Sautet’s profoundly moving final feature is a tale of unrequited love and the male gaze. Emmanuelle Béart is the beautiful object of an emotionally withdrawn man’s curiously expressed affections. Nelly is a freelance literary editor struggling to make ends meet for her and her unemployed husband in the recession economy of the early 1990s. She meets the septuagenarian businessman Pierre Arnaud (Michel Serrault), who offers to pay her debts. At first suspicious of the old man’s motives, they form a bond that is at once more than mere friendship and less than physical intimacy.
"Sautet's elegant Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud is a model of understatement, classically restrained in its evocation of its characters' unexpressed, sometimes still-to-be-discovered emotional lives." — Tom Ryan, The Sunday Age
PG
Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Serrault, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Claire Nadeau
Claude Sautet