I really like the Il lavoro episode in Boccaccio ’70. I think of it as a sketch of the character of a modern woman, like many that I know, above all in Milanese society: a modern woman who places great importance on money, luxury, cars, a box at the Scala, and all these kinds of things, and does not really care about the truly important things in life. I have been admonished for the emotional moment that she goes through at the end. I think it is consistent with the character. The moment in which she feels almost offended by the fact that her husband pays her is like a moment of pity for herself, and not for the more general situation, which she doesn’t understand at all. It’s like the characters in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; they allow the garden and the cherry trees to be sold without realising that the sale represents ruin – the ruin of a milieu and a society, and not simply of one character. In short, it is the playful moral vendetta of a loving young wife betrayed by her husband’s costly expenditure on ‘shares on the sexual stock exchange’. The rooms, the grey velvet couches, the authentic 18th-century French library in oak, the abstract paintings by Domietta Hercolani, everything that Rotunno’s camera captures represents the world in which the characters live. It is a cold and precious world, lacking the soul that Tomas Milian and Romy Schneider search for but never manage to obtain.

Luchino Visconti, “Filmcritica”, n. 159-160, August-September 1965

Romy – Anatomie eines Gesichts, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s second feature, made for German television, offers an intimate view of the actress Romy Schneider, revealing crucial conflicts behind the image of a public figure who loomed large in the German national imagination – and within the art of movies itself. […] Filming Schneider during her skiing vacation at Kitzbühel in early 1966, Syberberg catches her at a moment of crisis in her career, which she discusses with embittered and self-deprecating candor. A target of the gossip press, Schneider expresses frank disgust for the star system that places her personal life on the same plane as her acting. Proud of her success, she also sees its limits, speaking with exasperation of her work in films that, she says, made her “the princess, not only in front of the camera” but “all the time.” Now she admits that she “didn’t want to be her anymore” and hopes to find a more artistically satisfying way of acting – and of living. To that end, she was starring in a low-budget and small-scale French drama with dialogue by Marguerite Duras; Syberberg visits the set and films her there, finding that she’s nonetheless surrounded on location by fans. Bringing subtly bold methods to bear on the talking-head documentary, Syberberg detaches images of Schneider from her voice, showing clinically tight closeups of her in the semipublic setting of a ski lift while hearing her speak in voiceover, and relying on double exposures to evoke her recollections of her adopted city of Paris. In an on-camera interview in the luxurious confines of a prince’s villa, Schneider plunges ever deeper into the pathos of her conflict-riddled confessions, delivering a performance unlike any that she gave in dramas. Syberberg was a key innovator of new cinematic modes that also created a new kind of performance, one that both offered actors a far more engaged form of artistic commitment and, paradoxically, went even further than the popular press in blurring the lines between acting and life.

Richard Brody, “New Yorker”, 28 October 2016