A Simple Story

Marie is in her forties, works for a living and stands on her own feet. In the opening stretch of the film she leaves the man she has been living with and ends a pregnancy, and then drifts back towards her ex-husband. Around her is a circle of friends with marriages, redundancies and ordinary exhaustion of their own. Nothing enormous happens; life moves at its own pace. Claude Sautet's film earns its title. Romy Schneider won the César for best actress for the part, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. It is a good example of the cinema in which Sautet describes people not through their decisions but through the silences that follow them.