CÉSAR & ROSALIE Movie Review

Claude Sautet is an anomaly as well as a magician. Here, as in so many of the delicately drawn love stories he's directed since 1970, there's no real “hook” to suggest that the familiar plotline—in this case a couple wrestling with the emotional turmoil of an old lover suddenly reappearing—is going to result in anything special. And yet Sautet knows that behind every cliche there's an interesting story. The challenge he's created for himself, and successfully met, is to show us the minute-to-minute motivations of his characters, making them comfortably and sympathetically human. The action in Sautet's films is the stuff that happens between scenes in most other movies; the tension comes not from whether successful industrialist César (Yves Montand) is going to stay with Rosalie (Romy Schneider), or whether she's going to run off with her old flame David (Sami Frey). César & Rosalie is about the ways in which love legitimizes decisions that make no sense on paper, and it's a tribute to the knowing, gentle hand of Claude Sautet that he's able to carry us along with these very human beings, never condescending to them even when an easy laugh is there for the taking. As in most of his work, this is a film without villains; what's more, Sautet has the wisdom to make such everyday emotions as love and regret seem positively heroic.

NEXT STOP … Vincent, François, Paul and the Others, Un Coeur en Hiver, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud

1972 (PG) 110m/C FR Romy Schneider, Yves Montand, Sami Frey, Umberto Orsini; D: Claude Sautet; W: Jean-Loup Dabadie, Claude Neron, Claude Sautet; C: Jean Boffety; M: Philippe Sarde. VHS, LV TPV