Near the end of Emily Atef’s Three Days in Quiberon (2018), a cinematic snapshot of the life of Romy Schneider, a doctor at the curative retreat in Brittany where the film is set asks the actress, deftly played by Marie Bäumer: “And how do you feel after three days of care, rest, no alcohol and healthy food?” “I’m hungry,” she replies, drawing her silk scarf tighter round her neck and looking through the window at the sea.
A woman of robust, occasionally aberrant appetites – chain-smoking, drinking to excess and bringing different men to bed – is not the public’s stock image of Schneider, who was made famous by the regal trilogy of films about the Austrian empress Sissi, and later, in France, by Jacques Deray’s decadently sensual, waterlogged La Piscine. She is imprinted on the cinematic consciousness as a pristine hologram of femininity, all smoke-rimmed eyes and lacquered hair. In June, when Three Days in Quiberon came out in France, defenders of Schneider’s image – including her daughter, Sarah Biasini, who was four when her mother died – came forward to decry the feature, maintaining that its presentation of the actress as a stubborn addict who pushes against the spa’s ascetic premise was “scandalous” and “disrespectful to the point of vomiting”. This is a film that provokes visceral reactions, which at times can feel more like a charged psychoanalytic session than a voyeuristic or escapist tour through a famous icon’s life.
Though addiction is a theme in Atef’s film, it’s far from the most interesting thing about Three Days in Quiberon, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February and is the director’s fourth full-length feature. As the title signals, the narrative turns around a three-day stay Schneider took at a spa in Brittany in 1981 (months before her teenage son David died in a freak accident, and a year before she herself passed away from cardiac arrest) in order to drop pounds and cleanse herself ahead of making her final feature, The Passerby (1982). She was visited there by two journalists – an interviewer and a photographer – from the German publication Stern, who, preying upon Schneider’s vulnerabilities away from friends and family, extracted from her a sensational, still-infamous interview where she catalogued her bankruptcy, her resentment of the Sissi legacy, and the unhappiness of a life consumed entirely by film.
The publication of the Stern interview further damaged Schneider’s reputation in Austria and Germany, where she was seen as ‘abandoning’ her native country for the New Wave glamour and prestige of France. The interview is now widely seen as one of the factors leading to the actress’s ultimate decline. In Atef’s rendering, on-screen romantic tension between Schneider and the photographer character lends both light relief and imposes the illusion of a ‘trustworthy’ presence (although ‘getting the shot’ remains his primary imperative). The invention of a fictional third visitor in Brittany, a pragmatic “childhood friend” of Schneider’s, Hilde, provides a counter and witness to the actress’s excesses (in one stand-out sequence Schneider talks her way into a private function in the sleepy seaside village and, using magnetism and charm alone, is able to keep proceedings going all night). But despite Hilde’s efforts to protect Schneider, the actress is easily led to her high-octane confession – the journalists winking at each other when they think she cannot see.
Despite these scenes, Atef’s Schneider is no passive victim. Exploitation surrounds her – “I trust you,” she assures the ruthless interviewer, and he replies, plainly, “Why?” – but she is portrayed as complicit in the process of her own objectification; most alive, most vivid and most vibrant when she is being photographed or recorded. When alone, she flounders, loses herself. Accompanied by the click of the camera, however, she jolts into action, movement and speech. Though there are echoes here of John Berger’s observation in Ways of Seeing (1972) that women have to “appear” before they can exist, and continually must “watch themselves” moving through the world, Atef suggests that such self-consciousness is underpinned by economic factors. Schneider’s financial precariousness is stressed throughout the film, and through this the suggestion is made that her willingness to be defined by the male gaze is motivated by brute survival. This focus lends new meaning to the trope of feminine retreat recently made popular by the wellness and self-care movements. For Atef, a woman is never really in elective or luxurious repose: ‘retreat’ is the means through which she readies herself for further – economically obligatory – exploitation.
Three Days in Quiberon refuses to freeze Schneider in rote postures of suffering and instead presents the actress as occasionally joyous, reckless, and self-aware without being self-obsessed (“Not everybody’s mother,” she says, at one point, referring to her German and rumored Nazi-collaborator actress mother, Magda Schneider, “was the desired fuck-object of Hitler”). This is one of its strongest features: women are not often allowed to exist in the realm of psychic ambivalence. Yet the celebration of ‘complexity’ in one so famous can often be a problem, toppling over into pastiche. For the most part, Atef navigates the balance skillfully, although occasionally forgoes subtlety (Baumer’s horizontal position on the floor at the climax of the interviewing scenes, glass of wine in hand, is a bit too much). The choice to film in black and white, which Atef has said was intended to recreate the ‘atmosphere’ of Stern’s now-iconic photographs, further imbues the film with an old-world sense of glamour that is sometimes too readily endorsed.1 Lingering insistently on Baumer-as-Schneider’s refined features, Atef risks fetishising the suffering of a beautiful, white, female subject when the myth of the exquisite female corpse – Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse – is not one that mainstream culture needs to revisit.
In her memoir Negroland (2015), Margo Jefferson describes the way that women of colour, and economically and socially marginalized women more broadly, have been “denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity.”² This is a privilege available only to a few – a fact Atef’s film both seems to grasp but also sometimes to evade. After an intense three days in the company of Schneider that raise pressing questions both about how a life in public should be handled and how film in general should approach such figures, Three Days in Quiberon refuses to rehearse the tragic coda, the final curtain. We do not see her son’s death, nor Schneider’s own. A kind of respect is maintained. In the interview with Stern, Schneider says: “I’m just an unhappy 42-year-old woman and my name is Romy Schneider”. It is intended as a drawing of a boundary. But to decide to be ‘Romy Schneider’ is to open yourself up to constant invasion; something that Three Days in Quiberon, wants us to know.
Alice Blackhurst is a writer and a research fellow in Visual Culture at King’s College, Cambridge. She writes on critical theory, contemporary film, fashion and art.
1 ‘Press Kit, Three Days in Quiberon, a film by Emily Atef’ 2 Margo Jefferson, Negroland (New York: Pantheon, 2015), 171.
