The Passerby

Max Baumstein is a respected man in Paris who runs a human rights organisation. One day he walks into the Paraguayan embassy and kills the ambassador. Nobody understands it. At the trial his wife Lina learns it for the first time as well: Max's childhood was spent in Germany in the thirties. His father was killed by the Nazis. A woman got him out and raised him: Elsa Wiener. Elsa's husband was a publisher who died in a camp. What happened to Elsa, and what the ambassador had to do with it, comes out in court. Jacques Rouffio directs the French film; a hundred and ten minutes. Romy Schneider plays both Elsa and Lina, with Michel Piccoli as Max, adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel. It was Schneider's last film. During the shoot her fourteen-year-old son David was killed in an accident and production stopped for a time.