Some films - and they are in the main Hollywood exports - are so easy to explain that they insult their audience (come on down, Mr Speilberg). Others weave a path for themselves so sensitive that, beyond the light of the projector, they almost cease to exist.

Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) is defiantly not a love story, despite being a menage a trois of sorts between the violin repairer Stephane (Daniel Auteuil), his business partner and old friend Maxime (Andre Dussolier), and Maxime's new love, the brilliant and beautiful young concert-player Camille (Emanuelle Beart). Over time she begins to respond to what she perceives as the diffident Stephane's interest in her, but with an eye to the unpredictable he bluntly rejects her advances, his reasoning remaining steadfastly guarded, despite the inevitable fracturing of his ties to Maxime.

70-year-old Sautet's twelfth feature is one built, then, not on action but atmospheres, and, even for a French film of its ilk, not even on the acting out of desires. Everything here is subtle, the performances are low-key to an extraordinary degree, there is no contrivance of plot, no explicit metaphor within the text. Against that there is a danger of the film becoming stand-offish, off-putting to a potential audience by its deliberate detachment from the overheated cinematic passions they have been educated to expect, but that is the dangerous game the film is prepared to play to reach something other.

The three principals are superb - Auteuil in particular a remote, taciturn man whose actions could be fed by a palpable shyness, a sense of loyalty to his friend, or through hints of a curious hunger for self-destructive denial. Beart (Auteuil's real life wife, and best known for her work with him in the art house biggie Jean de Florette and its sequel) is successfully the subject of both men's erotic hankerings while simultaneously preserving a slightly distant, manipulative edge.

Real emotional pull is leached into the film via extended moments of Beart's playing, indulging the director's lifelong fascination with Ravel, and used skilfully in much the same way that Krzysztof Kieslowski so successfully integrated film and music in The Double Life of Veronique.

By the end of this film, all three principles have been on a long, arduous and deceptively quiet journey; everything has been achieved through underplaying, well-placed silences, pregnant glances across rooms. There has been no real melodrama, no theatrics, and barely a raised voice throughout, but somewhere within these 100 minutes director Sautet has drawn real cinematic blood.