Tag: Yves Montand

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: César and Rosalie

Written by Richard T. Jameson July 5, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 23, May-June 1973]

There’s no good reason why this film shouldn’t be entitled César and Rosalie and David since that’s a much more complete and accurate indication of what’s going on herein. Rosalie (Romy Schneider) is the mistress of César (Yves Montand), a vulgar but dynamic and likable junk tycoon given to explosive demonstrations of affection one moment, rage the next. She has a child, a little daughter, by a painter named named Antoine whom she married after the love of her life, another artist named David (Sami Frey), bugged out to the States without a word of explanation. After five years David returns as unexpectedly as he departed; Rosalie, without ceasing to love César, finds she’s still interested. César, doing his utmost to appear subtle and to take things in stride, belatedly catches on and threatens to make a shambles of all their lives. The film proceeds along familiar enough lines with Rosalie gravitating first to one man, then to the other. It is the violently changeable César who finally concedes that he cannot cope with “imagination,” as personified by David, and that Rosalie cannot be content without both of them; he invites his rival to share their seaside idyll. At that point Rosalie finds herself confronted with a particularly incongruous Jules-and-Jim relationship in the making and clears out entirely—only to return, a year later, just as the two men have settled into a mutually supportive (though not necessarily homosexual) lifestyle. And at that questionable juncture, the film terminates.

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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: State of Siege

Written by Richard T. Jameson August 29, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 30, March 1974]

Several months after its intended opening and a good seven or eight months behind the rest of the country, State of Siege has arrived. If the event is somewhat anticlimactic, it was scarcely expected to be otherwise. Costa-Gavras’s previous picture, The Confession, while exemplarily evenhanded in terms of the director’s career (leftist totalitarianism getting slammed as hard as rightist totalitarianism was in Z), was a tedious experience, and even the stellar-cast Z, emotionally and physically stirring while one sat before it, has tended to grow minor in retrospect. On the consumer-report level it must be noted that State of Siege affords a better time than The Confession without quite coming up to Z for sheer excitement—although in its limited way the new film essays a more complex problem, politically and aesthetically, than either of its predecessors. Based, like them, on a true series of events, the kidnapping and assassination of American policeman Daniel Mitrione in a South American police state, the film seeks to depict the political alignments of the society in which the crime takes place, the sometimes convoluted strategies of the various factions, and the ultimate ineffectuality of the terrorism on both sides. That any complexity will be admitted by the filmmakers is not immediately apparent: the Tupamaros who kidnap Mitrione (here called Santore) are young, unspectacularly photogenic, intelligent and dedicated, while their advocates—journalist O.E. Hasse and parliamentarian André Falcon—are urbane, witty, and unflappable; their rightwing counterparts are apoplectic, shifty-eyed, shrill, self-interested. Costa-Gavras has straightforwardly defended this bias by suggesting that the Left has a, er, right to its own “John Wayne–type entertainments.” And certainly one needn’t be a rabid rad to turn on to the film; the less-than-radical viewer will—if not be radicalized—at least pick up some salutary political education, as in a voiceover montage where one government minister after another climbs out of a series of interchangeable limousines and, on his way to a top-level conference, is identified as director of this or that or those corporations, many of them American companies, some of them virtual political and economic dynasties—and these men are the government of Uruguay.

States of Siege

Written by Movietone News contributor February 15, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 34, August 1974]

by Albert F. Nussbaum

I’m a contentious SOB. I’d rather knock you down than walk around you. However, if someone else knocked you down first, I’d probably pause long enough to help you up, brush you off, and tell the next man in line that you’re not a bad guy. A paradox? Sure it is, but if you’ve reached the age of puberty you should know that life isn’t always fair, and action and reaction aren’t always logical even when they are sincere.

This may explain why I’m writing about State of Siege, though. After reading critiques that found fault with its intellectual, artistic, and political content, I finally saw the film and wasn’t particularly troubled by these things. In fact, I liked it. Very much. I thought it was a good film and I hope the next guy who comes along doesn’t knock it unfairly.

Review: Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others / Salut, L’Artiste

Written by Richard T. Jameson March 5, 2012

[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]

Vincent is losing his mistress, his factory and his health. In the dark night of the bourgeois soul he goes to see the wife he’s already lost because of the mistress. Embarrassed by his needs, discomfited by the sudden knowledge that another man has just left his wife’s bed, he tries on an expansive gesture in her small apartment—and knocks over a vase of straw flowers. Yves Montand is the miraculous kind of actor who can reach over, restore the flowers, and cap the action with a look and wave that encompass “You know me!”, “You would have that kind of thing in your apartment,” ”I’m really up that well-known tributary,” and “There! good as new!” It’s scarcely an isolated actor’s-moment in Vincent, François, Paul et les autres; Montand and his co-players serve up many. One of the best-acted scenes of 1976 is likely to remain the café interview, a bit later in the film, between Montand and wife Stéphane Audran: he indicating by cautious, hopeful indirection that he’s at liberty, the young mistress is gone, he no longer worries about being a man of affairs in any sense, and maybe they could give it another try; she understanding from the first, supremely considerate of his feelings and vulnerability, but aware that life has moved on and so have they, that she must answer other imperatives now.