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Claude Sautet's lonely characters always did strange things for love.
For example, not loving who they loved.
Their creatures, fearful, elusive men, hesitant about the possibility of choosing, and concrete and combative women, socially, economically, morally and intellectually lost people, tended to be lost.
Claude Sautet (Montrouge, 1924-Paris, 2000) directed films between 1960 and 1995. Not too many, just 13, between
At All Risks
and
Nelly and Mr. Arnaud
, plus one,
Bonjour sourire!
, from 1956, which, although signed by him in the credits, he did not consider as his.
Of them, half a dozen masterpieces and another half of formidable or notable works.
Despised in his day by the members of the magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma
, although admired by Jean-Pierre Melville, another mature and complex independent like him, and by François Truffaut, the only one of the contemporaries of the
nouvelle vague
who valued him fairly. measure, Sautet would have turned 100 years old this February 23.
An excellent moment to recover his mysterious figure and his bitter work, present in a relevant part on platforms.
“
Cahiers du Cinéma
was a very influential magazine at that time and its judgments, as if coming from a nebula populated by ayatollahs preaching against the light, were law,” the director told Michel Boujut in the book
Conversations with Claude Sautet
, published in Spain by the San Sebastián film festival, which dedicated a retrospective to him in 2022.
The wonderful
Things in Life
(1970) was defined in
Cahiers
as “the
Z
of tenderness”, in reference to the famous Costa-Gavras film, and the happily desolate
A Heart in Winter
(1992) was said to smell “to formaldehyde”.
Michel Ciment, historical director of
Positif
, the rival magazine, denounced in a 2009 interview the “terrible” nature of “dogmatism”: “The role of criticism is the choice.
At
Positif
we defended Sautet a lot in times when he was heavily attacked by the
cahieristas,
but what links Sautet, Truffaut and Chabrol?
It is a psychological, narrative, realistic cinema.
All three share the same type of cinema.
But Truffaut and Chabrol are considered masters and Sautet as nothing, because the latter did not write in
Cahiers...
These are the defects of criticism.
Criticism must be open and then prioritize and evaluate.
But never an evaluation based on dogma.
It's stupid".
More information
Claude Sautet, the 'painter' of the France of Pompidou and Giscard, dies
An admirer of jazz and of Howard Hawks and John Ford, in addition to the fabulous duet formed by the filmmaker Marcel Carné and the writer Jacques Prévert, champions of French poetic realism, Sautet, who had begun his career as a screenwriter of important titles by Georges Franju (
The Eyes Without a Face
) and Jacques Deray (
Crime Round
) and as a consultant for scripts in which he was not credited, he was a tireless searcher for a serene way of living and, at the same time, for a supreme demand in his work.
Thus, in the thematic section, his career could be divided between the harsh police films starring beings adrift (
At all risks
,
Max and the scrap metal dealers
) and the dramas about mature bourgeois united by failure, “who have known each other all their lives.” and who use friendship as a refuge to escape their anguish”:
The things of life
;
She, me and the other
;
Three friends, her wives... and the others
;
Mado
.
Meanwhile, formally, always with supreme elegance, through a more expansive style in the seventies and eighties and a more introspective and naked stage in the nineties.
His usual tough but gloomy men, played by stars such as Michel Piccoli and Yves Montand, and his much more persuasive and independent female figures, represented by Romy Schneider in the first stage and Emmanuelle Béart in the last, move and fascinate because they are never the same. that seem.
“I'm tired of living with a resigned man, who cooks like a lettuce day by day,” says Schneider's character in
Max and the Junkyards.
Do not resign yourself to not knowing, revisiting and perhaps reevaluating Sautet's cinema.
Five of the big ones, on platforms
At All Risks
(1960)
Based on a novel by José Giovanni, one of the fundamental names of the French detective, both in literature and in cinema, with a script by the writer himself and Sautet, music by Georges Delerue - his soundtracks for Truffaut and Godard are historical - and starring by Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Sandra Milo.
The big names accumulate in
At All Risks
, a
polar
(French film noir) about a breathless life.
That of a bank robber sentenced to death in absentia a decade ago who, on the run in Italy, wanders from city to city with his wife and two small children, with the goal of returning to France.
As in
Heat,
by Michael Mann, so influenced by some aspects of the French policeman, the audience is on the side of the evildoer.
For his nobility, for his dignity.
That gentlemanly crime that Ventura embroidered: minimal and subtle gesture, sincere smile, hard and brief.
The hopeless, anxious and fatalistic tone culminates in a dry and atrocious ending narrated by an omniscient voice-
over
that leaves the viewer speechless.
Among them, Jean-Pierre Melville, master of
polar,
who was enthusiastic
about At All Risks.
Available on Filmin
.
Max and the Scrappers
(1971)
In the final part of his career he has some good opponents, but Michel Piccoli's character in
Max and the Junkers
is the meanest, darkest and most complex guy in Sautet's cinema.
A former investigative judge who became a police officer so as not to have to see criminals on the street that he considered guilty and who were acquitted due to lack of evidence.
A professional obsessed with red-handed crime, with a certain inferiority complex and astonishing arrogance, he is worth the contradiction.
And so in need of a medal, that he provokes it.
At his side, in their second joint film after the also wonderful
Things in Life
(1970), Romy Schneider, who had to convince the filmmaker that she could play a prostitute from the Parisian red belt, around a group of nobodies. : some miserable people, some lazy people, some imbeciles who had never created the biggest problem.
The director's favorite film, the story of a gloomy vain man, a formidable
polar
that culminates with a pair of devastating images after a masterful sequence shot with three cameras among a crowd: the robbery of a bank that cannot be seen, because the look de Sautet remains where he belongs, in the streets.
Available on Filmin.
A Woman's Life
(1978)
Both its original title,
Une histoire simple,
and its renamed Spanish,
A Woman's Life,
give an idea of what Sautet wanted: to address a (unfortunately) common story, that of a middle-aged woman who tries to find herself without the dependence on men, although without forcing the slightest dramatic emphasis.
“For a while now, when I'm with you is when I miss you the most,” Schneider's character, a divorced woman with a teenage son, tells her current partner in a dark tone full of lyricism, after making the decision to stop dating. live with him and abort, alone and in a totally free decision, the child they are expecting.
In the film, starring a large group of middle-aged friends with various sentimental and work problems, between layoffs, depression and infidelities, she tries to provide the calm that others do not have.
“Fatality does not exist.
Just because freedom exists.”
And the director shines in those moments of pause, apparently taken over by the verve, the conversations and the resentments, in which he plants the camera in the silence of his protagonists;
in your thoughts, your worries and your dreams.
Sautet's external gaze is on the internal state of his creatures.
In the search for freedom and in the sisterhood of combative women.
Available on Filmin.
A Heart in Winter
(1992)
The darkest and most devious side of pristine, successful and cultured people.
In this case, a luthier, an artist with exquisite care when creating violins, a musical savant, an icy and impenetrable guy, who is played by Daniel Auteuil without barely moving a muscle.
“If you talk he can say nonsense.
If you keep quiet, on the other hand, there is no risk and you may seem intelligent," says Emmanuelle Béart's character, as angry as she is fascinated by an opaque and unpleasantly conciliatory being who has created a closed world for herself and plays a cruel game of seduction. radically opposite to that of Valmont in
Dangerous Liaisons.
This is much more sibylline and humiliating.
He is a man with a heart in winter, inspired by Mikhail Lermontov's short novel
A Hero of Our Time.
Aware of being in front of a chamber film, Sautet chose pieces that were “neither too well-known nor too melodic” for the various musical moments: the triplets and sonatas of Maurice Ravel.
As the director said of his relentless character: “It's hard to know if he's acting, hiding, or protecting himself.”
Silver Lion for the best address in Venice.
Available on YouTube.
Nelly and Mr. Arnaud
(1995)
The director's cinematographic testament.
Mr. Arnaud is not Sautet, nor does he have to be, but he is so much like him!
A work that, given its main argument, sounds sleazy, but that, enjoyed later with its sour melancholy and its singular temperance, only exudes delicacy.
A young woman in financial difficulties accepts a good amount of money to pay off her debts and a job offer to go clean and edit a memoir from a friend of a friend, a former judge and retired businessman whom she barely knew. knows, an “older gentleman” but “not an old man.”
The enormous capacity of the French filmmaker to break expectations;
his attachment to uncertainty, and his talent for making the most unexpected happen in every dialogue and with every action;
the portrait of a series of characters who seek an inner calm that comes to them in the most mysterious way.
It could have been a film about a dark and corrupt relationship, but it is the story of a man with an immense path traveled who watches over a woman with a path to travel.
Michel Serrault is magnificent as Sautet's alter ego, but Béart is extraordinary: he cannot simply say “yes” or “no” with more conviction, nuances and authenticity.
Available on Filmin.
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