User Reviews

This is Claude Sautet's most underrated movie. I (an intensive film enthusiast since pre-school age) even think it is the best movie produced in any country during the 1980s. - The French cinéma-noir period gave rise to many famous works of art. The period ended around the middle 1950s. I feel that 'Quelques jours avec moi' is the most authentic heir to the cinéma noir trend. It is not a contradiction that it is at the same time an altogether modern movie, with plot, situations, characters and interactions which were perfectly realistic in the world of the late 1980s. Moreover, happy and funny scenes may well have a natural place in a modern film with such a dark heritage. - There are five main persons in the plot: the girl, her boyfriend, the rich boy, the pimp, and the manager of a supermarket. The mother of the rich boy owns a chain of supermarkets. Her son had spent some years in a mental hospital because of pervasive indolence. Hoping that an active task may improve his condition, his mother sends him to inspect one of the supermarkets. - In the town where most of the movie takes place it turns out that the manager has taken a large loan of money belonging to the firm, and has never been able to pay it back. When exposed, he expects to lose his job. But instead friendship develops between the boy and the much older manager, and the boy remits the debt entirely. Their friendship might have consequence for certain later events. - It is difficult to provide a true and fair explanation as to why the rich boy and the girl develop a sexual relation. He is more attracted by her personality than by her body. If he is indolent, she is not. - One night when she is a little drunk he lets her sleep in his apartment, but makes no attempt at seducing her. However, during the night she comes to him - perhaps because of gratitude. - No jealousy develops between the rich boy and the boyfriend, although both share the same girl. - But then the girl makes a serious mistake. She understands that the rich boy will soon leave the town, and she wants economic independence. She gets herself a job as a waitress - although the job is combined with limited duties as a prostitute. The young owner of the bar is the pimp. - To save the girl, the boyfriend kills the pimp with a knife. The only witness is the rich boy. He says 'Run! Do you want to spend ten years in prison!' He is well aware that to him the consequences will be much less severe. He stands in silence next to the corpse with the knife in his hands, until other people arrive - among them the manager and the girl. She is the only one who saw a glimpse of the boyfriend and, hence, understood what really had happened. But she keeps silent. And the manager's words may have strong weight. To the judge it is a simple case. There will be no trial, and the rich boy will just return to the luxury hospital he recently came from, probably even without any legal decision about confinement to the hospital. - The double sacrifice has radically changed the girl's emotions. Now her relation to her boyfriend is rather like feelings for an older brother, and they part. She does make a visit to the hospital, seeing the rich boy. But she does not contact him, and he never learns that she was there. - It is a recurrent theme in many French movies that friendship between two male friends will not break, although both are in love with the same girl. The frequency of this pattern may well derive from Bizet's opera 'Les pêcheurs de perles'. Sautet repeated the same theme in his next movie, 'Un coeur en hiver'. But I cannot help feeling that the latter is markedly inferior. Admittedly, in 'Un coeur en hiver' the constellations and emotions are well painted. But there is little sophistication as regards the plot, the situations, the characters etc. - Sandrine Bonnaire and Daniel Auteuil are well chosen for the two most important parts, and here they show more than usual proficiency in displaying the 'invisible' feelings behind their words and actions.

The conventional view of Claude Sautet tends to overlook the frequent eccentricity of his narratives, and Quelques jours avec moi pushes that tendency almost to a break point, before the director's two quieter final films. In disconcerting short order, a troubled retail executive (Daniel Auteuil, holding his cards close to the chest throughout) is released from a mental hospital and returns uneasily to work, then accepts a road trip to check out some underperforming stores before impulsively deciding to stay on in the first location he arrives at, Limoges, largely because of his attraction to a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) who works for the local store manager, and regardless that she continues her relationship with her boyfriend (Vincent Lindon). The plot goes on adding further elaboration, eventually and improbably embracing outright melodrama, but Sautet's primary interest is in community and connection, in tracing how such an arbitrary-seeming trajectory might nevertheless provide the momentum that crosses lines of class and money and attitude and brings disparate people together. In this case the project takes on an air of borderline goofiness, as the chief of police and other pillars of the establishment take to partying or hanging out in dive bars with the dive bar crowd (the closing stretch of Mado comes heavily to mind here); fiscal and other transgressions are forgiven (and as an aside, has any other director seemed so intrigued by finance and accounting as a plot motor) and long-fractured relationships are refreshed. If the ending seems somewhat arbitrary and unresolved, it only underlines how the interest here is much more in the discoveries that attend the journey than in the arrival point. At times the movie may seem rather coarse and overdone, but even that much is refreshing for a director usually better remembered for small-scale observation and "humanism" than for his more elusively substantive traits.