Sautet’s Films Unfold--Just the Way Life Does

NEW YORK —  “The risk--which I will always take--is to simply trust in those who will see your film,” said Claude Sautet, the esteemed French director whose “Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud” opened earlier this month. “The viewer has to be trusted. Afterward, the film will keep coming back to them.”

Unlike so many, you add. “Yes, but when people say to you, ‘It’s a shame it’s over, I wanted to see more,’ that’s a lot better than when they say, ‘Is this film still going on?’ ”

Sautet, 72, has been making movies since 1955, and they can best be described as the type in which nothing happens and everything happens. “A Simple Story” was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar in 1978. His last film, “Un Coeur en Hiver,” critically acclaimed in the United States, was nominated for nine Cesar Awards (the French Oscar) and won two in 1993, for best director and best supporting actor.

“Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud” stars two of the world’s best-recognized actors--Emmanuelle Beart (“Manon of the Spring,” “La Belle Noiseuse,” “Un Coeur en Hiver” and Brian De Palma’s “Mission: Impossible”) and Michel Serrault, who has an enormous list of credits but is probably best known here for “La Cage aux Folles.”

Beart is Nelly, a not overly happy woman who is holding down multiple jobs because her husband won’t work. One day, she meets Serrault’s Monsieur Arnaud, the elderly former lover of a friend who offers to pay her back rent, no questions asked. She declines, but tells her husband she took the money and asks for a divorce. Arnaud hires her as the typist and editor on his memoirs, and their relationship, difficult as it is, develops into something like love. It’s an impossible situation, complicated by so many things, but Sautet is exploring very subtle nuances of human emotion.

“My desire is to make a film where I can remove all stressful effects, anything with stress,” he said while on a recent visit to Manhattan. “My goal is also to choose subjects or anecdotes, if you will, that are quite simple, to develop them simply, to film them simply, and to find multiple levels in relationships, modulations in relationships--so that the progress of the relationship between two people follows a journey you do not even realize is taking place.”

Sautet’s films are naturalistic, and so is his working style: He allows his stories to develop realistically, which takes time and doesn’t necessarily end with a happy denouement.

“Because what happens isn’t explicit,” he explained. “It’s the same thing that struck me when I was a young man about Bach: The basic tune was a small formula, but all possible variations could be made with that formula. Which means that you can, with small variations, go through your plateaus, your valleys, your rain, the sea, rivers--it’s life. But at some point you have to end it. When the boat gets to the port you have to leave it.”

Is love possible in the world of Claude Sautet? “That depends,” he said with a smile. “First of all, what do you mean by love? There are euphoric states and there are nightmares. That’s a long discussion. I try to furnish myself with a little piece of information: Was it better for Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud to have met or not? I concluded it was better for them to have met, because each one was enriched by the other. Afterward, they’re both free. And that’s another film.”