A typical 70's drama, something that still gets its way when it comes to touch that emotional key in us (Or some of us) and makes us long for that passionate love story, without a tragic end of course. Through a filter of pastel tones, Sautet portrays the typical struggle many have put themselves through to fork onto a secondary sentimental route in life, thinking they can have it both ways. Albeit its apparent sappy tone, Les Choses de la Vie is an intense mature story of love and sacrifice, a double one at the end.
I find European dramas very attractive, perhaps because they portray a kind of no-frills passion that is very hard to come across nowadays, both in movies and in reality. A movie like this surely has its clichés, the dual life, the regrets, the tragic death but in this movie Sautet is a wizard in enfolding the viewer with a very bitter-sweet sequence of happy yet solemn flashbacks. Pedro Lazaga's Largo Retorno (1975) happens to be similar in the way the relationship between the two main characters comes to an end (The memories, the sorrow, the death), granted in Les Choses de la Vie there is a three-way story. Both Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider fit perfectly in the above scheme of things.
Just like in Largo Retorno, a very somber yet passionate baroque score complements the entire movie, leaving us with a soggy handkerchief at the end.
