Claude Sautet
L'amante

I love this film by Claude Sautet, one of the French directors most reserved and distant from various "nouvelles vagues" yet capable of crafting and meticulously building a cinema full of emotions, sentiments, romance without being sentimental, subtly delving into the psychology and pain of the characters.

This film, which in Italian was translated and I don’t understand how, with the title "L'amante", rightly in French is titled "Les choses de la vie", the things of life of every human being who loves, suffers, remembers, and dies. In fact, the story, rather than being centered on the two lovers, tells the story of a man Pierre, portrayed by an excellent Michel Piccoli, who works, is separated, has a son, and a lover, the stunning Romy Schneider. This man is completely torn between his family and affection for his ex-wife, the charming Lea Massari, and conflicted between the desire to leave forever with his lover to Algeria or to spend holidays with his son in their old beach house, has an accident during which he encounters the things of life, indeed, memories, regrets, affections, and dreams. Parallel to this is also the thread of the love story between him and Hélène, the lover, and it narrates all the fragility and fleeting nature of feelings, and how sometimes certain misunderstandings can lead to unbridgeable distances if one of the two dies accidentally. This is one of the film's most heartbreaking aspects, the fear of loss, which indeed, combined with the splendid music by Philippe Sarde, brings a lump of silent pain to my throat.

Sautet manages to touch the tenderest, most romantic, pastel, and gray tones of our souls while being anti-romantic: he avoids building the story by loading it with tension but instead shows us death as a punctuation of the film, from the stunning reverse scene in the opening credits with Sarde's beautiful music that I attach to this review, to the images peppered throughout the film; the accident itself does not involve bloodshed and wounds but is constructed with foreshadowing and shown from all angles, thus achieving a tone more of realistic sadness than melodramatic tragedy. Despite this, there are points where the film slips to the border of the banal and the easy, especially in the last part when Pierre is lost in his imagination, with his memories before death: Sautet is not Fellini, and it shows, but his skill lies elsewhere, in narrating with delicacy the most intimate affections, like the splendid images of Pierre in the car, while outside it pours, and his thoughts drift sadly and tenderly over his life.

The feelings are never shouted out but there is silence, as in the beautiful and heartbreaking final scene where only a silent pain remains inside that finds no expression.