Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 164: Tue June 13

Les Choses de la Vie (Sautet, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm.

This film, which also screens on June 3rd, is part of the Michel Piccoli season at BFI Southbank. Yoiu can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
A not uninteresting attempt to make a film about ordinary, everyday minutiae, with Michel Piccoli as an average sensual man, vaguely torn between a demanding mistress (Romy Schneider) and an ex-wife (Lea Massari) to whom he still feels bound. Quietly and deftly, Claude Sautet sketches in the portrait of a man gradually becoming aware that he is coming to a crossroads in his life. But since the opening sequence reveals that he is shortly to die in a car crash, his attempt to make some decision about his life is much ado about nothing - which is precisely the point of the film. Difficult to make a film about banality without being boring in the process, but Sautet all but pulls it off, thanks to a beautifully understated performance from Piccoli which manages to extract a whole lifetime of meaning from a simple gesture like lighting a cigarette, and to illuminate the film's meticulously detailed naturalistic surface.

Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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