3 Tage in Quiberon
Intimate Romy
Film. A week-end with Romy Schneider, a movie between documentary and biopic, cure and introspection. 3 Tage in Quiberon by Emily Atef, the 7 Lola’s feature film (the German equivalent for the Césars) will be realeased this summer.
By Franck Lebraly
In 1981, Romy Schneider offers herself a parenthesis cut off from the world during a cure in Quiberon with her childhood friend Hilde Fritsch. But the actress from Sissi, La Piscine and Claude Sautet’s films (Les choses de la vie, César et Rosalie…) forces herself by agreeing to give an interview to the great German magazine Stern who sends a journalist and a photographer that she knows well. She comes into the open in this last interview given in her mother tongue and faces her old demons, between identity crisis and need for recognition.
“Are you Miss Sissi ? No, I am Romy Schneider.”
Romy needs to destroy herself in order to exist. She exults in weakness, loves in hatred… She is a delightful paradox that escapes under the eye of the photographer Robert Lebeck who took more than 600 shots during this session. The journalist is looking for the slightest detail that could wipe her away, but she is deeply distressed and is letting her go even more.
Do we need to suffer to create ? Does the artist exist without an audience ? She lets her go for 3 introspection’s days.
The black and white realization of Emily Atef is irreproachable. Marie Baumer is perfect and really do looks like Romy Schneider… But the movie is long and slow and singularly lacks bias. Six weeks later she was going to lose her son. One year after the actress dies of a barbiturate’s excess at 43 years old. No one knows if it is a suicide or an accident. The film rests a little too much on this tragic issue. That’s its elegance. Its limit too.
