Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud

Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (1995) is a French drama from Claude Sautet you can watch online on iFILM. It was the director's final film — a hushed account of the pull between twenty-five-year-old Nelly and a man four decades her senior.

Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) walks out on her jobless husband and takes a job typing the memoirs of Pierre Arnaud (Michel Serrault), a retired judge who quietly clears her debts and asks for nothing back. What grows between them is too tangled to call friendship. When a young publisher named Vincent (Charles Berling) begins courting Nelly, the composed older man is seized by a jealousy he cannot keep off his face.

Sautet builds the entire film out of pauses, glances and half-finished sentences over coffee, with almost nothing dramatic on the surface. At the César Awards it handed Serrault the Best Actor trophy and gave Sautet the directing prize. Intimate, grown-up cinema for anyone who loves unhurried French character drama. Stream Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (1995) online on iFILM.