LES CHOSES DE LA VIE / THE THINGS OF LIFE (1970)

Well received breakthru toward what might be called ‘Quotidian Bourgeoisie’ came to quintessential French director Claude Sautet midway along his stingy fourteen film output.  Told in non-chronological flashbacks after a car crash has stopped forward momentum on a life’s worth of decisions (personal & business/public & private) for middle-aged builder & family man Michel Piccoli, that French Everyman of moral indecision.  As a builder, he and his longtime partner are up against opposing plans by their backers while at home (if indeed Piccoli currently has one) he’s promised younger lover Romy Schneider they’re starting anew in a fresh city, but has also promised grown son Gérard Lartigau (hard to imagine as Piccoli’s son) to join him and his girlfriend for two weeks at the old family vacation home . . . with ex-wife attending.  (How amicable are these two?)  Well done and well cast, but whatever was advanced about this in 1970, now looks pretty common.  The film far surpassed by every Sautet film made after it.  (At least, the one’s I’ve seen!)  The list an extraordinarily sophisticated group of original ideas lifting the lid on that Quotidian Bourgeoisie so often looked down upon by French intellectuals & cineasts.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Look for them here: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=sautet; along with a special appearance from his debut pic.  New to Sautet?  Plump for CLASSE TOUS RISQUES / THE BIG RISK/’60 and UN MAUVAIS FILS / A BAD SON/’80.

UN MAUVAIS FILS / A BAD SON (1980)

Quietly awe-inspiring work from Claude Sautet, thoughtful, adult, involving, without the slightest note of worthiness or duty to spoil things.  Patrick Dewaere is utterly transparent (as if you could see emotions thru his skin*) as a still young man given a second chance after six years lost to a drug conviction.  Back in France, he’s looking for work and living with a resentful dad who holds him at fault for his wife’s death.  But it’s not that simple.  After a few manual labor gigs, his rehabilitation handlers set him up at a boutique book store where he’ll be working under another of their ’patients.’  A beautiful one, not quite ‘off the stuff.’   Very standoffish, she warms up quite suddenly.  But, again, it’s not that simple.  And so it goes with a series of new jobs, faces, apartments and experiences, eventually adding enough pressure to bring on a relapse as Dewaere still in a delicate condition, still in recovery.  Presented by Sautet with seemingly meticulous naturalism that’s also not that simple; dramatic construction very solid, unforced yet missing nothing.  Observant & revelatory results to recall what French New Wavers so loved in Jacques Becker’s best work.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Ironic that Dewaere lost that year’s Best Actor Cesar to oft partner Gérard Depardieu, caught up in that year’s sweep for Truffaut’s THE LAST METRO/’72.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/le-dernier-metro-last-metro-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to think of a current age-appropriate A-list Hollywood actor (other than Riz Ahmed) who wouldn’t muck this up with too much showy/soulful/James Dean-ish self-absorption.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For more Sautet, try UN CŒUR EN HIVER/’92, probably his best-known/most original/most accessible work.   Much Sautet still hard to come by over here.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/un-coeur-en-hiver-1992.html

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

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES / THE BIG RISK (1960)

Claude Sautet‘s stunning directing debut is adapted from a typically tough-minded gangster tale by ex-con/writer José Giovanni. Lino Ventura plays a doomed gangster on-the-run (doesn’t he always?) who claws his way to Paris only to find his old chums coming up short in the loyalty department and a new pal (Jean-Paul Belmondo in irresistibly dewy form) holding firm. The two-reel prologue which goes from a daytime robbery in Turin, Italy to a deadly race-to-escape over land & sea, is almost too good. The rest of the film can’t maintain the propulsive level of suspense & character identification balanced against such believable & despicable acts of violence and murderous self-preservation. It’s a knock-out opening; the rest of the film is merely superb. Sautet began helming just as the French Nouvelle Vague came along to dominate the scene and his cinematic classicism has been undervalued ever since.

UN COEUR EN HIVER (1992)

Claude Sautet‘s penultimate work is a beautifully observed film about a love triangle involving business partners in the high-end violin trade (Daniel Auteuil, André Dussoilier) and a violinist (Emmanuel Béart) who is engaged to one, but unexpectedly attracted to the other. The story’s crisis comes when the ‘other’ man (Auteuil) declines to take advantage of the situation, a response that should tilt the story toward comedy. But Sautet is drawn to the quiet desperation behind his inaction, so instead of an explosion, we advance to a sadder-but-wiser bitter-sweet landing. The film holds an extra layer of interest & delight since it’s not only set in the world of classical music, but uses Ravel’s chamber music (trio & violin sonata) not as a tony backdrop, but as the dramatic sinew to ground the story. (Béart’s violinist may have the lead in the film, but the star performer on the soundtrack is the extraordinary pianist.) It may sound flip, but this is undoubtedly the best film ever made about a luthier.

VOYAGE À TRAVERS LE CINÉMA FRANÇAIS / MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA (2016)

Manna from heaven for French Film Fanciers.  The final project of writer/director/raconteur Bertrand Tavernier (quickly followed by a nine episode tv expansion), both a highly personal and surprisingly uneccentric survey of a century in French cinema.  All the usual suspects: Renoir, Truffaut, Godard, Carné, Varda, Chabrol, actors like Jean Gabin & Eddie Constantine, composer Joseph Kosma, with directors Jacques Becker, Claude Sautet & Jean-Pierre Melville landing as particular favorites.  A treat to be able to count on beautiful prints!  (Though a FRENCH CANCAN clip looks ‘blasted,’ its recent restoration unavailable?)  Perhaps easy accessibility explains why these walk-thru film histories are popular just now.  Martin Scorsese has done two (both poor); Mark Cousins’ 15-part STORY OF FILM loaded with cherry picked factoids and inaccuracies to make pre-digested points.  By comparison, Tavernier is an exemplary guide, unafraid to buck tradition, generous by default, always on the prowl for good films regardless of politics, Party Line or auteurist theory hegemony.  (Rather male-centric though; perhaps this is addressed, at least with actresses, in the tv followup.)  Tavernier knows everything, has met everyone and earned his opinions having worked all sides of the industry.  Plus, he’s fun . . . even when you disagree.  With his often hilarious anecdotes, love & knowledge of American cinema, what a Hollywood survey Tavernier had in him if only he’d lived long enough.

DOUBLE-BILL: Kevin Brownlow & David Gill’s all-enveloping Silent Cinema history, HOLLYWOOD, a giant documentary leap that set the modern standard for these things.  Made in 1980, its eleven hours now hard to find.  Perhaps it's getting a much needed restoration.

CESAR ET ROSALIE (1972)

It's Yves Montand who makes this menage à trois story ‘pop.’ He plays a self-made millionaire who has be #1 at all he tries: at business, at a party, at family gatherings, at being a guy’s guy at his weekly poker game (the smoke is positively alarming in this scene) and especially at being a great & caring lover to his beautiful young mistress Romy Schneider. But his edifice comes crumbling down when Sami Frey, a youthful former lover of Schneider, returns to the scene. Montand can’t seem to stop his inner Stanley Kowalski from crashing through the sophisticated surface he’s cultivated. And director Claude Sautet does a fabulous job not only letting him show himself at his worst, but in showing how both Schneider & Frey are alternately appalled and attracted by his violent fits & grand gestures of apology. The sexual politics of the time dates some things (Schneider makes an awful lot of coffee for the boys), but the story arc holds up beautifully. By the end of the film, these three seem ready to tackle a French edition of DESIGN FOR LIVING, gay sub-text and all. Too bad the currently available DVD (WellSpring) is such a smeary looking transfer, but it will serve till something better shows up.