This "elegant" French feature is about a winter-summer romance between a judge in his seventies (Michel Serraut) and a hot woman in her twenties (Emmanuelle Beart) who has just separated from his brutish, good-for-nothing, young husband (Charles Berling). He cancels her debts, pays her for her work as a sub par typist of his memoirs, and they go and dine in fancy restaurants in Paris where he spouts supposedly profound witticisms about life. This is really a sexual fantasy by the director (Claude Sautet who was about 70 when he filmed this and looked a lot like the white haired Serrault, surely not by chance) that young women in their twenties will still be attracted to men like him for their "mind", their "sophistication" and their "intelligence". "Sophisticated" French films of this sort were ridiculed by the New Wave in the 1960s as "films de qualite", the term quality of course being ironic. This was Sautet's last film.
Review of Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud
