The title of Sautet’s film is a bit of a tease – the fairer
title might seem to be “Cesar and Rosalie and David,” or even some other subgroup
of the three. The chosen title prompts us to regard the relationship of Cesar
and Rosalie as a normative benchmark and David as a threat, as such taking the
viewpoint of Cesar – a self-made man overawed to have Rosalie as a partner, but not knowing how to express it except by aggressively
filling every silence with his own voice and by relentlessly reciting how much money he spent on this and that (Yves Montand is just sensational in the role). David
(Sami Frey) returns after five years in America, still pining for his old love,
and through his youth and handsomeness and (as Cesar puts it) greater cool seeming
to stand a chance of getting her back. Cesar rapidly succumbs to obsessiveness, and then to
outright violence, but even as his actions threaten to push Rosalie away rather
than secure her, his fraught interactions with David are actually becoming more
meaningful to him, perhaps to both men. For a while, the film seems rather offputtingly
dominated by Cesar and David, even to the point of underlying misogyny, but by
the end Sautet has repositioned that impression to a degree that seems quietly
radical (the movie stops short of any sexual implications between the two men,
but then it’s mostly discreet about sexuality throughout). In the end, Rosalie
is nothing more than pure image, observed from a distance, captured in a final freeze frame, making the point that perhaps that’s all she ever was, and that
the apparent lack of attention to her inner life in the earlier stages wasn’t
an oversight, but a quiet rebuke of our expectations of women in cinema, and
beyond it. The fact that Rosalie is embodied by Romy Schneider, in all her mesmerizing
reticence, dares us to see beyond the image, while simultaneously acknowledging
we may not think to.
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