Quelques jours avec moi (1988) - film review

Martial Pasquier returns home after a spell in a psychiatric home.  His mother, the head of a successful supermarket chain, hires him to look into the accounts of some of her less profitable stores.  Martial’s first port of call is Limoges, where he gets off to a bad start with store manager Fronfrin.  Martial worsens the situation by stealing the Fronfrins’ housemaid, Francine, the only person he has any sympathy for.  Francine is equally attracted towards Martial and agrees to move into his rented apartment.  But their affair is cut short when Martial is called back to Paris.  Returning to Limoges a short time later, Martial is devastated by the news that Francine has left him to start a relationship with another man...

Quelques jours avec moi is another engaging romantic drama from director Claude Sautet, this time featuring the dream pairing of Daniel Auteuil with Sandrine Bonnaire, two of the finest actors in French cinema.  It is an attractive film, marred slightly by some unconvincing characterisation and bizarre plot twists, but sensitive performances from the two lead actors compensate for most of the deficiencies in the script.  The eccentric Fonfrin couple – played to perfection by Jean-Pierre Marielle and Dominique Lavanant – provide an amusing counterpoint to the romantic drama, even if Sautet’s attempt at satirising their bourgeois milieu does come across as clichéd and simplistic.

As in most of Sautet’s films, the entourage of friends and family are an important ingredient in the drama, although the director is perhaps being somewhat optimistic in the way that his characters are able to set aside their social differences and prejudices to form friendships.  The worlds of the Fronfins and Francine are so far apart that it is unlikely that a set-piece dinner party would bring them together – yet somehow Sautet manages to just about make this plausible.  Whilst probably not the director’s best work, Quelques jours avec moi is a satisfying piece, hilariously funny in places, exceptionally poignant in others.  Daniel Auteuil would star in Claude Sautet’s subsequent film, the magnificent Un coeur en hiver (1992).

© James Travers 2006

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