Considering Un Couer en Hiver (on VHS)

The 1990s were a singular time to be discovering movies. The types of movies you might be exposed to in a way optimal for genuine engagement was at its height. Today of course if you have an internet connection and a few bucks a month for subscriptions you’ve got anything.  The 90s however were unique because you had space to be circumspect but also tremendous availability of material, the movies were there to be viewed and you could just take them home and watch them. But you were not crushed beneath the avalanche; it did not blend into a wash of impulsive halfhearted viewings, watching movies with the same part of your brain with which you flip between a basketball game and infomercials on a lazy Saturday. The 90s gave you time and you had to make decisions.

Un Couer en Hiver (1992) sat on the Anderson Public Library shelf nearby Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994) by Krystoff Kieslowski and Wings of Desire (1987) by Wim Wenders. All three had four-star reviews in Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook. And I was moving between the books stacks and the videos planning my time based on these recommendations.

These distinctly European films emerged on the outskirts of the revolutionary decades of international cinema. By the 80s and 90s the upheavals were over, the grand debates, demonstrations, and belief in cinema as incendiary gesture had ebbed and receded. But the temperaments and geniuses of that era still worked and produced, and in the case of men like Kieslowski and Claude Sautet were even reaching their expressive peak.

Un Couer en Hiver (which translates as, "A Heart in Winter"), discovered on VHS from a library shelf by a thirteen year old in central Indiana, was a cold oblique mystery, a gem with startling facets unprecedented in a normal media diet. It tells the story of Stephan, a methodical violin maker and restorer, a man who revels in the feeling of control, having a precision instrument not only yielding to his hand but being his to be made or unmade.

Stephan is the business partner of an urbane and generous businessman and music lover named Maxim. Stephan is the technical genius but his partner is the business head, the one who obtains and communicates with clients and gives the work a personal touch. One day Maxim reveals to Stephan that he has begun a relationship with their new client, an exquisitely beautiful and talented violinist named Camille. Stephan is immediately intrigued and sets about trying to comprehend the person who has so enamored his partner. None of Stephan’s motivations are explicitly stated. He is a closed off and laconic individual who communicates grudgingly and minimally. His acquaintances speculate about his motivations as he moves through life seemingly without feeling.

Stephan begins to pay attention to Camille. He seems to be trying to draw her close, to seduce her away from Maxim. But it turns out to be an empty game. He is teasing and testing Camille as he would a fine instrument at his workbench.

Daniel Auteuil as Stephan is the perfect hybrid of cold distance and smoldering fascination. His dark features seem taxed and inhabited by some slow inner fire and yet his gaze is always distant and his interactions with other people thoroughly unaffected by their presence or feelings.

Beart of course is an absolute vision of perfection. She is the romantic ideal, an object of desire made ethereal by her character’s musical talent. Her Camille is the stuff of tortured poetry, thus making Stephan’s indifference thunderously perverse.

The music within Un Couer en Hiver is the perfect essence of spare romantic longing. Ravel’s Trio in A Minor as well as the other compositions for violin and accompaniment provide a languid nearly erotic pulse to the otherwise dry hypnotic pace of the film.

Un Couer en Hiver is a rare film that does not give primacy to love as the most powerful force and end point of all narrative. Nor does it intend that art and passion mutually inflame and dominate. In Sautet’s enigmatic and elusive film the observant, disciplined, and obstinate individual can rise above, manipulate, and dominate both love and art even if this individual is not independently capable of either.

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