Quelques jours avec moi

Claude Sautet’s twelfth feature is another fine fruit of the director’s crop, with an esteemed cast playing out a heady mix of poignant drama and biting humour.

Martial Pasquier (Daniel Auteuil) returns to his illustrious family, the owners of a national supermarket chain, after a brief stay in a psychiatric home. Handled as if fragile china, he is sent by his mother Suzanne (Danielle Darrieux) to look over the books of some of the under-achieving regional outlets. Resentful of the condescension accorded to him, Martial doesn’t continue on from his first assignment in Limoges, rather he decides to stay and investigate the accounts of the store manager Raoul Fonfrin (Jean-Pierre Marielle), while courting his attractive maid Francine (Sandrine Bonnaire). However, eyebrows are raised back in Paris, among the company directors eager to bring the errant son back into line.

A psychological drama of the highest order, Sautet chose the perfect leading man to portray his troubled protagonist. Daniel Auteuil delivers one of the finest performances of his career, as his profound brooding and torment provoke a mixture of both sympathy and apprehension. Sandrine Bonnaire also excels as the delinquent maid, who suddenly finds herself straddling two social spheres. The pair enjoy a great dynamic; his introverted loner is challenged by her exuberant yet erratic nature. Indeed, they bring to mind Sautet’s former leading screen couple, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider (Les Choses de la vie, Max et les ferrailleurs), with Auteuil and Bonnaire doing justice here to such high acting calibre.

As with the majority of Sautet’s films, Quelques jours avec moi is a strong ensemble piece, with French screen legends Jean-Pierre Marielle and Danielle Darrieux leaving strong impressions in the supporting roles, while Dominque Lavanant shines as the stuck-up bourgeois housewife. Indeed, for a film which follows the vagrancy of its depressed protagonist, Sautet’s work exudes copious amounts of humour through its vibrant characters and critiques of class divides and social mores.

Previously unreleased in the UK, Cinémoi is proud to present a brand new subtitled copy of a forgotten jewel from one of French cinema’s legends.