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 his free hours,the businessman meets a girl,Mado.Leotard has some confused aspirations and wishes about his relation with Mado;he is even jealous,in a brutal and harsh way.He falters.Through his mistress,Mado,Leotard finds Reynald Manecca,a disingenuous scorner,convicted in contumacy and able to help him bring down Lepidon. As a result,Mado (who has not a very good opinion about Leotard,whom she considers selfish and incapable of love) looses the man she most liked.Michel Piccoli does a role that becomes him and that has been his usual employ in some movies:a somehow antipathetic and self-important bourgeois verging on disaster and in a juncture of collapse.Leotard saves his business and manages to find some things about himself (anyway,at least he seems to find out more than is the public able to get from Leotard's way through the financial maneuvers). P's performance in "Mado" is commendable.I liked the warm colors of this movie. Mrs. Schneider has a bit part;she got a scene of about 6 minutes.As a whole,the movie is quite vapid,banal and verbose,not very well narrated;the pace could be improved,the empty scenes could be reduced.Quite bad constructed.The movie would be better if it only kept being a bourgeois plain story about business and women in the life of a lonely man.The title makes a promise that won't be kept.It tells a story about affairs and it pretends that it is speaking about Mado.The movie is heterogeneous and unsatisfactory;above all,it lacks poetry.The treatment of the psychologies is shallow (but it should not be!) and narrow;it lacks insight and perspicacity.With two exceptions (Mrs. Schneider,by the sheer intensity and force of her electrifying presence,although her part is that of a dizzy drunkard, and Charles Denner),the characters are quite anodyne,lukewarm and badly written.The story is not well delivered.

Sautet had jettisoned his films noirs influences which gave the great "Classes tous Risques" and the good "L'Arme à Gauche" .One could have thought that "Max et les Ferrailleurs" his best film in the seventies would herald a return to form as well as a return to what he did best.But "Vincent François ,Paul et les Autres " had continued his chronicles of bourgeois-with-a-tender-heart which "Cesar et Rosalie" had begun ("les Choses de la Vie" is a different matter since it has an emotional power the subsequent works have not) "Mado" is more of the same.Bourgeois "in danger of despair" to quote Sautet himself.And zombie Dutronc on top of that.The scene when the cars get bogged down in the mud is the most grotesque metaphor I 've ever seen in a movie."It's the movie itself which gets bogged down " sneered the critics at the time.Romy Schneider's fans ,beware!Her appearance does not exceed five minutes (in a 2hours+ movie)!

25 years old, sober camera-work and set in and around Paris that we don't really get to see, and yet this is a pure gem. Actors that don't act but are their characters, with Piccoli amazing as ever, and a way too brief an appearance of Romy Schneider -for about ten minutes- that will be truely unforgettable for any movie-lover. A gripping story too, with a political undercurrent that seems to be of every day. A marvelous film, surely not to be missed !!