In the early 1970s, Claude Sautet met Michel Piccoli. For a whole decade, the director filmed the actor in The Things of Life, Max and the Junkmen, Vincent, François, Paul and the Others, and finally Mado.

Sautet met Piccoli through the composer Philippe Sarde, who composed the music for most of his films. The director was impressed by Piccoli and the tension he exuded in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos, released in 1962. Sautet chose his actors according to what they embodied in life: Michel Piccoli’s natural, bourgeois elegance inspired him.

Busy depicting bourgeois sociology, the strength of female characters and the cracks in a masculinity that is losing its identity, Sautet relies on the wardrobe to give life to characters who are all restraint, incapable of expressing their feelings, of revealing themselves completely. Characters who hide under suits and felt hats, behind cigarettes.

THE THINGS OF LIFE (1970)

An architect who drives too fast and goes off track. There is his wife whom he has left, his son and the young Hélène with whom he finds it difficult to commit. And the Ile de Ré. He drives his Alpha Romeo Giulietta Sprint, visits his building sites, writes his break-up letter, always wearing the same grey flannel(English flannel, from Welsh gwlanen, wool) - fabric whipped suit over a light blue shirt with a French collar from Arnys, of which Sautet himself is a customer.

MAX AND THE JUNKMEN (1971)

A police inspector and former examining magistrate whose only obsession is the arrest of criminals. A perfect anti-hero, cold and procedural. Sautet mixes the uniforms of the policemen in Melville’s films with those of the Parisian bourgeois: black fedora, charcoal grey double-breasted suit and then a flannel suit with chalk stripesline or band more or less wide that marks a fabric when he pretends to be a banker.

VINCENT, FRANÇOIS, PAUL AND THE OTHERS (1974)

A doctor living in Paris, always dressed in an impeccable three-piece flannel suit, worn over a gendarme blue shirt with musketeer cuffs and gold cufflinks – whether in consultation or at the bar where he meets his friends. For (tense) Sunday meals with friends over a leg of lamb, a v-neck jumper with a tie.

MADO (1976)

A rich property developer who lives with Hélène but is seeing Mado, a prostitute. Ruined because of a corrupted partner. Blue suit and black silkflexible and resistant thread produced by the larva of vario knit tietie made of wool, cashmere or silk threads which are twisted; red silk knit tie and brown flannel jacket. Money comes back but the woman leaves.