Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud

press release:

NELLY & MONSIEUR ARNAUD: France | 1995 | DCP | 106 min. | French with English subtitles

Director: Claude Sautet; Cast: Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Serrault, Jean-Hughes Anglade

In his masterful final film, Sautet tells of the gradually developing relationship between Nelly (Béart), a 25-year old with an uninterested husband, and Mr. Arnaud (Serrault), a wealthy businessman in his 70s. “There's an admirable detachment and sense of balance in the way [Sautet] attends and responds to his title characters, not merely defining one through the eyes of the other. The results are seamless and profound—novelistic in the best sense” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).

While Cinematheque audiences have recently had the opportunity to discover the great crime and action movies of French auteur Claude Sautet, like Classe tous risques, Max et le ferrailleurs, and The Dictator’s Guns, the director was better known internationally as the director of more quiet, interpersonal dramas and love stories. This October, we will present four recent restorations of three highly acclaimed Sautet features from the 1970s - Les Choses de la vie, César et Rosalie, Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others - and his masterful final feature from 1995, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud.