3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon)

Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland, Romy Schneider. All entertainers with inscrutable talent who died young, and whose names are now an easy byword for tragedy. Perhaps Romy Schneider isn’t as well-known in much of the world, but certainly in Europe she was a gleaming megastar and revered actress whose every action and utterance caused the tabloids to shriek with excitement.

Director Emily Atef’s 3 Days in Quiberon offers a fictionalised account of three days in 1981 that Schneider (Marie Bäumer) spent in the titular French seaside village. She was detoxing at a health spa, and it was here that she received a visit from photographer Robert Lebeck (Charly Hübner) and journalist Michael Jürgs (Robert Gwisdek). With Lebeck being an old friend, Schneider consents to an expansive interview. Her surprising level of candour is a cause of alarm to her friend Birgit (Hilde Fritsch) who suspects that the interview is cruelly manipulative.

In this day and age it would be unthinkable for a celebrity to conduct such an exchange without the presence of a publicist, ready to snarl like a guard dog each time a journalist put an offending foot over the line. It’s too much to consider these interview scenes exposition, and yet they paint a concise portrait of the damaged and vulnerable actress. Marie Bäumer is masterful as Schneider – a woman who is cracking under pressure but who has not yet shattered.

The black and white cinematography is tantalising, although it would have been a pleasure to see the presumably lurid colours of the detailed 1980s decor and costumes. At times, the film appears to be teetering on the edge of falling into a lather of soap, with some dialogue coming across as hackneyed. To be fair, the words might have seemed less familiar in the original German. Schneider passed away in 1982 at the age of 43. 3 Days in Quiberon is a fitting tribute to an intricate woman. 

Oliver Johnston

3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews and interviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2018 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival 2018.

Watch the trailer for 3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon) here: