Life Is a Bed of Roses [La vie est un roman] *** (1983, Vittorio Gassman, Ruggero Raimondi, Geraldine Chaplin, Fanny Ardant) – Classic Movie Review 12,145

When Life Is a Bed of Roses was released in April 1983, it got bad reviews (‘a catastrophe’) and had the lowest cinema admissions in France for an Alain Resnais film till then.

Linked by the themes of imagination and playfulness, director Alain Resnais’s amusing, civilised and accessible 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses [La vie est un roman] tells the story of Carl Forbek’s castle in three sequences as interwoven stories from different eras sharing the location of the forest of Ardennes.

Deliberately nonsensical, these slightly surreal accounts of dreamlike events provoke an emotional rather than an intellectual response. Unfortunately, the response at the time was negative, drawing poor reviews and box office: it had the lowest-ever number of cinema admissions in France for a Resnais film till then.

La vie est un roman stars the very impressive cast of Vittorio Gassman, Ruggero Raimondi, Geraldine Chaplin, Fanny Ardant, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma and Robert Manuel. Opera bass Ruggero Raimondi is cast in the role of Forbek but he does not sing.

The producer of the 1980 hit Mon oncle d’Amérique asked Resnais and writer Jean Gruault to work on another film together, and La vie est un roman is it. It is best seen as a comic counterpart to Mon oncle d’Amérique that also uses a triple narrative to explore theories of human behaviour.

A château on the outskirts of Paris was used for the exterior scenes of the castle, while interior scenes were filmed at the Studios de Boulogne.

The cast are Vittorio Gassman as Walter Guarini, Ruggero Raimondi as Michel Forbek, Geraldine Chaplin as Nora Winkle, Fanny Ardant as Livia Ceraskier, Pierre Arditi as Robert Dufresne, Sabine Azéma as Elisabeth Rousseau, Robert Manuel as Georges Leroux, Martine Kelly as Claudine Obertin, Samson Fainsilber as Zoltan Forbek, Véronique Silver as Nathalie Holberg, André Dussollier as Raoul Vandamme, Jean-Michel Dupuis as Laplaud, Philippe Laudenbach as The educator, Cathy Berberian as nurse, Francine Bergé as young lady, Marie Rivière, and Chantal Ladesou.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,145

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