These two mid-period Claude Sautet films present actress Romy Schneider (1939-1982) in fine form, but in both cases, she's more of a supporting player than a lead. Though Schneider made five films with the late director, 1972's César et Rosalie provides more of a showcase for Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear, Z) and 1970's Les Choses de la Vie does the same for Nouvelle Vague icon Michel Piccolo (who passed away earlier this year at the age of 94). In the first film, Schneider plays a free-spirited single mother involved with Montand's scrap-metal mogul. When her old flame, David (Sami Frey, Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders), a handsome graphic artist, returns to Paris after five years in New York, he and Rosalie start seeing each other again, strictly as friends, but as César's jealousy grows, he ends up pushing them towards each other, leaving him more lonely and frustrated than ever, so he comes up with a solution that pays unexpected dividends. It's an optimistic take on a scenario that predicts Sautet's late-in-life masterpiece Un Couer en Hiver, which centers on a tragic ménage a trois. As written, it's hard to imagine what Rosalie sees in the cigar-chomping, poker-playing César, which makes Montand so essential, because he's equally adept at depicting César's fury as his charm. Similarly, Schneider brings unstudied warmth to Rosalie that Sautet's first choice, Catherine Deneuve, might have found more challenging. The extra feature, Pierre-Henri Gibert's making-of featurette Serenade for Three, reveals that Sautet intended César for Piccoli, but it's hard to imagine anyone except Montand in the role (the set also includes a Gibert featurette on Les Choses de la Vie). The second film, an adaptation of Paul Guimard's 1967 novel Intersection, offers a more formally experimental narrative since it pivots on an automobile accident to which Sautet provides rhythmic flash-forwards before depicting the entire sequence in slow motion. Until the moment Piccoli's architect finds himself suspended between life and death, he finds himself suspended between his estranged wife, Catherine (Lea Massari), and his mistress, Hélène (Schneider). Once Sautet depicts the accident, it's clear that the entire film represents Pierre's recollections of "the things of life" while lying in a field, then on a stretcher, and then in an ambulance racing to the hospital. The filmmaker generates more suspense from the significance of Pierre's recollections than from his chances of survival. In 1994, Mark Rydell directed an English-language remake starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone to a less successful effect. Both Sautet films feature artful contributions from three longtime collaborators: cowriter Jean-Loup Dabadie, cinematographer Jean Boffety, and composer Philippe Sarde, who launched his five-decade-long career with Les Choses de la Vie. Look sharp for a teenaged Isabelle Huppert as a wise-beyond-her-years teenager in César and Rosalie. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)