Claude Sautet is not a household name. The French auteur, who left us in 2000, was not a prolific filmmaker. (The writer-director of fourteen features, he had a hand in the screenplay of a number of others, including the cult favorite Eyes Without a Face.) Nor did he leave behind a particular film that is widely or instantly recognized as a classic, or even, really, very well known. And although Sautet would surely garner a good number of votes for the Hall of Fame, his tally would almost certainly come up short of yielding admission to the pantheon.
Yet we’re terribly fond of him here at Mid Century Cinema, for three reasons. As far as we can tell he’s never made anything short of a very good movie. Although we still haven’t been able to source two of them, there is not one of that dozen we’ve seen that we haven’t watched with interest and attention, or wouldn’t screen again. And he’s made two flat out masterpieces: Classe Tous Risques (featuring Mr. Lino Ventura, Jean Paul Belmondo, and Marcel Dalio, shot by Ghislain Cloquet), and A Heart in Winter (with Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, and André Dussollier). And consider this, from the great Bertrand Tavernier (who dedicated My Journey through French Cinema to Sautet and Jacques Becker): “He was, with Jean-Pierre Melville, my godfather in cinema, helping me, taking me under his wing, even convincing my parents to let me choose this profession rather than political science.” We should all have such people in our lives.
In our estimation, the best of Sautet – or at least his most distinct, consistent, and representative work – is reflected in the six films he made in the 1970s. Often featuring an outstanding Romy Schneider (five times) or the marvelous Michel Piccoli (four times), there is a spectacular “Sautet in the Seventies” box set begging for a polished and proper release. The films from this rich middle period are largely about friendships. Moreover, as one critic wrote, “Friendship was as important to Sautet’s films as it was to him in life. That was why he tried to work with the same crew, including cinematographer Jean Boffety and composer Philippe Sarde.” Movies about friendship made by friends is quite in our sweet spot. But if that sounds a tad sentimental, consider Sautet’s take on the subject: “I always try to create an imbalance, an edge to friendship. You never know what’s going to trigger the next moment. My real subject is always uncertainty.”
Of his seventies films – all worth seeking out – our favorites are Vincent, François, Paul and the Others (a virtual clinic in ruminations about deep, intimate, and uneasy friendships, featuring Piccoli, Yves Montand, and Serge Reggiani); The Things of Life (a masterful meditation on, well, the things of life); and, released fifty years ago this week, Max and the Junkmen. Max is not a jaw-dropping masterpiece, but I suspect Sautet – with his assured, observational style and focus on the often inscrutable choices made by charismatic but compromised characters – had little interest in making jaws drop. (As he told one interviewer, “My goal is to choose subjects or anecdotes, if you will, that are quite simple, to develop them simply, to film them simply and to find multiple levels in relationships.”) And he’s definitely a “more about the questions than the answers” kind of a guy, so don’t expect his movies to reveal at the end the secret of why the characters did what they did. But Max and the Junkman is a great movie, and one you should race out and see. (And then write me a little note complaining about its languid pace. This is a story to be savored, not rushed. Now you can’t say you weren’t warned.)
Max and the Junkmen is thoughtfully shot in muted blues and grays, often refracted though frosted glass. The story, nominally, is something of an inverted French policier – instead of starting with the crime and the gang and then tracing its unraveling (a path littered with betrayals, bad luck, and tracked by seen-it-all investigators), Max starts with the cops, and then comes up with the crime—and quite reluctantly, it should be added. Michel Piccoli is a judge turned detective (the voluntary nature of his downward career trajectory is as close to a motivation as Sautet will provide); Romy Schneider plays a woman of such assured independence and autonomy it might make you rethink your stance on prostitution. Their lives intersect. They develop a relationship (if not the one you expect). A bank is perhaps to be robbed. Things go poorly. An unanticipated ending somehow makes perfect sense. That’s all I’m going to say.
