to work with, having also worked with Visconti, Welles, and Preminger, yet according to his wife Graziella Sautet, before he met her, “He didn’t know how to direct actresses and female characters didn’t interest him so much, except as objects.” While Schneider died under mysterious circumstances at the tender age of 43, their films together are a way of preserving her memory in cinema immortality. Sautet frequently collaborated with actors Michel Piccoli (5 films) and Yves Montand (3 films), screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie (6 films), cinematographer Jean Boffety (6 films), editor Jacqueline Thiédot (12 films), and composer Phillipe Sarde (10 films), all of whom figure prominently in this visually sunny film. Sautet is best-known for his intelligent, richly textured characterization of the French middle class, where personal lives are contextualized in a particular culture, time, and place, an expression of France as a liberal democracy, where freedoms are often challenged within the complexity of existing relationships in a changing society. In an interview for the book Mythos Romy Schneider, Claude Sautet said in 1998, “I think that Romy had something in her charisma that swept over other actors or colleagues and which was not particularly comfortable for her. Montand and she, that was war. Montand was macho and that still had a very appealing effect on the shooting, because she tamed him like a puppy.”
Sautet has elaborated on the romantic ménage-à-trois themes of Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), with Schneider as Rosalie inheriting the Jeanne Moreau role (originally written years earlier for Catherine Deneuve), expressing a casual nonchalance, yet her openness and fiery independence sets her apart from both men who desire her, preferring instead to control her, which was part of the changing social milieu of the 70’s. Schneider’s enigmatic performance is utterly enchanting, a confident and determined woman, relaxed and comfortable in her own skin, where she appears perfectly happy in her relationship with César, Yves Montand, one of the indelible faces in French cinema and a force in Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1953), a wealthy industrialist with a family-owned scrap iron business, where he’s a blustery, cigar-chomping, larger-than-life figure guided by his own impulses, throwing money around with ease, used to having his way, always demanding to be the center of attention, where their seemingly idyllic existence is uprooted by the sudden appearance of an old flame. David, Sami Frey, who dances the Madison with Anna Karina in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), is an art designer and comic illustrator who turns up out of nowhere after an absence of five years, having left for America after Rosalie chose one of his friends over him, a painter named Antoine (Umberto Orsini) that she has since divorced, immediately declaring his love, as the two men vie for her affections, putting César in a precarious position. A common theme throughout Sautet’s career is the midlife crisis, especially as it pertains to men in the middle of their comfortable bourgeois lives, with the director avoiding all frills, where the focus is always on the story itself, deriving a genuine quality from social realism, where his written dialogue is unprecedented in its authenticity. Almost immediately things start going awry, where the fragility of the relationship is exposed, as the comforts of middle class stability are a distant memory, with César shaken to the core, though he tries to shake it off and pretend he’s unfazed, with that perpetual smile on his face, like he’s the life of the party, César et Rosalie - "C'est mon Bach" YouTube (22 seconds), but it’s clear he’s caught off-balance and emotionally flummoxed, fearing the rival love from a much younger love interest, where the surface belies his internal anguish. The two men are polar opposites, with Montand displaying the full range of emotions as an extroverted ham, über macho and aggressive, with a fiery and possessive temperament, while the introverted David is a sensitive free spirit, a brooding dreamer who is more subdued and quietly reserved. César’s pompous braggadocio and boisterous vulgarity are considered charming during happier times, a brash style also on display during business transactions, often sending in Rosalie to smooth the deal, like a good cop/bad cop routine. While she has been dividing her time between her mother’s house, with her siblings, and César, his tender affection for her is indisputable, yet his abrupt, violently off-putting behavior sends the wrong message to Rosalie, who prefers the comforts and security of a more peaceful rapprochement, where it’s the daily living that matters, not the need to be swept off her feet, yet his jealousy has no bounds, literally sending her into the arms of David. It’s a bit surprising how quickly the wheels come off the rails in this model romance, suggesting middle class stability is a mirage, with so much of it about keeping up appearances, where it only survives during good times, but can’t stand up to the test of turbulence, which challenges the very foundation of bourgeois existence. The recent Claire Denis film Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) feels like a modernized version of the Sautet film with more explosive fireworks.
Lacking the biting sarcasm of Buñuel, the theatrical introspection of Rivette, or the dark Hitchcockian humor of Chabrol, Sautet’s sophisticated yet meticulously crafted character studies dissect societal ills with the precision of Chekhovian short stories, accentuated by stylishly appealing performances that seductively enhance viewer interest. Romance in this French love drama does not unfold in sexual liaisons, but in intimate conversations over morning coffee by an open garden window. Rosalie may be an idealized French view of a liberated woman, the personification of the modern woman, dressed in Yves Saint Laurent, refusing to consider marriage, while at times intimately connected to each man, enticed by the alluring charms by both, free to go back and forth between them, abandoning herself to her inclinations of the moment, capturing the essence of the “love the one you’re with” era. In each case she is routinely excluded from the communal male social activities, like playing poker in César’s case, where she sits alone in the background until summoned to bring more ice or beer, or sitting around a large drawing table with David and his associates, again sitting alone off to the side until summoned to bring coffee. She has a young daughter that César adores, Catherine (Céline Galland), a product of her failed marriage, yet remains connected to her large extended family. When the two of them disappear from his life, César is simply not the same, a shell of his former self, where he’s reduced to taking desperate measures. As David and Rosalie run away to Sète on the Mediterranean, the site of Agnès Varda’s early film LA POINTE COURTE (1955), (Sete - The most beautiful port in Southern France), César tracks them down, surprising them unexpectedly on the beach, exactly as David did earlier in the film, creating immediate anxiety and stress in such a relaxed, beach resort atmosphere, which includes, among other things, the spectacle of a Medieval style of water jousting. In order to appease Rosalie and win her back, he purchases the abandoned family summer home on the island of Noirmoutier in the Atlantic, a fisherman’s paradise, (Noirmoutier, my desert island paradise in the Vendée), which has always been one of her dreams. Exhibiting typical male behavior, after making a damn fool of himself, he thinks he can buy his way out of the problem, yet money can’t buy happiness, with Rosalie and her entire family deciding to spend the summer there, but she is pining away in loneliness, distraught and emotionally vacant. In an effort to rally her deflated spirits, César enlists the aid of David, persuading him to visit after arriving at the conclusion that he can’t contend with the power him living in her “imagination,” a well-intentioned ploy with mixed results, as both men surprisingly spend more time together on a fishing boat at sea and actually become good friends. There is a spirit of melancholy in Sautet’s films, infused with a literary intelligence, with a pervasive feeling of loneliness and sadness. Many of Sautet’s films contain a recurring visual motif, integrating the background and foreground through windows or glass reflections, examined by TroisCouleurs in this visual analysis, 8 - Claude Sautet - Reflets intimes // Intimate Reflections - Vimeo (2:00). An expert eye will find Isabelle Huppert as a kid sister in just the third appearance in her career, with an ambigious finale poetically narrated by Michel Piccoli, as Rosalie returns after a prolonged absence away from both of them, where it’s clear she is the engine that drives this train, as the game of musical chairs begins again, "on ne peut pas se quitter sans se le dire" extrait de César et Rosalie de Claude Sautet YouTube (3:42).
