Metrograph

The film that established Sautet’s fruitful creative partnerships with Schneider, actor Michel Piccoli, and screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie, and an audience favorite that won him the coveted Prix Louis-Delluc to boot, The Things of Life is a potent melodrama of unusual stylistic and structural verve, a film of twisted metal and fractured perceptions that opens with Piccoli’s Pierre, a renowned Paris architect, having a gruesome high-speed motorway wipeout in his Alfa Romeo, then, via free-associative flashback, showing the edge-of-eternity reflections that flicker through Pierre’s semi-conscious mind, most of these concerning his relationships with his wife (Léa Massari) and his doting but exhausted mistress (Schneider), who would go on to make four more films with the director.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures