Love Between The Lines

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: UN COEUR EN HIVER

DIRECTOR: CLAUDE SAUTET

WRITERS: YVES ULLMANN, JACQUES FIESCHI, JEROME TONNERRE

THE BOTTOM LINE: The French have a way with words -- and with the pauses between them that mean so much more.

American movies are all talk, no listen. Jabber jabber, feint feint -- conversation is combat, a schoolyard dissing contest, a slightly more sophisticated version of "Your mother!" "No, yours!" In real life, and in French movies, people pretend to get along when they talk. They keep things light, genial, talking around the issues that burn them up inside. Some love affairs never begin because people are afraid to reveal what they feel; "I love you" is so hard to say. Some marriages can last a lifetime on the tacit agreement that hostilities will go unexpressed. The static is in the silences.

By the chatty U.S. criterion, Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) is no great shakes. Even by French standards, Claude Sautet's drama tends to dither a bit. Yet the film displays a wonderful attention to the spaces between what people say and what they mean. Because the business of its main characters is making music, we spend many rewarding moments watching people listen. And then, because this is a kind of love story, we watch a woman watching a man. Here, the actors are the audience; they do what we do.

Stephane (Daniel Auteuil) and Maxime (Andre Dussollier) are partners in a violin repair business. Maxime, a man of affairs, is now involved with the accomplished young violinist Camille (Emmanuelle Beart). "It's a new experience," he notes, "admiring someone I love." Stephane is Maxime's opposite: he has a stillness that consoles men and attracts women. "You're very reticient," Camille says, and he replies, "A bit"; Stephane is too reticent even to admit he's reticent. He may be a little in love with Camille -- "I like watching you talk," is all he says -- but his job is his passion. Stooped over a violin, he has a delicate, confident touch. Camille, watching him work, must wonder: How would these hands care for a woman? In search of a muse, she pursues him, and he retreats. Camille thinks he is hiding what he feels. She is wrong: he is hiding what he doesn't feel. Stephane is the man with the hibernating heart.

Auteuil's performance is heroically blank. He doesn't explain Stephane's emotional numbness, nor does he editorialize against it. He allows his lure for dear Camille to remain a mystery, like so many romantic attractions. But then Beart (Manon in Manon of the Spring, the painter's model in La Belle Noiseuse) is an actress of such extraordinary beauty that any time she falls in movie love she seems like a goddess slumming. Her radiant face is , therapeutic. A glance from her should thaw the frostiest heart.

Because it doesn't -- because the violin maker chooses wood over flesh -- Un Coeur en Hiver seems to take place inside Stephane; it is a story of a woman's passion, told with a man's disconcerting reticence. In an overheated Hollywood summer, this movie is a sorbet that goes straight to the heart. And once there, it has a chilling effect. It says that genteel talk can be the most hurtful obscenity.