Friday, June 29, 2018

Cesar and Rosalie (Claude Sautet, 1972)



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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