Friday's Old Fashioned: A Week's Vacation (1980)

Four-time César Award winner Nathalie Baye died on April 17th at the age of 77 from Lewy body dementia. She worked with a who’s-who of French directors, including Godard and Truffaut, and in 1980 she starred in Bertrand Tavernier’s “A Week’s Vacation,” a movie I watched for the first time in April 2025 on The Criterion Channel. As I did, I must have thought to myself at least five times, “Is this my new favorite movie?” I wrote a review but was not entirely happy with it and in her honor, I tried again. RIP. 

Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. He hops out of the vehicle and chases her down, just as the handheld camera does too, though both ultimately relent, hanging back and helplessly watching from afar as she walks away into a sudden downpour: offering support is futile. The reasons she eventually gives for this breakdown are specific, though the feeling of wanting to forgo facing another day and renounce shining it on is universal, nevertheless. Her doctor prescribes a week off to rest and spiritually recuperate, which is much less universal, at least to an American, given that over here hard work is peddled as the answer to everything. Not that Laurence’s holiday proves a complete panacea. If the episodic nature of director Bertrand Tavernier’s film seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something more like a French version of a classic Onion article: Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results. 

“A Week’s Vacation” begins with Laurence drawing back a curtain on her window to reveal an elderly woman in the apartment across the way and wondering who she is and where she came from. Tavernier turns this image of Laurence spying on her lonely neighbor into a recurring one, giving life to what she says in voiceover, “I’d like to be an animal to watch others without speaking.” It’s not a quite a National Geographic special for people, “A Week’s Vacation,” but Tavernier and his co-writers Marie-Françoise Hans and Colo Tavernier stitch it all together with scenes of Laurence quietly observing the world around her and listening to old friends and new acquaintances, students and parents of her pupils, express their own feelings and recount stories of their own lives. These scenes take on different tenors and tones, but they are all unified by Baye, giving a surprisingly airy performance despite the air of melancholia that otherwise hangs over her character. In Laurence’s solitary moments, Baye evinces a bemused skepticism, as if she is the process of appraising the value of life itself, and in scenes opposite other actors, she radiates genuine joy at listening to their characters’ typically droll stories of woe, smiling and laughing in a way that seems to let us in on the grand cosmic joke of the whole human condition.

If there is a specific reason for Laurence’s emotional exhaustion, it ties back to her career. She believes in the mission of teaching, though its effectiveness is conveyed as debatable, glimpsed in flashbacks with students apathetic to learning and incapable of listening, evoking how despite doctor’s orders, her problems cannot help but intrude on her thoughts. At the same time, her father is wasting away in the French countryside, seen briefly in one scene where she pays him a visit and finds him unable to do much with his hands after a lifetime of working with them, sitting there with a sad smile on his face, happy to see her but having reached the point where living has given way to subsisting. Taken in tandem, these narrative threads suggest the poles of life, as if one’s existence is navigating from youth to the figurative infirmary, leaving the journey in-between as the time afforded to make sense of life’s significance. The pressure to do so feels amplified in Laurence’s case given that she’s 31 and is hesitant not only about continuing her career but about having children, the latter decision complicated on account of Pierre, a genially deft characterization of that most archetypal of dudes: oblivious. 

Laurence is not a static character, by any means, but neither does she experience a Hollywood-like climactic epiphany showing her the light. This is underlined in how she never meets, never talks to, never even learns the name of the elderly neighbor across the way. The woman is there when Laurence’s holiday begins and gone by the time it ends as if life and all that it entails is but a week’s vacation between whatever precedes it and whatever comes after.