Claude Sautet

Born in the Parisian suburb of Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, into a wealthy family, Claude Sautet received a solid musical education from a very young age. In addition, he studied artistic painting and sculpture. He was very young when Hitler’s troops invaded France, a period in which, as a reaction against Nazism, he decided to join the Communist Party. A few years after the end of the war, disenchanted with an ideology that had led to the suppression of freedom and genocide, he decided to resign.

After the liberation of France, he enrolled in the French Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies, in his hometown. After graduating, he has worked as a music critic for the magazine “Combate” since 1949. He started out in cinema from below, as an assistant director, in the comedy Le mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans , by André Cerf , in 1950. He also helps filmmakers from the likes of Edouard Molinaro , in Back to the Wall , Yves Robert , in Seen and Unseen , and Georges Franju , in Eyes Without a Face, where he also executed a script revision. He was so good at this task that the filmmaker –destined to write the scripts for his own films– was constantly asked by some of his filmmaking cronies to act as a script “doctor”, fixing problems that could ruin the film. . He carried out this important work over the years in titles by Marcel Ophüls ( The Con Woman ), Philippe de Broca ( The Devil by the Tail ), Jean-Paul Rappeneau ( Naive Wife ), and Jacques Deray (in Borsalino , which starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, became one of the great successes of French cinema). All of them were filmmakers that she used to hang out with often.

After the short Nous n’irons plus au bois , he debuted as a feature filmmaker with Bonjour sourire! , a commission that has little to do with her later filmography, about three kidnapped comedians to make the princess of an imaginary country laugh, unable to overcome her sadness. His second work, At All Risks , will be much more personal , a brilliant sample of French film noir to vindicate, with two great actors, Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo , around a gangster sentenced to death who, surrounded by the police in Italy, flees to Paris with his family. Suffice it to say that Robert Bresson praised his realism, and that Sautet moved the great novelistJosé Giovanni , author of the novel on which it was based, and of the adaptation, which over time he remembered as his favorite, among the numerous film versions of his works, and that many have a high level ( Un tal La Roca , The evasion , The clan of the Sicilians , The clan of the Marseillaises , Alias ​​”The Gypsy” , etc.). What Guiovanni had been most passionate about were the emotional sequences of the criminal protagonist (Ventura), with his wife and his children.

Following Arms for the Caribbean , another impeccable detective film, also with Ventura, radically changes register with the adaptation of a novel by Paul Guimard The Things of Life , to which Claude Sautet owes his international prestige. It focused on the last day of the life of an architect (the protagonist dies in a car accident in the first sequence), the father of a teenager who, after separating from his wife, has started a sentimental relationship with an old friend. The director had found his ideal interpreters, Michel Piccoli and especially Romy Schneider, whose career was languishing at the time, but was revitalized by the film’s good reception. As a curiosity, it should be noted that 25 years later, Mark Rydell would shoot a deteriorated American remake, Between Two Women , with Richard Gere , Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich .

He repeats with Schneider and Piccoli in the exceptional Max and the junk dealers , about an ex-judge turned detective, who falls in love with the boss’s girlfriend when he infiltrates a gang of criminals. With Schneider he would still shoot three more films. In Ella, yo y el otro (with Yves Montand ), she plays a divorced mother, in love with a man, but who suddenly begins to feel attracted to another whom she has just met. mado, the least interesting of the group and in which the actress has a very secondary role, once again has Piccoli at the helm of the cast, as a man who, after the suicide of his wife, must launch a risky plan to save his business. Schneider does a particularly exceptional job in A Life as a Woman , where she plays a designer who, after leaving her lover, returns to her ex-husband, despite the fact that he has replaced her with a young girl.

Sautet, who was always a great actor’s director, once again took advantage of Yves Montand and Michel Piccoli , brought together in Three Amigos, Their Wives and… Others , around three guys affected by the mid-life crisis.

Claude Sautet shoots the light Garçon! (with Montand again), followed by the dispensable romantic melodrama Quelques jours avec moi , where Daniel Auteuil is saved , from which the filmmaker was going to get more juice in the future. But it would seem that in this decade Sautet is somewhat disoriented and signs films far inferior to his best titles. His works have become as cold as those characters disillusioned with love that are omnipresent in his filmography. Perhaps he lacked rapport with his fetish actress, Romy Schneider , who died prematurely in 1982.

But as in his films, life gave Claude Sautet a second chance . In the 1990s, he found a replacement for the Austrian, Emmanuelle Béart , who along with Auteuil –who repeats under his orders–, stars in one of his best works, A Heart in Winter , a sensitive drama about a violin repairman immersed in the most absolute coldness after the failure of his marriage, but he begins to recover after noticing an attractive violinist. He wins the Silver Lion in Venice and the Cesar Award for best director.

Repeat with Beart in the excellent Nelly and Mr. Arnaud , about a young woman who, after breaking up with her husband, begins a relationship with an older man who offers his help ( Michel Serrault ). It will be his last work, as Claude Sautet died in the French capital four years after its premiere, at the age of 76, due to liver cancer. He was survived by his wife and his son.