The main interest of this movie is its cast: Lea Massari was one of the best Italian actresses. She's retired now and has become a painter. Gérard Blain (who passed away in 2000),like her,worked in Italy and in his native country where he became a too neglected director (8 movies and one MTV one,most of them highly commendable) .As for the late Laurent Terzieff , he became rarer and rarer on the screens along the years ,it seems that his ambitious acting would scare the directors .
The three actors are better than the parts they were given ; Massari is the bourgeois boheme who feels stifled in her milieu where she's got nothing to do : her husband is an architect (whose ideas are baroque and thus finally declined )
she's a got a domestic help ; she tries to paint but her artistic time is short-lived ;in a small popular bistro where underdogs wind up , gambling (dice, cards) is the main interest of these people -but the depiction of this milieu is caricatured- and soon she learns to play poker ; slowly by inexorably ,she's plagued by the gambling fever ;it takes all Massari's talent to make us believe in this rich but frail bourgeois woman who little by little gets out of her depth in a world she didn't know before.
Laurent Terzieff is wasted in a tailor-made predictable part:he was par excellence the fallen aristocrat and he makes the best of a badly written part ;Gerard Blain,on the other hand , is cast against type :his rebellious side is displayed when he talks about the de rigueur May 68 ; sonny follows suit when he tells the cleaning lady his parents exploit her. By 1981 -the film was released exactly at the time the socialists rose to power in France - , these revolutionary vague desires were pure clichés.
Watch it because of the reunion of three great actors,but do not expect too much.
