TAKE note, all you apologists for the work ethic: countless hours spent sitting in cafes staring into space are an essential part of the creative process. Witness Claude Sautet, who has devoted many fruitful decades to this activity, resulting in a series of impeccably crafted films which chart the emotional and psychological vicissitudes of the French bourgeoisie, such as Les Choses De La Vie, Un Coeur En Hiver, Quelques Jours Avec Moi, and, most recently, Nelly Et Monsieur Arnaud Sautet makes films about what he knows, he says, "taking ordinary people and seeing how they live".
Meeting this week over lunch during his visit to Dublin for the French Film Festival retrospective of his work, the 73 year old director initially seems more interested in talking about music than cinema, and returns repeatedly to the importance of certain key composers - Bach, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky - to the way he thinks and works. "What I love about music is that it is not explicit," he says, "and this is what I aspire to in my films." At one period of his life, after the second World War, he worked as a music critic, writing about jazz. His route into film making was circuitous; he first studied sculpture, which he loved, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
It was his mother who pushed him into film school, believing in his talent as an "artist" before he had recognised it himself. The course was too theoretical for him, and he left. Later, he was taken on as a general assistant on a feature film, where he learned about every aspect of film making, before finding his niche as a "script doctor" - working closely with directors, tinkering with screenplays, editing and rewriting them and making them consistent.
This role suited him, as he could improve other people's work without the risk of exposing himself. "I was afraid," he says. It was a long time before he felt the need to make a film himself, and he had no clear ideas about the kind of films he wanted, to make. He started with a detective film - "that was the thing to do then" - which taught him bow to follow the basic rules of directing. Then he was asked his opinion of the script of what as to become Les Choses De La Vie, his real debut, which stalled Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider. Now that was interesting.
Portraying the last days in the life of a man who is still attached to his ex wife and ambivalent about his new relationship, the film, made in 1969, charts the territory which Sautet has since made his own, with its preoccupation with triangular relationships, with possibilities, ambiguities, choices made and not made.
Les Choses De La Vie introduced the type of male character who recurs in the three award winning films that loosely form a trilogy and have established Sautet's reputation outside of France: Quelques Jours Avec Moi, Un Coeur en Hiver and Nelly Et Monsieur Arnaud. This is a man who is basically introverted, a little misogynist, afraid of involvement with women. This was me when I was young, and it is something I see in other people. I observe men fencing with women, enjoying the game, but ultimately afraid of intimacy, of living as a couple."
This movement of advance and retreat may be seen at its clearest in Un Coeur En Hiver, where one of the two male characters, played by Daniel Auteuil, appears to cultivate the interest of the young violinist (Emmanuelle Beart) but finally shrinks from emotional involvement.
"I am sensitive to the changing conditions of women," Sautet continues, "and the way this is unbalancing the condition of men. But the problem is, bow to make these people interesting. I'm trying to make ordinary situations seem attractive.
When I make these films. I think that nobody will be interested in them, he laughs. I take small themes, observe them from many different perspectives the way Henry James does - and then decide to stop. I leave the endings completely open, so that the characters simply return to themselves, to their own possibilites." It is enough for Sautet to depict the emotional psychological and sexual preoccupations of a small group of characters with whom he identifies' he doesn't regard this subject matter as either trivial, superficial or limited.
"Look at Proust; could anyone call him limited? Television documentaries now tackle the big social and political issues. I don't want to enter into domains which I do not really know. If you do not to show explicit violence in film now, your way is narrow and straight."
A sense of coherence and mastery of the language of cinema emerges from Sautet's films, evident in the visual economy, the harmonious composition of each flame, the pacing and lighting, the fluidity of camerawork and the subtlety of performances from the same small group of actors. He admits to exercising complete control over the entire process and is obviously a very demanding director. "There's a little resistance - at first, but I say to people if you don't want to concentrate, you can do something else'. But you know, the more exacting you are, the happier the technicians are. The main difficulty is to make people feel really concerned with the work. I am conscious of what a great privilege it is to make a film.
"Television now uses so many sophisticated effects to make something look effortless. But I want to achieve simplicity through rigour. Every shot must be perfectly composed. I shoot the same scenes with different gaps, at a different pace, and then we spend six months editing.
"My taste is classical," he says, in summation, but is reluctant to be more precise. Complaining good humouredly about critics' preoccupation with definition and analysis, he makes an effort to elaborate, referring to the difference between Ravel and Debussy.
"Like a Greek drama, my work contains different levels of sophistication. Being classical, I avoid falling into fashion I hate fashion. Society changes hut man doesn't. Situations are always the same, hut every truth can be discussed and what people say is only one aspect of reality."
"I want to surprise people with what they already know, by showing them some singular, people whose extremes of behaviour can be recognised by others. People are enigmas, and I simply observe them." And this is where we leave M. Sautet, "hanging around cafes - of course, if I lived here, I would make films set in pubs . . . Somehow, that doesn't seem to have quite the same appeal."
