César et Rosalie (1972) - film review

After her divorce, 30-something Rosalie decides to live with César, a wealthy scrap-metal dealer who is prone to violent bursts.  Five years on, the two have settled into a happy domestic routine, although Rosalie is in no hurry to get married.  Just when all appears to be going well, David, Rosalie’s former lover, suddenly turns up from nowhere and tells her he is still madly in love with her. Rosalie hasn’t yet forgiven David for wrecking her marriage and so is reluctant to start an affair with him.  Unfortunately, César thinks otherwise and, convinced that David is about to take Rosalie away from him, he turns on his rival in a fit of jealousy.  This merely drives Rosalie into David’s arms and the two renew their earlier romance.   When César manages to track her down to Italy, Rosalie finds that she is once again torn between her two lovers...

César et Rosalie is for the 1970s what François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) was for the ’60s - a vibrant portrayal of a love triangle in which the three participants are torn by conflicting emotions as they attempt to reconcile their desires and faltering friendships.  The film was directed by Claude Sautet, a contemporary of the French New Wave whose first acclaimed feature was Les Choses de la vie (1969), a film that helped to revive the career of its lead actress Romy Schneider.  Sautet and Schneider would work together on five films in total, including César et Rosalie - their most successful collaboration - and Une histoire simple (1978), the film that won Schneider her second César.   César et Rosalie features another actor whom Sautet greatly admired and worked with on several occasions, Yves Montand, who was then at the height of his popularity as a singer and actor.

With the exception of his first four films (an odd assortment of genre offerings which are perhaps best overlooked), Claude Sautet’s cinema has a remarkable coherence, both in style and subject.  Between 1968 and 1995, he made just eleven films, but all of these are superlative examples of the French film d’auteur with mainstream appeal - Sautet had a rare knack of pleasing both the critics and audiences.  César et Rosalie is amongst Sautet’s best films and exemplifies his distinctive style, one that has a dreamlike poetry which is draped, a little too elegantly, over a cold girder of realism.  It is easy to be lulled by the implacable surface calm of Sautet’s films, so that when raw emotions suddenly rear up, in rare outbursts of conflict, these inevitably come as a shock.   The cinema of Claude Sautet is characterised by a subtle form of stylisation that gives the most piquant edge to his vivid slices of life.

César et Rosalie is a tour de force not only for its director but also for his three lead actors, who form an impeccable trio as the components of that damned eternal triangle which has tormented mankind since the dawn of time.  Yves Montand and Sami Frey complement one another perfectly as the rival lovers who, inexplicably, develop a close friendship as they each try to steal from the other the woman of his dreams.  Montand and Frey represent two extreme facets of masculinity, the one macho, over-confident and aggressive, the other submissive, quiet, almost feminine in his emotional restraint.  Both actors are superbly cast and give performances which easily rate as highpoints in their respective careers.  Montand is particularly memorable in this film - only he can fill his audience with utter digust in once scene (throwing his co-stars about the set as if they were mere dolls) and then win them back just a few minutes later with his down-at-heel, puppy-dog charm in the next.

Romy Schneider is no less memorable as the enigmatic Rosalie, a character that seems more like an abstraction of the ideal woman than the real thing, a siren-like beauty that seems too perfect for the grubby world she inhabits and may well exist only in the imaginations of the two men who seek to possess her.  As in all of her films for Claude Sautet, Schneider personifies the modern woman in a way that few actresses of her generation could match, showing that a woman can be both desirable and independent.  Here, Sautet exploits Schneider’s unrivalled charm and beauty to the maximum and, in doing so, he creates one of the slickest and most arresting French films of the 1970s.   With a haunting poetry and sublime narrative simplicity, powered by three remarkable performances, César et Rosalie contains the most exquisitely poignant expression of the cruel vicissitudes of love - a film which Sautet would surpass only with his 1992 masterpiece, Un coeur en hiver.

© James Travers 2011


Although he had been appearing in films since the mid-1940s, it wasn’t until Compartiment tueurs in 1965 that Yves Montand discovered his acting chops and subsequently it became impossible to choose between Montand the singer and Montand the actor.  Here he excels as one side of an eternal triangle, living quite happily with Romy Schneider (who wouldn’t be?) until an old boyfriend (Sami Frey) turns up and moves back into her life.  This is truly a belle équipe from writer Jean-Loup Dabadie, through director Claude Sautet, to the three principal actors, not forgetting future threat Isabelle Huppert in a small role. 

Dabadie is a worthy successor to screenwriters like Spaak, Jeanson, Aurenche and Prévert.  As well as writing screenplays, he thought nothing of adapting foreign dramas for the French stage (I was lucky enough to see his take on William Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw - Deux sur la balançoire - at the Montparnasse a few years ago), or churning out songs - his Valentin (named after and written for the son of Montand) was a late hit for the singer.  Claude Sautet, who died far too young, left a legacy of magical movies with not a scintilla of French New Wave artifice about them.  In short this film is beyond perfect.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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