The conventional view of Claude Sautet tends to overlook the
frequent eccentricity of his narratives, and Quelques jours avec moi pushes that tendency almost to a break point, before the director’s two quieter final films. In disconcerting short
order, a troubled retail executive (Daniel Auteuil, holding his cards close to
the chest throughout) is released from a mental hospital and returns uneasily
to work, then accepts a road trip to check out some underperforming stores
before impulsively deciding to stay on in the first location he arrives at, Limoges, largely
because of his attraction to a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) who works for the
local store manager, and regardless that she continues her relationship with
her boyfriend (Vincent Lindon). The plot goes on adding further elaboration,
eventually and improbably embracing outright melodrama, but Sautet’s primary
interest is in community and connection, in tracing how such an arbitrary-seeming
trajectory might nevertheless provide the momentum that crosses lines of class
and money and attitude and brings disparate people together. In this case the
project takes on an air of borderline goofiness, as the chief of police and
other pillars of the establishment take to partying or hanging out in dive bars
with the dive bar crowd (the closing stretch of Mado comes heavily to mind here); fiscal and other transgressions
are forgiven (and as an aside, has any other director seemed so intrigued by finance
and accounting as a plot motor) and long-fractured relationships are refreshed.
If the ending seems somewhat arbitrary and unresolved, it only underlines how
the interest here is much more in the discoveries that attend the journey than
in the arrival point. At times the movie may seem rather coarse and overdone,
but even that much is refreshing for a director usually better remembered for
small-scale observation and “humanism” than for his more elusively substantive
traits.
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