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Evading direct commentary on class, this 1970s sketch of a bourgeois Parisian couple creates an arch of estrangement and relatability, awe and bewilderment.

An essay by Janek Kindel

Inspired by a 1967 novel by Paul Guimard, who was noted for his passion for writing and his love for the sea, director Claude Sautet changes the ending entirely in his otherwise faithful screen adaptation from 1970. The title dominates the initial frames of his film: Les Choses de la Vie dons over scenes of a car crash beside a backroad in the Bretagne region. Rural voices recall the incident in flashes. Embedded in the bucolic landscape, like a Monet summer scene, the vehicle resembles a haystack on fire.

It is June in Paris; traces of the pallid morning sun are caressing the half-nude, passed-out bodies of the couple whose lives we are about to witness. Elsewhere, beyond the encroaching bustle of the waking city surrounding their modern apartment building, spicks of poppies are piercing the golden fields of rural France. Hélène (Romy Schneider), in her mid-30s, rolls out of bed and straight to the typewriter in their bright salon. Her light brown hair is mirroring the meadows of the countryside seen a moment ago. Pierre (Michel Piccoli), a successful architect in his 50s, is having a smoke behind Hélène, amused by her zeal: “What’s the proper word for ‘lügen’ again,” she exclaims, “more like telling tall tales – ‘verschönern,’” she adds. “‘Affabuler’,” shoots Pierre, correcting her spelling instantly while drawing her in to him. Already, bursts of budding excitement are clashing with subdued reciprocations of affection; the glistening of June unfurls into an inkling of premonition.

And just like that, the play of an unseasoned couple unravels: he is shaving while she is doing her makeup –scenes of a marriage?– except he might be leaving for Tunis indefinitely and she pleads with him to take her along. Is it just to expect Pierre to make a decision that would so fundamentally alter their lives? He didn’t obtain their visas yet – the engine stalls. Interjections of Pierre’s car tumbling over rough terrain, set to a swelling soundtrack, cut through the soft rambling of quotidian life. We know he is crashing. Back on the timeline, we follow the man throughout his day before the fateful incident. He’s a bourgeois in a midlife crisis without much fuzzing around: he simply goes about his day, works, talks, always stoically fashionable. At a construction-site inspection we are being introduced to his former wife, Catherine (Lea Massari), and current colleague – the two are getting along just fine.

Les Choses de la Vie is marked by a notion of the mundane particular to nouvelle vague cinema. This distinctly French genre thrives on iconographies of quotidian life – the ordinary becomes extraordinary, boredom and familiarity provoke our imagination and reflection of the self. Claude Sautet’s film pulls this off rather well. From its particular mix of colloquial and literary French to its notable, visceral interplay of the social and the pastoral, the human-made and the natural, the movie inspires comparisons with later nouvelle vague entries, including Maurice Pialat’s Á nos amours (1983) and Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert (1986). Here, too, interpersonal relationships are dependent on their surrounding environment. The glistening morning light inspires giddiness; we are waking up with the couple to their dreamy romance. The vibrant colors of the Bretagne landscape after a heavy downpour reflect the resolution of Pierre’s inner conflict about his love for Hélène. After his crash, the colors turn pastel but remain vivid, posing a stark contrast to Pierre’s slow death. A fine homage to the nouvelle vague and a prolific adaptation of Guimard’s eponymous novel, Sautet’s behaviorist film affects us rather subtly and yet no less intensely.

Throughout the film, the car crash is a short throw off the plotline goal but serves as its setup. Character behavior moves to the foreground and we empathize with the protagonists, not through admiration but through the relatability of their motives. Whether we are of similar background is not the question here. It is all-too-easy to step in the shoes of both Hélène and Pierre, as neither is particularly unlikable. In the afternoon at the grand family apartment, walls are being wallpapered, furniture is being moved, only the faces of the people present remain the same. Time flies. A little out of touch with his son, Pierre promises him a vacation on Île de Ré. Later: flashbacks to the sun laced jetties and swaying sailboats amid which Pierre had left his wife for Hélène a year ago.

Over dinner the new couple argue and dispute over the move to Tunis. A friend and colleague of Pierre’s eventually breaks the stifling silence. He invites Pierre to a glass of Pacherenc, a white dessert wine: “imagine meadows of buttercups accompanied by a little creek. That’s the month of April; you’re drinking the month of April!” Cut to Pierre rolling over in his car. Among patches of dirt, delphinium flowers and buttercups are flying around him. We are led to pause for a second amid this clash of machine and nature. Cinema, in its properties of the real, lends itself all too well to conveying naturalist narratives of social drama that are in conflict with the pastoral. We are being transported into a grotesque state of awe and urgency.

In a memorable scene gone awry, Hélène tells Pierre from the comfort of the passenger seat: “Often men say ‘be quiet’ to a woman, you say ‘stop being quiet’.” The sparse use of music sets the tone, giving every look, every phrase that’s exchanged significant space to breathe. Stoically, Pierre drives on. He remains silent. Upon dropping her off, he announces his departure from Paris bound for Rennes. And into the night he drives. Driving and driving through harbingers of what’s to come. Will he crash in the rain? Is the stranded couple on the road at fault for his accident? While driving the unfortunate hitchhikers to the nearest post office, Pierre is thinking up the breakup letter he’d later write to Hélène along the sound of their mundane miffing about getting the car fixed. Instead he changes his mind, deciding to phone Hélène to invite her to Rennes. Meanwhile she is out buying shirts for him, missing him and his phone call altogether. The soundtrack swerves between soft mumblings of Pierre to himself – “A marriage. Mhm. Wouldn’t it be nice to get married. Yes, I should…” – and the steady grunt of the car’s engine as he is cutting through the awakening countryside now glowing from the nightfall rain.

As the sun is approaching its zenith, two trucks meet at a small intersection. One driver stalls his engine, blocking the road entirely. The other stops in time. Not Pierre, however, who is now going sideways at about a “100 [km/h],” or “cent” in French, which in the truck driver’s dialect sounds like “sun.” Pierre’s frightened face, a cigarette clenched between his lips, is being frozen in motion blur. We hear one of the drivers ramble up the scene. For a brief moment, the sound goes quiet. Slowly the orchestral piece picks up, the camera begins to roll in slow motion as Pierre flanks the truck and crashes onto the patch of uneven grass. The shot interchanges between the accident and the bystanders’ flustered faces – scenes from a memory. We see Pierre topple over in slow motion with the music bedding him as he is flung out of the car. It’s a horrid scene. Amid the poppy flowers he lays on the golden grass, talking to himself calmly, dangling on the last thread of his life. Here, the tensions of the film become palpable: life and death, nature and machinery, inner and outer sphere. Trying not to slip out of consciousness, he recounts all that he sees: a policeman, a farmer, a church father, the truck drivers. Only the thought of Hélène keeps him hanging on, and now he knows, too. Now, he is sure of loving her. Back in Paris, Hélène receives his invitation too late. Exhilarated by the news, she drives off as fast as she can, passing the scene of the accident. Finally at the hospital, Catherine receives her late ex-husband’s belongings. In shock, she finds the breakup letter to Hélène and reads it. As if she had always known herself, she tears the paper into pieces sparing Hélène the lie of heartbreak – poetic justice.

These are the things of life.