MOVIE REVIEW : Casting, Mixture of Moods Set ‘A Few Days With Me’ Ablaze

Mad passion--the grand amour that unhinges you, makes you throw away your life--is a frequent movie subject. But it’s rarely handled with the intense observation or generous good humor writer-director Claude Sautet brings to “A Few Days With Me” (Music Hall).

Focusing on the cross-class liaison of an alienated young man, heir to a French supermarket chain, and the maid of one of his family’s managers, this movie has an almost irresistible narrative drive. Sautet, one of the great artisans of the naturalistic French screenplay, is dealing with life and death, love that destroys, but he mixes his moods expertly. He keeps “A Few Days With Me” incongruously light, deft, humorous.

He portrays pathology by giving it an unflinching gaze, by filling the story with amusingly eccentric characters and unexpected twists. It’s a seeming romantic tragedy or melodrama told in an engaging comic style. The deceptive, often lackadaisical-seeming rhythm keeps you constantly off balance, until the trap is sprung.

Sautet’s lovers are played by Daniel Auteuil, the guilt-ridden son of “Jean de Florette” and Sandrine Bonnaire, the almost scarily independent hoyden of “A Nos Amours” and “Vagabonde.” It’s a brilliant piece of double casting. Auteuil, without his grotesque “Florette” prosthesis and makeup, has the yearning eyes and delicate, wary features of an obsessive swain. When we first meet his Martial, recovering from depression in an asylum, he seems vaguely dislocated, insulated by his family’s wealth from life’s shocks, oddly unaffected by everything, including his wife’s infidelity.

Bonnaire, on the other hand, has exactly the stuff a man like this--dreamy, sarcastic, sensitive, bored--might get obsessed with. As Francine, whom Martial meets in Limoges while checking the books of her genial employer, Fonfrin (Jean-Pierre Marielle), she projects something earthy and unfettered, seductive in a seemingly uncalculated way. (Bonnaire is the actress audiences wish Madonna could be.) A practical femme fatale, Francine meets Martial’s mad plunges and rich boy’s self-indulgence with a working girl’s shrewd self-interest. And, as he journeys through degradation and disgrace to possess her, she watches not bitchily or malignly, but curiously, almost bemusedly.

In the 1974 “Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others,” Sautet proved himself a poet of friendship. He excels at the portrayal of communities and the three groups he draws here--the glassy artificiality of the Pasquier family, the provincial pretensions of the Limoges bourgeois who run the Pasquier stores and the raw roughhouse swagger and cunning of Francine’s friends--make for a marvelous collision. It also inspires a marvelous ensemble. Marielle, as the amiably corrupt Fonfrin and the legendary beauty Danielle Darrieux, as Martial’s mother, give perfect performances; the rest of the cast, notably Dominique Lavanant as the neurotic Mme. Fonfrin and Gerard Ismael as the sinister Rocky, are nearly as good.

Sautet indulges all his actors, helps them to their best form. But he doesn’t indulge his lovers. He shows exactly what happens when their worlds clash, never losing his innate sympathy or his comic, urbane perspective. That’s why the film sustains so well the classic narrative virtues of surprise and inevitability, and why, in the end, Sautet, Auteuil and Bonnaire can give us such a devastating last few shots. And it’s why “A Few Days With Me” (MPAA rated PG-13, despite partial nudity) can reveal so convincingly the tigerish passions that smolder beneath a surface that’s deceptively calm, charmingly funny, insidiously smooth.

‘A FEW DAYS WITH ME’

A Galaxy Films release of a Sara Films/Cinea/Films A2 production. Producer Alain Sarde. Director Claude Sautet. Script Sautet, Jacques Fieschi, Jerome Tonnerre. Music Philippe Sarde. Camera Jean-Francois Robin. Editor Jacqueline Thiedot. Sets Carlos Conti. With Daniel Auteuil, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Danielle Darrieux, Dominique Lavant, Vincent Lindon, Therese Liotard, Gerard Ismael.

Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children younger than 13).