UN COEUR EN HIVER (A HEART IN WINTER)
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1993 Frank Maloney
UN COEUR EN HIVER (A HEART IN WINTER) is a 1992 French film directed by Claude Sautet. The cast includes Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Beart, Andre Dussolier, and Elisabeth Bourgine. The film is unrated, in French with English subtitles.
UN COEUR EN HIVER is a welcome antidote for the summer glut of big-bucks, effects-rich, story-poor action films. UN COEUR has won extensive honors in Europe, and rightly so, including 1992 Cesars (the French Oscars) for best director (Claude Sautet) and best supporting actor (Andre Dussolier) with nominations for Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Beart for best male and female actor, respectively. Sautet is a masterful director with a breath-taking sense of timing, of when to cut and when to linger, a master of silences that speak volumes. He placed the images of his film on top a sound track that includes many fragments of the incredibly beautiful Sonatas and Trio of Maurice Ravel, perfect choice--passionate, intimate chamber music to illuminate a film about passion. Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to regard UN COEUR as a kind of chamber film, if you will, more at home in intimate surroundings than grand auditoria, a film of intimate and delicately controlled emotionalism, a film in which three players enact of quiet drama.
Beart plays an up-and-coming violinist who through most of the film is either rehearsing or recording the Ravel. It is no small achievement that she completely convinced me and my partner Lyndol (himself a musician) that she was playing the complex, passionate music with authority and virtuosity. In actuality, the music was performed by Jean-Jacques Kantorow.
Beart is one of the cinema's great beauties, in addition to being an actor of taste and intelligence. Here she plays Camille. Beart's physical beauty is perfect match for Camille's precise, demanding, perfectionist aesthetics. And when in a critical scene Camille appears drunk, her make-up garish and sloppy, her hair as disarrayed as her emotions and her career and art momentarily put to one side, it is profoundly shocking, deeply painful.
Camille's foil is Stephan, played by Auteuil. Stephan is a failed musician who has become a master violin maker and restorer. Stephan is handsome, introverted, denying himself love and passion, denying even a capacity to love, a giant ear (as he is called by one of his victims), casually cruel in his refusal to love others. He lives a spartan life, as spare of emotion as it is of furniture. His partner, Maxim (Dussolier), has taken Camille as his lover, in the process disrupting a relationship between the violinist and her agent and mentor and apartment-mate (Elisabeth Bourgine). Maxim furthers Camille's education and growth, but it Stephan whom she desires. The more Stephan tells her that he is unavailable, the more obsessed Camille becomes with him. He indulges himself in a games of approach and avoidance that takes on a life of its own and eventually hurts all three in this reticent menage a trois.
Reticence is at the heart of this film's style and greatness. The dialogue of silences, passionate refusal to touch and be touched, the emptying of emotions are acts of privacy carried out largely in public, in bars, rehearsal halls, on the streets of Paris. The one scene of overt emotionalism, acted out in a familiar bar-restaurant, is cleverly foreshadowed in the same bar by a different, less austere couple. They recover quickly, whereas the principals never fully recover the things that were last in that later scene.
The film is also illuminated by a quiet cinematography that works the ambient light as extension of the story, as part of the dialogue. The design, likewise, is restrained, unobtrusive. Even Auteuil's Christian Dior wardrobe is too rich, too tasteful to call attention to itself.
One of our local critics sees UN COEUR as revisionist comment on the French Lover of movie history. Only Maxim fits the suave, debonair role, but even he is far from the stereotype in his actions and words. Stephan as the anti-lover is far from the stumbling, bumbling, clownish Pierre Richard sort of French comic tradition. I don't object to the critic putting the film in a filmic context. However, I think this aspect is only one of the subtexts here even though I don't want to write much about what I see is the meaning of UN COEUR since that would require an essay of a very personal nature and like Stephan I would prefer not to expose myself to my own emotions.
Instead, let me get by with saying that UN COEUR EN HIVER is a mature, accomplished, complete achievement of fine French filmmaking. It is a film that I recommend to any adult at any price and a film I hope you get a chance to see.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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