A sensitive businessman, injured in an automobile accident, reflects on his wife and his mistress, both of whom he dearly loves. Though a stylishly sophisticated romantic, Les Choses de la Vie builds to a deeply moving examination of the fragility of life relationships.




Pierre, a successful expert in building highways has a traffic accident. Being seriously wounded, he is lying waiting for death and remembering his past in flashbacks. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0064165/plotsummary)




Claude Sautet creates an understatedly haunting, sophisticated, and insightful portrait of emotional attachment, indecision, and intimacy in Les choses de la vie. Structuring the narrative of the film in medias res as the middle-aged protagonist is transported to the hospital, Sautet figuratively reflects Pierre's emotional uncertainty as he struggles with the inertia of commitment and a new life with Hélène, unable to sever the bonds of common history associated with his failed marriage to Catherine: Hélène's self-imposed exclusion (and unshared family memories) from the Bérard island home in Ré; Pierre's procrastination over a visa application for a long-term business trip to Tunisia; his fixated preoccupation with a damaged table in the summer house; his impulsively written, unaddressed letter to Hélène that reveals his innate ambivalence. Inevitably, as Pierre unconsciously ponders his unfinished household tasks - the trivial "things of life" that bind him to his estranged family - what is revealed is a resigned longing for a lifetime of irretrievable memories and an irreconcilable sentiment of profound regret. Filmref




Les Choses de la vie (1969) marked the turning point for Sautet. He had found his muse in the Austrian-born actor Romy Schneider, who went on to star in many of his films in this period, including Max et les ferrailleurs (1971), César et Rosalie (1972), Mado (1976), and Une Histoire simple (1978) which won her a best actress César (the film was nominated for 11 Césars). It is also in this period, which is perhaps his most productive and fruitful in that he founded long-term friendships with actors Michel Piccoli and Yves Montand, and with his collaborators, scenario-writer Jean-Loup Dabadie, cinematographer Jean Boffety and composer Phillipe Sarde. As with his careful depictions of human relationships in these films, Sautet greatly valued his personal friendships and that is why most of the time he chose to work with people he knew, or whose work he was familiar with. Romy Schneider's suicide in 1980 affected him very deeply, and his work slumped to a low point with Garçon (1983), which was not well received either by the public or critics. Sensesofcinema