Claude Sautet, past seventy, herewith reaffirms his unflagging interest in people, and, more philosophically, in life and in love. Nelly, just separated from her couch-potato husband (is there a French expression, divan-pomme-de-terre?), accepts a position as the amaneunsis of M. Arnaud, a divorced and retired magistrate (a character who can speak for Sautet's generation: "You reach an age where you read the same few books over and over"), currently penning a memoir of his postwar judiciary appointment in the Leeward Islands. (He lets it pass when Nelly pins these down as somewhere in Polynesia.) His eager young publisher, a confirmed bachelor, is much nearer Nelly's age. What unfolds, with not a hint of hurry, is terribly adult and civilized and unsensationalized and, for want of a better term, novelistic. It is not terribly cinematic, apart from the pointedly contrasting performing styles and personalities embodied by Michel Serrault and Emmanuelle Béart: his is a detailed and fine-point portrait of an alert, finicky, proud, dour, reserved, introspective, conversable, generous, paternalistic old-school gentleman; hers a broader-stroke sketch of youthful beauty underlaid and deepened by unexamined sadness. With Jean-Hugues Anglade, Michel Lonsdale. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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