A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Last night I watched my second Claude Sautet movie, Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. I guess I had unreasonably high expectations, since my first Sautet, Un Coeur en Hiver, was tremendous. (It’s sort of like an apolitical French riff on The Remains of the Day — they both concern men who simply can’t bring themselves to open their hearts to the women they either love or could love, and who are ready to love them.) Though Nelly was consistently gripping and boasts superb performances all around, I felt slightly let down as the credits rolled, and after a few minutes’ thought, I figured out why.

First, a little plot summary for those of you who haven’t seen either movie or don’t remember them well. And yes, I’m afraid spoilers will abound in this post; there’s no way around it.

Un Coeur en Hiver (”A Heart In Winter”) follows three characters in a doomed love triangle. Stéphane (played by the great Daniel Autueil) is a brilliant violin maker and repairman. Maxime (played by André Dussollier) is his boss and the closest thing he has to a friend. And Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) is a gorgeous virtuoso violinist who comes into the shop one day in need of their services. Though Stéphane is immediately attracted to Camille, he doesn’t act on his attraction, and Maxime quickly leaves his wife and children and takes up with her. Later, Stéphane reveals how much he appreciates Camille’s playing, and she succumbs to the attraction she’s felt for him, leaves Maxime and enters a relationship with Stéphane. Stéphane, though, having the frozen heart of the title, can’t offer her the emotional engagement and intimacy she craves, and when her frustration and anger grow, he breaks things off with her… perhaps to spare her, perhaps to protect himself. Likely for both reasons. Humiliated, she returns to Maxime, and Stéphane retreats further from all human contact, quitting Maxime’s business and setting up his own secluded violin studio.

Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud is the tragic story of two people who are perfect for each other except for an unfortunate gap in their ages. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a retired judge and businessman who hires Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) to help him type and edit his memoirs. Nelly is initially married to an out-of-work dullard who sits around all day watching TV while she juggles multiple jobs trying to keep them from being evicted, but exposure to the fascinating and courtly Monsieur Arnaud snaps her out of her self-imposed imprisonment in the status quo, and she gets a divorce. An attraction of sorts grows between her and Arnaud, but Arnaud is unwilling to risk rejection and Nelly can’t bring herself to engage in a physical relationship with a much older man. She tries to sublimate the interest she has in Arnaud by attempting a relationship with his publisher, Vincent (Jean-Hugues Anglade) but compared to Arnaud, Vincent is terribly boring, and before long, she breaks it off.

The difference between the two movies, and the reason Un Coeur is so much more satisfying, is that Nelly, the protagonist in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, stops pursuing her goals after awhile and becomes passive, while all three principle characters in Un Coeur en Hiver remain active right up to the very end. That doesn’t mean any of the other characters in either film necessarily achieve their goals; these are, after all, movies with essentially unhappy endings. But at least they keep trying.

In Un Coeur, Maxime, having long since left his family, recognizes that he’ll never truly possess Camille’s affections and understands that she may leave him at any time, but resigns himself to taking what he can get for as long as he can get it. Stéphane, having seen the dangers (to himself and to others) of even superficial engagement with other people, retreats even further from the society of his fellow man. And Camille, rebuffed by Stéphane in a way that she’d never before been rebuffed by any man, retreats to an unsatisfying relationship with Maxime as an ineffectual sop to her ego.

In Nelly, Arnaud, realizing at last that he can never have Nelly, takes up with his ex-wife and leaves the country. Nelly’s ex-husband, having been shocked awake by the breakup, finally returns to work, regains his self-respect and finds new love in the bargain. But after breaking up with Vincent, Nelly’s character turns static. She doesn’t try anything new to resolve the conflict between her interest in Arnaud and her unwillingness to become romantically involved with him. She just… exists, and the narrative and thematic momentum shift entirely to Arnaud. Because the movie is so nicely observed and excellently acted, and because the Arnaud sections are so strong, it largely succeeds despite this, but it would have been infinitely stronger if Nelly had remained active. She could have decided that she was actually better off alone, for example, though that would have undermined the tragic nature of the Nelly-Arnaud relationship. She could have tried returning to her unsatisfying affair with Vincent, though the dramatic possibilities of that storyline were already pretty much exhausted, so it wouldn’t have meaningfully moved the story or her character forward. Or, seeing the new man her ex-husband had become (or the restoration of the man he used to be) she could have seized upon him as the solution to all her problems and desperately tried to woo him back, perhaps wrecking his new relationship in the process and definitely failing to find what she really wanted all along — essentially Monsieur Arnaud in a younger body.

The point is that Arnaud knows exactly what he wants (Nelly) but realizes he can’t have it and settles for his ex-wife, and because we like him very much, we feel terribly sad for him. Nelly, by contrast, more or less knows what she wants (Arnaud, but younger) but she gives up entirely on trying to get it or anything else, and because we can only judge how much a character wants something by how hard he or she tries to get it, her apathy and inaction suggest to us that she didn’t really want it that much after all, and that we therefore shouldn’t be so sad that she didn’t get it. That seriously undermines the impact of the ending — Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud parting ways — and even distances us from the heartbreak Arnaud feels upon saying goodbye to her.

Maybe you haven’t seen either of these movies and never will (though I recommend that you do), but the lesson applies universally: stories are about characters trying to get what they think they want and either succeeding or failing, not about characters sitting around doing nothing.