It’s an evening like it often happens during a shoot. One day in November 1981, the team of The Passage of the Sans-Souci, by Jacques Rouffio, who has been working for a month, ends up at Copenhagen, a tavern in West Berlin. The atmosphere is festive. Felted, too. Romy Schneider is in the center of attention. The fragility of the 43-year-old actress is known to all. But no one imagines that this is her last film and that she will disappear six months later.
At a table in the basement of Copenhagen, the actress sat down with her costume designer and her hairdresser. The director of photography, Romy’s regular make-up artist and Claire Denis were also at the party – the future director was then Jacques Rouffio’s first assistant. Romy Schneider, one of the biggest movie stars in Europe since the mid-1950s, loves these intimate atmospheres. Far from the curious, she can let herself go, laugh, cry, speak loudly, have a drink.
Romy Schneider takes a beer mug and doodles on it. The actress often writes compulsively, on everything that comes to hand: hotel letterhead, tissues, pages torn from magazines. She also annotates a lot of her copies of scenarios, which she covers with reflections and details. In French, which she prefers to her native German, her writing is awkward, crossed out – a sign that she has a bad command of it in writing.
Germanic spleen
Romy Schneider throws the coaster to Claire Denis, who then sips a glass of wine at the other end of the table, “like a Frisbee”, remember this one. The future director of Chocolate (1988), Good work (1999) or Trouble Every Day (2001) grabs the piece of cardboard and reads the German word on it: “Sehnsucht”. Romy Schneider knows that the young assistant masters the subtleties of the Germanic language. And she knows that word Sehnsucht, difficult to translate, revealing a certain malaise, a vague feeling. Only this term can express the state of mind of Romy Schneider in 1981. “It is a word which has many folds and folds, says Claire Denis today. There is also joy in Sehnsucht, the pleasure of regret. »
“Romy could go from laughter to tears at any moment,” remembers Josée Bénabent, the press officer of The Passage of the Sans-Souci, who had worked with the actress since Caesar and Rosalie (1972), by Claude Sautet. “What is your madness? », journalist Guy Braucourt had asked him in 1970. She then replied with a smile: “The Germanic spleen. This is Visconti who told me. Either it’s high or it’s low, there’s nothing in the middle. Either we are marvelously well or we collapse from misfortune and, sometimes, we don’t know why. »
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