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Friday, December 29, 2023

NELLY ET MONSIEUR ARNAUD (1995)

Classy French director Claude Sautet, with a mere baker’s dozen of films over three decades (no clunkers in my experience, but too many undistributed Stateside), took his cinematic leave with that rarest of achievements, a stand-up triple.  A confirmed old bourgeois Parisian of 71 when this came out, it’s a bittersweet relationship roundelay with Emmanuelle Béart (looking strikingly like Angelina Jolie as a human being), a 30-something in a dead marriage (depressed husband spending the day alone in bed), working a few part-time jobs after her editing job vanished, and a habit of telling the truth before it’s happened.  At a café with a friend, she meets Michel Serrault, former colonial judge/former successful businessman, a pleasantly prickly senior on the lookout for an editor to help him finally get to that memoir he’s promised publisher Jean-Hugues Anglade.  What follows is a series of companionate couplings (at restaurants, at the pool, shopping, word processing, even in bed . . . not companionate) to work out changing relationships and desires between friends and ‘exes.’  All told, about four times the main three, each a fully formed, interesting person.  We’re not so far from Éric Rohmer in his ‘70s/’80s prime*, but with a boulevard farce structure as dramatic mortar, and, more crucially, grown-ups instead of Rohmer’s talkative 20-something avatars.  Here, everyone very knowing about themselves/about others.  Describing a French history book to his grandson, Serrault sums it up as ‘Chauvinism with pretty pictures,’ which just might be a perfect description of this all but lost civilized French style of moviemaking.  Unlike Hollywood, here, stabbing back pain doesn’t signal plot-altering cancer; a change of heart at an airport counter doesn’t lead to dashing off for a last grab at happiness; and regretful second thoughts just leave you regretful.  If FOR ADULTS ONLY didn’t signify porn in advertisements, you might well use it for the witty, intelligent, wryly rueful, smashingly entertaining cinema of Claude Sautet.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *FULL MOON IN PARIS/’92 a good comparison for a Rohmer film where getting what you wish for is a small tragedy.  OR:  Sautet probably best known Stateside for UN COEUR EN HIVER/’92 made directly before this.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/les-nuits-de-la-pleine-lune-full-moon.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/un-coeur-en-hiver-1992.html

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