Exhausted, drugged, lost ... Romy Schneider is only a shadow of herself when she decides, in April 1981, at 42, to go to cure to regain strength. In Quiberon, in Brittany, she bends to a firm food discipline, renounces her addictions: alcohol, sedatives ... These adjuvants help her to escape when the anxiety becomes too unbearable. About this one, the actress wrote in her diary: "She always has a hand on my shoulder. "

The tragic destiny of Romy Schneider, her life punctuated by dramas sticks to the myth of the star. Thirty-five years after his death, it is not useless to rest the question of his decay and his greatness. German filmmaker and actress Emily Atef and Marie Bäumer accomplished this gesture by restoring this brief stay in Quiberon. "Since I was 16, I have been compared to Romy Schneider," explains Marie Bäumer. I was offered biopics, but I always refused. This emotional zoom helped avoid the trap of interpreting the Romy icon. "I could not have told a whole life in ninety minutes, confirms the director. He had to take his time. To enter the head of a charismatic woman and uncover her misfortune. To grasp delicately his torments. This is something that succeeds Three days in Quiberon, turning around this discomfort with modesty and restraint, without voyeurism or judgment. Just render, look and understand, sketch interpretations. Nothing more in the opaque splendor of black and white.

How then to explain the extraordinary distress of Romy Schneider? By what blows of fate the famous interpreter of Sissi, adored in France, twice laureate of the César of the best actress, has she arrived there? At the time, the answer is partly spread in newspapers: her ex-husband, a German playwright, has just killed himself. But for now, this broken woman knows nothing of the ultimate drama that awaits him: the accidental death, three months later, of their only son, David, 14 years old. This double tragedy will eventually sack its existence. The Austrian naturalized French star has known before many others - as if a death fatality weighed on his life.

Little starlet obsolete

There are those men who broke his heart, the unfaithful Alain Delon and this second husband, suicidal and destructive. These romances exalted her and left her bloodless. Finally, she divorced in February with her third husband, eleven years younger, father of their daughter, Sarah . "Romy Schneider was borderline. She was exhausting those around her. His mood changes were constant, "says Emily Atef. An emotional instability that will make Michel Piccoli say: "Romy is a zigzag", and to which we can attribute several sources: a solitary childhood, a guilt related to the Nazi sympathies of his family, the trauma of Sissi, who has " mired in an image of a small, obsolete starlet, "writes her biographer Sophie Guillou (2). "The German and Austrian audiences have never forgiven him for leaving. It was "their" Sissi. They refused to let her grow up and go through the stages of a woman's life. It was very painful for her to be rejected by her own country, "commented Emily Atef and Marie Bäumer. During this famous stay in Quiberon, she will set off again to conquer the German press by indulging in two journalists. An exposure that will be fatal. "She did not have a filter to protect herself ... Romy was a sponge. "

Without interior anchoring, the actress is a slave to her emotions. A pathological sensibility, also at the origin of her talent, which puts her on the ground. It has often been said that Romy Schneider was light and dark. Disaster and solar aura. This energy makes her throw herself into her job with a lost body ("It is necessary to give it all your heart," she confides to her diary) and assigns to her characters in Claude Sautet or Andrzej Zulawski a rare thickness. "She is the most physical actress I know," confirms her interpreter with a smile, disturbing of resemblance. The emotional intensity and the authenticity of the heroines of A simple story, The pool , The important thing is to love or The old rifle made him know a peak of career in the 70s. It is there, finally, that Romy becomes fully herself, sensual, rich in her cracks. And its battles: this "radiant face of the nascent seventies" takes a stand for the right to contraception and abortion , reports Sophie Guillou, and embodies a woman "loving and independent, voluntary and fragile at a time. A woman who will succumb to grief a year later, at age 43.

1. Three days in Quiberon by Emily Atef, with Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Robert Gwisdek, released on June 13th.

2. Author of Romy Schneider, ed. Libretto.