La voleuse

La voleuse is the story of a woman who 6 years ago gave her child for adoption to a Polish worker family .Julia tells her husband that she feels a strong desire to know what happens with her son.So she travels from Berlin to the Ruhr region to spy the boy, then to give him a gift.Radek, the foster father and his wife are quite afraid by the presence of Julia who is insisting with her visits to their house.One day she kidnappes the boy and carries him to her home.Radek manages to recuperate the boy,but he has a great problem, the adoption has not been formalized.So Julia has the guardianship of the boy.Further Radek makes a strike to get the guardianship ofthe boy. I enjoyed very much this film for the excellent performances of the actors and for the description of Germany of this time.

Loving Romy Schneider, it is very simple to appreciate this film about a moral dilemma, solved, maybe, in too arbitrary manner.

A nice collaboration between Romy Schneider and Michel Picoli, it offers, in white and blue images, with auster tools and dialogue reminding a theater play, the drama of a woman who, at 19 years old birth and abandone a baby for , six years later, fighting for him and having apparently, succes.

Fair crafted tension, good acting and a melodrama reched with inspired nuances, not ignoring few pathetic scenes.

Most important - the end. I admitt, for me, it is far to be the inspired one because it seems more comfortable answer to moral expectations of audience, ignoring small, significant things.

A bitter story about love.

Romy Schneider and Michel Piccoli are both absolutely exceptional actors. So does Hans Christian Blech, one of the most natural actors ever. But here, in this movie, although they gave their best, the result is that it has the effect of a sleeping pill. So, you can put your head on a pillow if you decide to watch this production, you will have a quiet good sleep. One star each for Schneider, Piccoli and Blech, for their extraordinary roles in other films.

By its title "La Voleuse," and its final shots of Warner (Michel Piccoli) bearing his wife's son, swaddled and suckled to his chest, to his male mama in the sky, I assume that "La Voleuse" sides with the "adoptive" male mother, and not with "the thief." I don't. I side with the son's biological mother, Julia (Romy Schneider), who passionately and unequivocally needs her child back, but who equally needs to test and challenge the binds of her ordained marriage--and the self-enclosure associated with it. How she can be accused of breeding hatred is beyond me. That her repeated pleas to accept reconciliation and compromise are met with rote defiance bv the foster father, is only one instance of all the forces arraigned against her lonesome, unsupported effort to reconcile with her son.

Her husband, Warner, has even more point blank "no" responses in his arsenal than his headstrong working class counterpart. For starters, he either shuns or opposes Julia's need for his support in time of crisis. He cannot quell her anxiety because he doesn't know her, can't grasp her abandoning her baby at age 18, and sees her dilemma as suppositional. Although he may be a convincingly subtle, smart, and at times, a good, curious, and mellow listener, Julia is just not credible to him. In fact, Julia's strongest appeals receive the same calm insistent rejections whether it's to his forced sex ("stop, this is rape)," his locking her in their apt on multiple occasions, or his rousting her about.

Another bash factor is the plot's final scenes which are coarsely framed to amplify Julia's selfishness and cruelty. The foster father's dramatic suicide ultimatum from a phallic working-site tower on the following dawn, guilt-trips Julia and condemns her to a night of anguish. The media coverage of the circus-like event is in the same vein--the crowd comes out to hate and gape over the drama. Werner walks among the crowds absorbing their fervor, and then returns to the apt to join his stressed out wife. She asks him to leave until the saga's end, but he says "no." Instead this stern existentialist adjures Julia to "apply her own moral standards" and stick by her decision. But he's no more than a standing threat ("I love you but I could kill you") drumming his own position via the damning public: "People are saying you abandoned him for six years like a suitcase." The media interviews parade the same assaults: "I'd be ashamed if I were her." Julia, smoldering with resentment, counters that the suicide spectacle is blackmail. But the pressure on her is as relentless as gravity. The man on the pillar, the man clinging to her, the media, the working class... conspire to effect her mute dawn surrender. Warner takes control of her son and performs his hero-to-hero delivery. While Julia, in a state of collapse, has nothing more to anticipate but more marriage and more of Warner's bullying attempts to father his own baby.

Piccoli and Schneider teamed up for two of Claude Sautet's best films "les choses de la vie" and "Max et les ferrailleurs" and finally Jacques Rouffio's " la passante du sans-souci" which ,sadly,was to be Schneider's last part.

"La voleuse" which is the earliest of their collaborations has fallen into oblivion.Although directed by a French,the action takes place in Germany and ,with the exception of Piccoli,the actors are all German (like Schneider herself) Although based on a melodramatic screenplay,this effort is rather austere filmed in a bleak black and white with a strange use of the wide screen:during the cast and credits ,at the beginning,Schneider mumbles words which the music drowns out and we only understand her last words.We think she is in a shrink's office but she's actually talking with her husband.When she was nineteen ,she gave birth to a child who was taken in by another family.And now she wants her child again,and with the help of the Police,she "steals "(hence the title:= the thief)her boy from his foster parents .The adoptive father is not prepared to accept it and he threatens to commit suicide .

The film is rather undistinguished but it has become poignant when you know Romy Schneider's awful fate:she lost her own child and died two years later.With hindsight,"la voleuse" was a frightening omen.