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). 

Z

Director Konstantin Costa-Gavras

Grigoris Lambrakis a month before his assassination

Christos Sartzetakis

 

Raoul Coutard behind the camera with Costa-Gavras

Costa-Gavras with Yves Montand

Costa-Gavras with Jacques Perrin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Z                      A                                                                                                                      France  Algeria  (128 mi)  1969  d: Konstantin Costa-Gavras

Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance.  It is DELIBERATE.                                                                                                                               —The opening title card of Z

An incendiary political thriller based on the 1966 Vassilis Vassilikos novel, which lists no government authority by name, only their position, documenting the events leading up to the 1963 assassination of Greek pacifist and social democrat reformer Grigoris Lambrakis (played by Yves Montand), known as the “Lambrakis Affair,” whose death unleashed an unexpected scrutiny of a fabricated series of explanations provided by the police, all eventually exposed as lies, introducing the world to one of the more important figures in cinema, the Investigating Judge, or Examining Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant as Christos Sartzetakis), who overlooks all the threats to his life and career, as well as his own political ideology (the son of a military colonel) and actually uncovers factual evidence contradicting the façade of police reports, and one-by-one placing the conspiracy of Greek military leaders under arrest, touching the social consciousness of young cineastes, critics, and political activists around the globe who had never seen a movie like this.  Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival (strangely spoken in French), mostly shot in Algeria, it won the Jury Prize, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, who would go on to star in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), also picking up the Best Actor Award, making over $14 million dollars internationally, inspiring a generation of conspiracy dramas, while the film also won Academy Awards for Best Editing and Best Foreign Film.  Hugely successful in France and abroad (though banned in Greece), screenwriter Jorge Semprún fought fascism under the Franco regime in Spain, shot by French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard, edited by Françoise Bonnot, while the musical score was by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, the film unveils themes that are central to the work of Costa-Gavras, the repercussions of tyranny and the subtle variations of guilt.  The director made a Political Trilogy of films with Yves Montand, a renowned actor and singer already associated with progressive causes (alongside his equally legendary wife Simone Signoret), including THE CONFESSION (1970), another political thriller based on a true incident, the kidnapping of a Czech Communist Party functionary (Yves Montand) that becomes a critique of Eastern Bloc Communism, and STATE OF SIEGE (1972), another fictionalized treatment of an actual event, when an American intelligence agent (Yves Montand) is tortured/interrogated/assassinated by Uruguayan Marxist terrorists, all films that meticulously detail a sequence of events with harrowing ramifications.  The director has come under an array of criticism from Marxist sympathizers who suggest his dramatic methods tend to invoke sympathy for individual victims of political repression.  A tireless champion of artistic freedom, Costa-Gavras’s father fought against the Nazis in the left-wing Greek resistance movement, but after World War II was labeled a communist by the country’s new government and frequently imprisoned.  The political blacklisting of his father eliminated higher educational opportunities for his son, who was a leading ballet dancer in Greece, but unable to hold a driver’s license, also denied permission to study film in the United States, so instead he emigrated to Paris to study law and filmmaking, becoming synonymous with tireless research and storytelling of profound skill and integrity.  Breaking into the public consciousness with this film, it is a shattering and viscerally potent experience, with viewers enticed and manipulated by a new manner of experiencing events and ideas, featuring a level of immediacy and urgency that is exceedingly rare to cinema, something along the lines of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) or Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (Il divo: La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti) (2007), taking us into the bowels of the Italian General Assembly and Giulio Andreotti, serving seven times as the Italian Prime Minister, able to withstand multiple murder trials, reported connections to the mafia, while also accentuating the kidnapping and eventual murder of then Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.  It also brings to mind a more local experience, Howard Alk’s The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), where a Black Panther activist was assassinated by police, but their tracks were similarly covered by a web of deceitful lies by the police, and at the time, there was no Examining Magistrate to sort out fact from fiction, so that job was left to the filmmaker himself.  Drawing from films with an intense political message, capturing the tensions and energies of the time, much of this resembles the paranoid conspiracy films of the 70’s, clearly inspired by a decade of assassinations in the 60’s (Assassinations and attempts), from John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Patrice Lumumba, Mehdi Ben Barka, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton, yet what’s unique to this film are the slow introduction of at least 30 different characters, each seemingly having their own point of view, all providing subjective, alternative, and contradictory versions of the same incident, as flashbacks only increase the psychological tension, turning this into a RASHOMON (1950) style inquiry that poses particular challenges to the viewer. 

In 1967, two years before filming started, the far-right military junta, under the authoritarian dictatorship of Georgios Papadopoulos and the Colonels’ Coup, took control of the Greek government through a coup d’état, instantly declaring martial law, the suspension of political expression, and the arrest of political enemies, while implementing draconian restrictions on individual liberties and freedom of the press.  Much of this is reflected in both the opening and closing scenes of the film, as in the introduction an Assistant Minister of Agriculture is revealing methods to eradicate mildew or crop disease, which he equates with leftist foreign interference, a metaphor for communism, which requires indoctrination at schools, universities, or working-class factory plants, suggesting their unwanted presence needs to be completely eradicated from Greek society through an aggressive use of voter intimidation and a cooperative police and military plan at the local level to switch votes to their own party.  What this film demonstrates, then and now, is how the mechanics of fascist corruption are firmly hidden under a mask of law and order.  Greece was undergoing a decade-long struggle for political dominance between the left and right, leading to a rise of military conservatism seeking to oust the outside Soviet influence clashing with leftist, communist-leaning organizations seeking to create a Modern Greek state free of American influence, specifically a proposed U.S. Polaris missile submarine base.  Both sides had nationalist agendas free of outside political agitation, so when the Deputy, leftist activist Grigoris Lambrakis, a member of parliament for the opposition Union of the Democratic Left, is called upon to give an anti-American and anti-nuclear speech in the Greek port city of Thessaloniki on May 22, 1963, the local government shuts off all options, refusing permits to both indoor and outdoor auditoriums, confining the event to one single option that they could prepare for, a tiny union hall just across the street from the hotel where Lambrakis is staying, filling the streets with anti-leftist hooligans, basically paid rabble rousers utilized by the police to stir up trouble, interrupting speeches with clubs and sticks, targeting communists and students, sending many to the hospital.  Despite receiving a credible death threat earlier in the day, the police intentionally ignored it, claiming this was a tactic often-used to gain headlines in the newspapers.  Nonetheless, Matt (Bernard Fresson) and Manuel (Charles Denner), two leftist lawyers, are hastily making arrangements, only to be thwarted at every turn, reconfiguring things at the last moment, notifying the pubic of the changed venue through the distribution of student pamphlets, yet they are harassed and interrupted as carloads of agitators are unleashed upon them, many subject to brutal beatings, creating a manic disturbance even before things are allowed to begin.  By the time Lambrakis arrives at the airport and transported to his hotel, he has difficulty crossing the street, as the assembled police simply ignore the marauding crowd, with one of them bashing Lambrakis in the head even before he climbs the stairs to the union headquarters, broadcasting his speech via outdoor speakers, yet the police have built a heavy presence of right-wing thugs out on the street who unleash a barrage of rocks, clubs, and fists as the night explodes in a torrent of confusion and panic, described as “hoodlums” and “wage slaves without wages” in his speech denouncing Greece’s use of nuclear armaments while arguing for a move from the country’s right-wing, pro-war stance to a more pacifist approach, contending half the entire budget goes to military expenditures.   When Lambrakis tries to return to his hotel, a three-wheeled truck known as a kamakazi comes out of the crowd driven by Yago (Renato Salvatori as Spyro Gotzamanis), targeting the Deputy, with Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi as Emmanouel Emmannouilidis), a man in the back hitting him with a devastating blow to the head, knocking him first to his knees, before falling to the ground in a pool of blood, which gets replayed through witness testimony in slow motion, much like the Zapruder film.  In the ensuing pandemonium, a man leaps onto the kamikazi and attempts to engage them, but they fight him off, leaving him heavily injured on the street, where they would have finished him off except pedestrians arrive along with the police, with the driver immediately contradicting the witness testimony.  Nonetheless, Yago is hauled down to the police station.  It’s not the assassination, however, but the ensuing investigation that dominates the film, following a systematic structure, something first realized in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), following the culprits, confronting the avalanche of lies, the attempts to silence witnesses, and the eventual arrests of the real criminals.   

In something of a change of pace, the scene shifts to the Deputy’s wife, Hélène (Irène Pappas), who gives a remarkable performance, nearly all of it wordless, emulating the grief yet quiet dignity of Jacquelyn Kennedy following President Kennedy’s assassination in the same year of 1963.  At the time, it would have been impossible not to recognize the comparison.  The tragedy of her grief at the hospital is overwhelming, conveyed though flashbacks to better times in a master class of understated emotion, holding it all in, changing the entire focus of the film, as Lambrakis holds on for a few days before he dies (half a million Greeks marched at his funeral), yet she’s forced to witness doctors talking about her husband in the most excruciatingly dire medical terminology, yet she endures it all.  By the time she returns to her hotel room, finally left alone, she lets it all out.  The astonishing performance Pappas provides cannot be underestimated, as it profoundly elevates and humanizes the experience. The military junta has all their witnesses lined up, concocting a story about two drunken nobodies out on a wild adventure swarming through the crowds before anyone could react, accidentally running over the Deputy, ready to close the case as death by unfortunate accident, with over a dozen witnesses swearing both Yago and Vago were drinking heavily at a bar just prior to the accident.  This contradicts what the viewer has already seen for themselves, as both Yago and Vago were mingling through the crowd, creating a scene by attacking leftists and clubbing them over the head.  When the arresting police officer has Yago confined at the station, he is carrying a club and there is no alcohol on his breath.  Within days, the military Generals have him officially change his report to delete those tiny details.  Initially, only one person is willing to come forward to testify before the Magistrate, but he is attacked by a speeding car and also clubbed over the head, yet when he falls, there are a dozen witnesses who swear he is drunk and fell off the curb, transporting him to a hospital, where he is placed under police guard.  The General, (Pierre Dux, based on Konstantinos Mitsou) and his right hand man The Colonel (Julien Guiomar, based on Efthimios Kamoutsis), both remind him that he was drunk, against all his personal protests, caught up in a Kafkaesque universe where nothing makes sense.  Also, an autopsy performed at the hospital provides conclusive evidence that the Deputy was killed by a severe blow to the head, contradicting the parade of police witnesses offering phony testimony.  Once again the scene shifts to the Examining Magistrate, as he is charged with sifting through the diversionary smokescreen, suddenly interrogating many of the witnesses, some of them provided by a Photojournalist (Jacques Perrin, based on Giorgos Bertsos) who has photos that contradict the police testimony, while in an electrifying sequence they attempt to run down Manuel on the street to prevent his testimony.  Within no time, the Magistrate has cracked a secret right-wing organization favored by the police to cause havoc when they need it, changing the entire scope of the investigation, where a telling moment occurs when what he has routinely been calling an “incident” becomes labelled a “murder” investigation, hauling in a parade of witnesses, who absurdly use the exact same words to describe events, suggesting they were told what to say, finally discovering that it wasn’t the acts of drunken citizens or riled up protestors, but a deviously concocted plan initiated by higher ups in the government.  Sartzetakis came under heavy pressure to wrap up the case quickly without extending the investigation, but he held firm, leading to an exhilarating climax, resulting in a rhythmic procession of heavily decorated military leaders being called in for questioning before being indicted for both perjury and murder charges, a quick succession of events that plays out like a cavalry charge, with rapid-fire editing that may have laid the groundwork for Francis Ford Coppola’s procession of mafia killings in THE GODFATHER (1972), while the typewriters in close-up tapping out the indictments are copied in Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976).  The assembled forces for the greater good finally stand up for themselves, bringing a warranted jubilation to the audience, with leftist groups proclaiming victory afterwards, all but assured of winning the upcoming elections.  Yet the final epilogue crushes their spirits, as two months later the Magistrate is mysteriously removed from the case, witnesses die under suspicious circumstances, and 21 defendants are acquitted, the two assassins receive relatively short sentences, both pardoned by the junta shortly afterwards, and the military officers receive only reprimands.  Sartzetakis was expelled from the judiciary, arrested multiple times and tortured while imprisoned for a year, though he eventually served as the President of Greece from 1985 to 1990.  The end credits list all the things from A-Z that were banned by the junta government, most too absurd to believe, including long hair on men, miniskirts, the Beatles, Mark Twain, modern and popular music, sociology, labor unions, modern math, strikes, Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter, Albee, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre, Ionesco, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides, Socrates, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Trotsky, the bar association, peace movements, Russian-style toasts, learning Russian, the Vassilikos novel, the letter Z, which means “he lives,” while composer Mikis Theodorakis was placed under house arrest in the Peloponnese Islands.

Postscript                                                                                                                                       Greece and the Global Sixties | HuffPost null  Tom Hayden, former SDS President and California State Senator, March 18, 2010

Perhaps “Greece in the Sixties” is remembered in another historical category because of the dictatorship, but the omission in Sixties historical literature is a serious one, promoting the popular understanding of the Sixties as mainly concerned with middle class lifestyles.  This is distorted historiography.  Greece after all was the fulcrum of the Cold War which dominated the Sixties generation.  The 1967 coup was one of many CIA-assisted ventures that were typical of the time.  The Greek dictatorship was imposed in response to the departure from Cold War politics that the Center Union coalition represented.  The November 17 movement’s resistance to tanks on the Polytechnic campus was a symbol as great historically as that of Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City five years earlier.  If I may say so, Melina Mercouri was as great a global figure representing a revolution in the arts as was Jane Fonda — and Mikis Theodorakis as great as Pete Seeger, and Costa-Gavras as great as Stanley Kubrick.