The Things of Life 1970

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 Pierre Bérard onto the grass. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits the essential things that make up his life, a quiet, persistent pull toward meaning as the world tilts around him.

A Paris architect in his forties driving to a meeting in Rennes, [Pierre Bérard] on the way had quarreled with his lover Hélène the previous night. They had planned to leave together for a job in Tunis, but he hadn’t signed the documents yet. Yet in the same breath of possibility, he had agreed to take his teenage son Bertrand Bérard, who lived with his estranged wife Catherine Bérard, for a holiday at the family’s holiday home on the Île de Ré. The trip was tangled with work, love, and family history, a web that would soon be tested by the accident to come.

Stopping at a café, he writes to Hélène calling everything off, but the note remains unsent, its fate undecided as the day unfolds. Later, driving past a wedding, he comes to a stark, almost instinctual conclusion: the letter was wrong, and perhaps he should marry Hélène after all.

He is rushed to hospital in Le Mans, but the injuries prove severe, and recovery remains unlikely. In the aftermath, Catherine, now his widow, is given his effects, including the unsent letter to Hélène. She reads it by the window, a visible sign of the life that might have been, just as Hélène hurries toward Pierre’s bedside. She is told by a nurse that she is too late, a heartbreaking denial that closes a chapter the way time itself seems to tighten and contract.

The film’s structure mirrors the emotional terrain it traverses, frequently leaping between different moments in time—the moments after the crash, the crash itself, and the periods before it. This non-linear approach creates a sense of memory at work, where each fragment of Pierre Bérard’s life is weighed against the abrupt interruption that the accident represents. The result is a quiet, contemplative drama that asks viewers to witness not just a single tragedy, but the interconnected threads of love, obligation, ambition, and the fragile choices that shape a life.