I have wanted to see this film for around forty years, since I first read the brief reviews in the Leonard Maltin and Steven Scheuer film guides. And at last I have - and it was worth the wait!! Veteran French character actress Sylvie (whose film career started in the 1910's) stars as Berthe, an elderly woman in her eighties whose husband of sixty years has just died. The duo had lived quietly and apparently not that happily. A rather frosty family whose grown children are distant emotionally if not location-wise and rarely visit. The film follows Sylvie's months following her husband's death as she ventures out from the small apartment and local neighborhood and starts walking around the big city to discover the modern world, making friends with a thirtyish woman of dubious virtue and a eccentric fortyish man who runs a shoe repair shop. The local villagers are scandalized by the old gal venturing out into world, particularly with such questionable associates and Berthe's neurotic, luckless, failed businessman son Albert (Etienne Bherry) is especially concerned, sending his 20ish son Pierre (Victor Lanoux), an aimless young man who plays pop music with his buddies, to check on the old gal.
If you are expecting a Gallic version of a Ruth Gordon vehicle, this is not it. This is a gentle, slice of life drama (some have labeled it a comedy but there is only a mild touch of humor in it) with a moving performance by Sylvie that is so natural it evokes the legend of Laurette Taylor in "The Glass Menagerie". Sylvie and the film both won many deserved honors at film Festivals for this beautiful film but the supporting cast is equally good, especially Lanoux, Berry, and Malka Ribowska as the easy living and easy loving waitress Rosalie. I wasn't familiar with any of these French actors before, sadly this trio all passed away within the last five years or so (2022). The ending is one of the most tastefully poignant film climaxes I have ever seen. A true masterpiece, it sadly is rarely mentioned in film histories of French cinema but deserves to be noted in depth.
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