The Things of Life

The Things of Life is a 1970 romantic drama film directed by Claude Sautet, based on the 1967 novel Intersection by Paul Guimard. The film centers around a car accident experienced by Pierre (Michel Piccoli), an architect, and the events before and after it. The film won the Louis Delluc Prize, and had 2,959,682 admissions in France, becoming the eighth highest-earning film of the year. Plot The structure of the film involves frequent jumps in time - between the time of, and after, the car crash, and before the crash. The opening sequence jumps between the period immediately after the crash, and the crash itself. In the French countryside on a summer morning, a lorry full of pigs stalls at a crossroads. An Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint swerves to avoid it and crashes into an orchard, hurling the driver, Pierre (Michel Piccoli), onto the grass. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits the essential things which make up his life. A Paris architect in his forties driving to a meeting at Rennes, Pierre had quarreled with his lover Hélène (Romy Schneider) the previous night. They were due to leave together for a job he was offered in Tunis but he hadn't signed the documents. But he had agreed to take his teenage son Bertrand, who lived with his estranged wife Catherine, for a holiday in the family's holiday home on the Île de Ré. Stopping at a café, he wrote to Hélène calling everything off, but did not post the letter. Driving past a wedding, he decides that the letter was quite wrong and he should marry Hélène.