Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud

After A FEW DAYS WITH ME and A HEART IN WINTER, Sautet concluded his loose trilogy on unrequited love and the male gaze with this career-capping triumph that once again features Emmanuelle Béart as the beautiful object of an emotionally withdrawn man's curiously expressed affections. Nelly (Béart) is a freelance literary editor struggling to make ends meet for her and her unemployed husband (Charles Berling) in the recession economy of the early 1990s. Through a friend, she meets the septuagenarian businessman Pierre Arnaud (the great Michel Serrault), who offers to pay off her debts and asks her to serve as his amanuensis for the writing of his memoirs. At first suspicious of the old man's motives, Nelly eventually agrees, and over the course of their long afternoon sessions together, they form a bond that is more than mere friendship and less than physical intimacy. Majestically acted by Serrault and Béart and meticulously observed down to the smallest of details, Sautet's profoundly moving final feature finds the director at the very height of his creative powers.