César and Rosalie (César et Rosalie)

 

Director Claude Sautet

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). 

Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part)

BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Bande à Part)      B                    

France  (95 mi)  1964 d:  Jean-Luc Godard

Everything that is really new is by that fact automatically traditional.

―T.S. Eliot from his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

Probably the last Godard film still connected to traditional cinema, shot for just $120,000, inspired by the director’s love of gangster flicks, B-movies, American pop culture, and the existential poetry of “trembling” youth, which can be downright goofy at times, with the director credited as Jean-Luc Cinéma Godard in the opening credits, but proof that Godard was once a playful young director, adapting a 1958 American pulp fiction novel Fools’ Gold by Delores Hitchens and transporting it to the back alleyways and dirty canals of Paris, showing dilapidated streets, industrial zones, and locations not normally associated with films, reflecting a city in decay, accentuating a peculiar lower class perspective.  Playing out like a fairy tale, complete with a dry yet poetically descriptive literary narration that runs throughout and is read by Godard himself, Anna Karina plays Odile (the Black Swan, or black mirror reflection of the heroine in the Swan Lake ballet), a particularly dreamy-eyed young girl whose innocence recalls that of Alice in Wonderland, completely surprised yet captivated by the world around her, literally terrified that it’s not as it seems.  But the film opens with Franz and Arthur (Sami Frey, ex-boyfriend of Bardot, and Claude Brasseur), two friends who are working class and poor, still carrying on like youthful adolescents (though they are both closer to 30 in age, which certainly stands out as noticeably incongruous), carefree in spirit, playing out fantasy sequences on the street, like Billy the Kid being shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett, while driving around the city in their Simca sportscar convertible with the top down, though bare trees are without leaves and pedestrians on the street are all in heavy coats.  Reaching a destination just outside of town, they seem to be casing the joint from afar, observing a large manor on the other side of a river, already conceiving a planned robbery with absolutely no backstory provided.  Seemingly identifying youthful indifference, it’s something of a dreary, downbeat story with melancholic overtones, yet the playful exuberance has enchanted movie audiences for decades.  Given a jazzy score from Michel Legrand, the upbeat tempo is inherently appealing, even as these two small-time hoods have their clamps on Odile, meeting her in an English class, learning coincidentally that she lives on the outskirts with a boarder who keeps large sums of money in his room.  With designs on a robbery from the outset, the two vie for her attention, pretending to romance her and earn her trust, never letting on that it’s all a charade, a devious con game, with little interest in her as it’s all about the money.  These two knuckleheads cleverly deceive her throughout, much like Pinocchio thinks his captor is his friend, up until the point he’s become a caged commodity.  So despite the jazzy tempo that accompanies them in a race around the city, driving their sports car like a race car (another one of their fantasies), there’s an underlying tone of malevolence that is cringeworthy, like introducing sin to an innocent, as Odile simply doesn’t have the capacity to recognize malicious intent.  Living in a big house with her wealthy aunt, she leads a sheltered life, overly protected, abiding by strict rules that are for her protection, which she quickly rejects in a rebellious series of deceitful acts and lies, egged on by these two halfwits who continually prod her for information while encouraging her to disobey, never once thinking about the consequences. 

While the boys are jealous and extremely competitive for Odile’s charms, Arthur boldly asserts himself, passing notes to her in class, playing her for his girlfriend, though he continually stuns her with cold-hearted observations and criminal instincts, views that she simply ignores, preferring to see him in a more romanticized light, believing she actually means something to him or they wouldn’t be kissing.  Franz on the other hand is more of a dreamer, with the narration coming from his character, where he fades into the background, basically following Arthur’s leads, yet arriving at a different viewpoint, as he’s less harsh, play acting the part of a criminal so he can see himself as an action figure, mostly just doing it for fun as he has little else to do.  Still, he’s got a thing for Odile, and met her first, but he’s forced to stand in Arthur’s shadow.  Passing the time together, Franz reads newspaper reports of crime stories out loud, fascinated by the petty details of sordid lives, incorporating them into their young imaginations, romanticizing the idea of criminality.  In much the same way, Odile doesn’t really love Arthur, but loves the idea of what love brings, like renewed energy and a sense of purpose, idealizing the idea of romance, inhabiting the character of Juliet being wooed by Romeo, exactly as Jean Sebring imagines in Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960).  This idea is further emphasized in her English lessons, where the teacher (Danièle Girard) reads aloud passages from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expecting the students to translate the French reading into English, something not a single student appears capable of doing, yet she collects the papers afterwards and expects to grade and correct them within a ten-minute break.  This overall feeling is one of delusion, a separation from reality, which one might attribute to youth, but the teacher is equally culpable, getting her butt patted by one of the students seen earlier drinking from a flask.  The overall sense in class is one of utter anarchy, where there is no sense of order or direction, with the teacher clueless about how disinterested the students are.  This emptiness is further reflected in their aimless and directionless lives, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum, where a drab reality is all that exists, lives filled with endless dissatisfaction, the same thing happening day after day, leading hopeless lives, with no end in sight.  Odile is their ticket out of poverty, or so they believe, but they’re such amateurs, the only thing they know about crime is what they see on TV or in the movies, embracing a fictional world as their own, unaware of the difference.  Mostly what happens in this film is purely killing time, bored, with nothing better to do than concoct a minute of silence, with Godard eliminating all sound, yet they easily give up before a minute is up, also seen driving on roadways or taking the subway, staring at the bored faces of commuters, immersed in a world of disappointment and defeat, yet Odile breaks out into song, staring straight into the camera, singing about sad and lonely people.  To overcome that adversity, they live in a world of make believe, racing through the Louvre museum avoiding security guards like silly kids in order to break an existing speed record, which they do accomplish, but avoid spending even a second of their time embracing the art or culture contained therein, again completely unaware of the consequences.     

Easily the scene of the film is generated from simply passing the time in a café, bored without anything else to do, so they decide to get up and dance the Madison, Bande à Part - Madison Cafe Dance Scene - Jean-Luc ... - YouTube (3:50), an American line dance fad from the 50’s that initiated in black communities but quickly spread to white mainstream television shows like American Bandstand, becoming all the rage in Europe in the early 60’s.  Godard of course insists on subverting the form, stopping the music altogether for brief moments, yet they continue dancing in rhythm while Godard reintroduces his superfluous narrative, becoming a stream of conscious blend of body and mind, accentuating freedom of movement, becoming an artform of harmonious synchronicity that is constantly interrupted, altering the rhythm and mood, yet remains a timeless sequence, one of the most memorable scenes of Karina ever captured on celluloid.  Now if only the rest of the film were this good.  Another film shot by Raoul Coutard in black and white, the film feels drenched in an overcast wintry gray, like an overhanging cloud of oppression that all but blocks out their future, leaving them in their own enclosed little world, cut off from themselves as well as the world around them.  This internal existential angst is in complete contrast to Godard’s film style that so completely embraces shooting on the streets, allowing spontaneity to intervene in regular intervals as they geometrically crisscross their way around the city, including a storefront sign reading “Nouvelle Vague.”  With Arthur bullied by his own family to help pave their way out of debt, Franz is dreaming of escaping into Jack London territory, while Odile is caught up in an imaginary romance that doesn’t exist.  By the time they get around to actually carrying out the crime, they soon discover they are in over their heads, stymied at every turn, baffled by the idea that it should be so hard.  Thinking that they’d be in and out in two minutes, they are startled to discover obstacles have been placed in their way, having the alter their plans and make adjustments on the fly, only to discover what a bungling group of idiots they really turn out to be.  Caught up in a world of dream and reality, they have no conception of right and wrong, where the ineptness of their actions is headscratching in its futility, going from bad to worse, as they continually make boneheaded decisions.  While the intent may be laughable at such a bungled robbery attempt, perhaps amusing viewers through comic misdirection, almost like something we’d see in a Silent movie speeded up to show just how ridiculous they are, yet the cruel way Odile is discarded and physically mistreated is no laughing matter.  Like earlier Godard films, it ends in senseless tragedy, producing the most preposterous shootout scene, as artificially contrived as any ever conceived, where the sheer exaggeration is beyond absurd, but by this time viewers may actually be thinking, good riddance, put him out of his misery.  With one man down, finally out of the competition, that leaves the other to ride off into the sunset with the girl of his dreams, like a Chaplin-style fairy tale ending from THE GOLD RUSH (1925), where both live happily ever after.