Mado (1976)
- 1976
- ·135 min
Middle-aged businessman, Simon Léotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts.
Simon's unscrupulous business rival Lépidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate.
Reluctant to fall into Lépidon's trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself.
A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems.
- Actors
- Charles Denner·Jacques Dutronc·Michel Piccoli·Ottavia Piccolo
- Directed by
- Claude Sautet
- Genre
- Drama
- Language
- French
- Country
- France·Italy·West Germany
- Director
- Claude Sautet
A few years ago The BFI showed a season of the films of Claude Sautet. It proved to be a revelation to many who were unfamiliar with his work.
The glum Simon Leotard is a businessman who confronts the greed of the rapacious Lepidon.After the suicide of one of his business partners,Leotard must honor some credence,as the hole created by the late's mismanagement amounts to 600 millions Francs.
In some ways, Claude Sautet's Mado is an inversion of his earlier Max et les ferrailleurs, which followed a protagonist played by Michel Piccoli as his scheming leads him to personal disaster and isolation; Mado starts with a no-less-consumed Piccoli protagonist, Simon, but this time the journey leads to an extended and surprising vision of community. Just as with Sautet's Cesar and Rosalie, there's an apparent structural oddity in the title: Mado isn't the main character (she's a prostitute with whom Simon has a relationship that causes him as much angst as pleasure), and her fate isn't the film's predominant preoccupation.
