Enrico is clearly a personal filmmaker — he returns obsessively to themes of time and memory, images of families and homes shattered in the most terrible, irreparable ways — but all his films after Au
coeur de la vie... and Zita fail of deftness and suggestibility as visual experiences, being all but indistinguishable from the hackwork of other commercial French filmmakers typified
at their best by the «Tradition of Quality» boys.
A character study of a career criminal
at the end of his rope, this rugged noir from Claude Sautet (Un
coeur en hiver) is a thrilling highlight of sixties French cinema.