Philippe Sarde’s jazz-tinged score—alternately breezy and melancholic—underscores the film’s bittersweet thesis: that the most passionate relationships are often the least sustainable. That we love not wisely, but too well, and too loudly, and too late.
More than fifty years later, César and Rosalie remains a sharp, unsentimental masterpiece—a film for anyone who has ever been caught between the thunder and the silence, and still cannot decide which one is home. is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber and streams periodically on The Criterion Channel. Cesar ve Rosalie
The film’s most radical choice is its ending, which I will not spoil here except to say that it rejects every convention of romantic resolution. Sautet understood that love is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be endured. César and Rosalie arrived at a moment when French cinema was deconstructing the couple. Eric Rohmer was analyzing moral tales, and François Truffaut was tracing obsessive love in Adele H. But Sautet’s film feels less intellectual and more viscerally true. You believe these people exist because you have met them—or been them. is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber and