3 Days in Quiberon

We all know that the biopic is the sec­ond low­est form of cin­e­mat­ic artistry (after the super­hero movie), but Emi­ly Atef’s intrigu­ing 3 Days in Quiberon at least offers up a best case scenario.

Instead of a fanned-out Wike­pe­dia entry set to glossy musi­cal mon­tages, this terse, claus­tro­pho­bic film cov­ers an impor­tant 1981 episode in the sad­ly cur­tailed life of beloved lead­ing lady Romy Schnei­der, here brought to life with uncan­ny authen­tic­i­ty by the actress Marie Bäumer.

The title refers to a sleepy north­ern French port town where Schnei­der spent three days at a rehab clin­ic with her gar­ru­lous pal, Hilde Fritsch (Bir­git Minich­mayr). To alle­vi­ate the tedi­um, she agrees to an inter­view with a con­fronta­tion­al Ger­man jour­nal­ist, who pre­cedes to peel back the lay­ers of her dam­aged psy­che. At this point in her life, Schnei­der is a mess of col­lect­ed neu­roses, and Bäumer man­ages to chan­nel the hard­ships of a life in the lime­light into her a per­for­mance which tra­vers­es the poles of agony and ecsta­sy in a mere heartbeat.

Things get dark while the tape rolls, and so a trip down to a bar leads to drinks, danc­ing and a poet­ry recital from Denis Lavant with long blonde locks. The black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy antic­i­pates a cli­mac­tic pho­to­shoot on a rocky verge, with Schnei­der bound­ing and leap­ing to offer the impres­sion of mid-life bliss. The film explores the idea of the pro­ject­ed image ver­sus the painful real­i­ty, and in doing so, tran­scends the lim­its of the screen biopic by allow­ing us to mon­i­tor the wild mood swings as they happen.

It’s occa­sion­al­ly a lit­tle pon­der­ous and per­haps even over-stretched, but this con­cept of talk­ing about an entire life through the prism of a few days reaps sig­nif­i­cant rewards.