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Claude Sautet by Janice Tong Janice Tong is completing her PhD in Cinema Studies at the University of Sydney. Her thesis is a study on love, time and memory in the films of Wong Kar-wai. |
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| The Poetics of
Melancholy There is a sense of melancholy and a certain quietude that permeates Claude Sautet's cinema, and it is in keeping with its pace, a languid but deliberate slowness, that we are able to enter into his world. Sautet's world is a richly textured one, and requires attentiveness and a careful eye to its details. Populated by fully formed and complex characters, its skein of images is the weaving together of a series of looks, gestures, annunciations, utterances and moods of its inhabitants. Both limpid and opaque, this world and its denizens ask us to be thorough and mindful not only of what we see, but also what we hear -- to listen to the conversations, the music, the ambience, as well as the silences. In this way, his films ask us to surrender our senses, to give ourselves over to them, so that we do not remain on the 'outside' as mere viewers or voyeurs to the intimacy on screen. Described as a “discrete and elegant man,” (1) for many this director is a humanist whose films may be described as “intimate-realist” (2) films, a meticulous study of lived lives whose characters, despite their social standing, are nonetheless part of the quotidian. Who is to say that the bourgeoisie are immune to the falterings of friendship or the failings of love? For others, his films are scrutinised for their lack of criticism of the bourgeoisie and their mores, and whose films always seem to be “as pleasant, polite and polished as the man himself” (3) and are “very French in that attractive, fashionable people prepare and eat a lot of attractive food, while grappling with life and love” (4) kind of way. It is these kinds of split considerations that have haunted Sautet's career and driven a rift between the two French film journals, Positif and Cahiers du cinéma, in their views and opinions of this French director. It seems that, for the latter, Sautet has simply vanished out of sight -- especially in death, with the noticeable absence of obituary on this important director. Perhaps it does not matter ultimately whether Sautet chooses to comment on or embrace the upper middle class. His work is unlike that of Chabrol's or Buñuel's, it is not there to lend a critical eye or to satirise. Instead, we find a kind of honesty and humility in his films that do not bear on the side of judgement.
Sautet withdrew from directing his own films and took to scripting in the intervening years, and, though little known publicly, within the industry he was perhaps more distinguished for his ability and work in transforming a script than his work as a director. Often called upon by fellow directors to dislodge their writer's block (Marcel Ophüls, Jacques Deray and Jean Becker are amongst a few), he earned the reputation and title of “script-doctor” from Truffaut. Much of his work in this period (and a lot of his dialogue work in the '60s remains uncredited) concentrated on developing and perfecting dialogues and observations on love in its various dimensions. His delicately nuanced study of love resurfaces in his own films in the '70s and again in the '90s. Les Choses de la vie (1969) marked the turning point for Sautet. He had found his muse in the Austrian-born actor Romy Schneider, who went on to star in many of his films in this period, including Max et les ferrailleurs (1971), César et Rosalie (1972), Mado (1976), and Une Histoire simple (1978) which won her a best actress César (the film was nominated for 11 Césars). It is also in this period, which is perhaps his most productive and fruitful in that he founded long-term friendships with actors Michel Piccoli and Yves Montand, and with his collaborators, scenario-writer Jean-Loup Dabadie, cinematographer Jean Boffety and composer Phillipe Sarde. As with his careful depictions of human relationships in these films, Sautet greatly valued his personal friendships and that is why most of the time he chose to work with people he knew, or whose work he was familiar with. Romy Schneider's suicide in 1980 affected him very deeply, and his work slumped to a low point with Garçon (1983), which was not well received either by the public or critics.
Claude Sautet passed away on July 22, 2000 after a long battle with liver cancer. He is survived by Graziella Escojido, his wife of 47 years, and a son, both of whom he took care to shelter from public life. In an homage to Sautet, President Jacques Chirac described his work poignantly, and hailed the director as one who “held out the mirror of our times.” For me, his films have the ability to consume us entirely, by stripping back our emotions we come face to face with something truthful in his films. From the first moments of Un Coeur en hiver we are engulfed by the long takes, the stillness of his images and the whisperings of his characters. It is as though we are bound by some secret affinity to the lives of these characters. In an interview Sautet revealed that this film was more based on his memories of the story, rather than an adaptation of Lermontov's short story “Princess Mary,” from his book A Hero of Our Time. This aspect, coupled with Jean-Jacques Kantorow's recording of Ravel's sonatas (a gift from his son, which he was listening to at the time), allowed Sautet's film to develop deeper and richer dimensions in the three main characters. The novelistic quality in the detailed study of his characters, who reveal themselves slowly but precisely, through conversations, gestures, looks, are all Sautet's doing. He and writer Jacques Fieschi worked on the first third of the dialogue for no less than four months in order to pare it down to perfection. But there remains an opacity to his characters: we learn of Stéphane's (Daniel Auteuil) thoughts about winning over Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) through snippets of his conversations with Hélène (Elisabeth Bourgine), but his gestures and behaviour belie his stated intentions (standing silently in the dark watching his old professor argue with his wife). We do not know whether we should believe in what he says, or even if he himself understands his own actions. The slow disintegration of the relationship between this “enigmatic, self conscious and meticulous musician and collector of mechanical toys” (6) and his partner Maxime (André Dussolier) is as unbearable to watch as Béart's luminosity is beguiling. But the threesome (Stéphane, Camille and Maxime) hangs onto each other, and their story can only be told with all three of them in their place. So, as painful as it is to watch Camille's fall towards Stéphane's cruel detachment, it is somehow unavoidable for their love to be unfulfilled and unable to be reconciled. It is in the same vein that Sautet poses impossible situations to us: how are we to choose between Samy Frey and Yves Montand, who are both in love with Romy in César et Rosalie? And the stolen moments of love in the face of loneliness for Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) and M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault). Love for Sautet is not about knowing where it will take you. His camera observes a world where human subjectivity is something unknowable. We can only 'gaze upon' what he reveals to us in the hope that, like his characters, we may come to know this person that is not 'I', but who is other and thus unfathomable. Sautet's films are a careful study of human subjectivity and reflect our struggle to find meaning and love in our often complex, difficult and fragmented relationships through life.
For me, however, it is Sautet's work on Les Choses de la vie that helps change the French cinematographic landscape definitively. Who can forget and not be haunted by those quiet, infinite rebounds of Piccoli's car? Its slow-motion drags this moment across almost the entire film. When we see it in 'real-time,' it is no more than four or five seconds in duration. We are almost always shocked by its speed, the force of it and the incredible deafening sounds. What, in effect, are we seeing in these slow-motion replays? I would suggest that they are more than images repeating or folding in on themselves. These rebounds, which stretch out infinitely, are already in the realm of memory, and contain within them images which map out Piccoli's existence, the fragmented episodes of love, his family and their drifting apart, his isolation. These images cannot merely be ticked off as having 'your life flash before your eyes' at the moment of your death. They are images which describe a life not “as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it.” (7) You see, Piccoli's character is also this past that is in his memory. Between each rebound of the car, Sautet reveals to us the fabric of this man's existence, and makes present to us a part of him which up until now has remain hidden. To borrow one of Romy's lines, these images are “full of memories that don't belong to me.” (8) These memories that “don't belong” to her are precisely the memories that she is jealous of, because she has no way of knowing them. She will never be able to recall Piccoli's past. Barthes describes this perfectly: “I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins…Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.”
Another long image sequence conveys the notion that the past is infinite. It is the title sequence which continues to haunt me with every viewing, as we are displaced by what we see. I remember being totally absorbed by the image, but was unable to work out what I was actually seeing. It is simple, the camera looks out through the windscreen of the car, we are driving, a long time passes, the light changes, cars pass and keep passing on both sides of the road. The entire sequence is played backwards through the projector. It seems that we are being pulled outside of time -- our experience of spatio-temporal relations are completely out of kilter. It may be that this sequence is trying to convey a travelling back in time. But for me, this image-sequence will always remain an enigma. These images of the passage of time and Phillippe Sarde's incredibly beautiful music transport the viewer into their own subjectivity. Whilst watching this scene, I somehow always find myself in my own memory -- remembering two other unforgettable and solicitous car sequences. The first one is in Antonioni's The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975), where Maria Schneider asks Jack Nicholson what he is running away from, and he tells her to turn around and look behind her. The image cuts to her POV and one sees the long stretch of road rapidly pulling away from them. It is the past, a past which has made her who she is, that which constituted her identity. The other sequence is from Catherine Breillat's À ma soeur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001), the sisters in the car are sullen and waiting, we see the world literally passing them by in the side-mirror of their car. What a simple shot, and yet, we are able to sense their already protracted and doomed future from the silent mood of the girls and the fleeting images in the mirror. Sautet conveys to his viewers the same kind of sentiments through dialogue and framing. Piccoli's quiet and broken utterances after his accident in Les Choses de la vie—“I'm hot,” “shall I open my eyes?” “maybe I'll rest a little,” “I'm hot,” “who put this blanket on me?” “I'm thirsty,” “I'm hot”—shows a man in ruins more effectively than any image of a bloody and broken body can. The camera picks out parts of his body in a series of close-ups, his still fingers, his closed eyes, his face down in the grass, his fingers again.
This is what Sautet's films do best, to reveal to us that “the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with.” (11) He achieves this through carefully constructed dialogue and the way he frames his characters: never in the middle of the action, but always on the sidelines, waiting and watching silently, humbly and without judgement. It is in these ways that his images allow us to approach the other without eroding their opacity. For the enigma of the other is precisely what intrigues us; we need them to be different from ourselves, so that we may be “seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever.” (12) Like the closing of a violin, “[e]verything, all the work that has gone on underneath, is hidden. The skill of the craftsman is such that it takes two people to close up the instrument.” (13) Claude Sautet's cinema is an intimate one, and like the perfume on a lover's skin it is ephemeral and fragile, and yet, traces of it remain with you, lingering like an afterimage. © Janice Tong, February 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography Films directed by director: Nous
n'irons plus au bois
(We Won't Go to the Woods Anymore)
(1951) short film Select Bibliography There
is scant material written in English on this director apart from film
reviews.
Articles in Senses of Cinema Claude
Sautet's Nelly And Monsieur Arnaud (1995) – An Appreciation
by John C. Murray
Web Resources Compiled by author Ecran
Noir
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