Showing Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (1967) to the Cinema Salon film club was one of the most agonized viewing experiences I've ever had, with its provocative aggravations hardly giving most of my audience an inviting introduction to one of my favorite directors. Yet I could have as easily made a case for it as apologized for it, and I was glad when some of the audience spoke up in favor. Later the same day, I watched two other of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” and confirmed that he is indeed engaging as well as persistently interesting, and now I’ve been on a binge of watching or re-watching every Rohmer film I could get my hands on.
The most excruciating scene of La Collectioneuse was certainly when the annoyingly pretentious artist Daniel persisted in mindlessly stamping his feet on the living room floor. The character was played by a real artist named Daniel and he no doubt considered his rudeness a conceptual performance piece, as painfully prolonged as many such are. While the discomfort of the scene might have seemed too mimetic, still one could see Rohmer doing interesting things within it, in the reactions of the other two characters, the man who smirks admiringly at this friend’s effrontery even while his own leg falls into the other’s rhythm, and the girl who determinedly moves to her own rhythm and gives a sensible if exasperated response. The whole film is there in miniature, if you can bear to watch.
But the thing is, Rohmer is usually easy on the eyes -- like Haydée in this film -- and if you pick up his rhythm, get on his wavelength, he is endlessly and seamlessly entertaining, yet continually thought-provoking. Like Ozu, he is a master who basically made one lifelong film, comprised of interlocking (and almost interchangeable) chapters. So here’s my brief take on a number of those chapters.
The “Moral Tales” I watched to get the taste of La Collectioneuse out of my mouth were Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972). Both were every bit as good as I remembered them to be, well establishing the Rohmer formula – a few attractive people in an attractive place, ruminating endlessly on the ambiguities of attraction. One person is pursuing another, but is distracted from pursuit by a third. Much rationalization -- and comic delusion of self and other – follows. The characters are specimens we observe with sympathetic amusement.
In My Night at Maud’s, the black & white setting is Clermont-Ferrand at Christmastime. That’s Pascal’s hometown, and the film revolves around the question of Pascal’s Wager, as Jean-Louis Trintignant pursues his “innocent” blond dreamgirl Marie-Christine Barrault, despite his attraction to dark-haired, worldly-wise divorcee Francoise Fabian. In Chloe in the Afternoon (as it was first released in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the Audrey Hepburn film), a stuffy Parisian businessman threatens his comfortably bourgeois marriage by taking up with an old bohemian flame. In Claire’s Knee (1970), which I’ve seen often enough not to need my memory refreshed, the setting is summer at a Swiss lake, where an engaged diplomat forms a fixation on a blond teenager’s lovely gam.
Beatrice Romand plays another teenager, a dark frizzy-haired foil to Claire, but grows up to return as the main character in Le Beau Marriage (1981), in Rohmer’s next series, “Comedies and Proverbs” (and will return again, as is Rohmer’s habit with actresses, as the delightfully difficult middle-aged seeker for love in An Autumn Tale in 1998). Here she’s a young woman who’s never had trouble attracting men, commuting between art studies in Paris and family home and job in the old section of Le Mans, when she decides arbitrarily to get married and suddenly encounters disappointment in her pursuit of a mate.
We return to a seaside summer in Pauline at the Beach (1983), with our first glimpse of the delightful Amanda Langlet as the 15-year-old title character, who follows the erotic escapades of her va-va-voom older cousin and begins to form her own attachments. As usual, Rohmer manages to find humor, pathos, and complication in his bikini-clad characters. Summer (Le Rayon Vert) (1986) features another difficult babe and Rohmer favorite, Marie Riviere, as she restlessly seeks a place to vacation and some sort of romantic companionship. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie) (1988) concludes the “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, back in a fancy new suburb of Paris, where young professional women try to find a mate and sort out their love lives, as usual charmingly complicated and fondly satirical.
Then Rohmer turned to his “Tales of Four Seasons,” beginning with A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) (1989), which follows a young Parisian philosophy teacher as she falls in with a younger girl and eventually her father, in another rondelay of hidden motive and sexual scheming. Amanda Langlet returns in A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été) (1996), again wise beyond her years as she waits for a young man to make up his mind, while he vacations on the Brittany seacoast waiting for his tardy girlfriend and encountering a hot chick, emulating the choice of Paris in selecting the fairest of the three. Scandalously unavailable in any video format, I remember An Autumn Tale (1998) most fondly of the tetralogy, for its winning reunion of Beatrice Romand and Marie Riviere, the former as a winemaker ripe for love amongst her beautiful vineyards. I don’t remember much about A Winter’s Tale (1991), except that it delivered the reliable, though ineffable, pleasures of any Rohmer film.
I recently reviewed Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2006), and then at last, I caught up with his penultimate film, Triple Agent (2004), which as a World War II spy saga seemed like an outlier in his oeuvre, but turned out to be quintessential Rohmer in its depiction of intimate deception of one’s self and the other. Based on a real case, the film examines a White Russian general living in France, who may be collaborating with the Nazis or the Russians, but is certainly deceiving his stay-at-home Greek painter wife, in Rohmer’s usual round of conversations filled with themes of loyalty and betrayal, trust and suspicion. Amanda Langlet reappears as the upstairs neighbor in this very interior drama.
These last two films complete another implicit cycle of Rohmer's work, which might be categorized to as historical stylizations. However different in setting and style, each essentially recapitulates all his obsessions, of romantic complications among attractive people, usually young. The Marquise of O (1976) adapts a Kleist novel into a beautifully chaste though passionate vision of domestic life during the Napoleonic wars. Perceval (1978) emulates a medieval pageant, on minimally unreal sets, to retell a tale of chivalry and knighthood amongst a group of lovely modern young people, especially notable for introducing Fabrice Luchini as the title character, humorously balanced between naiveté and nobility. The Lady and the Duke (2001) plays out an affecting story of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobility, against green-screened period paintings of interiors and exteriors, an effective innovation in historical recreation that surprisingly has not been much emulated.
So there in capsule form is the career of one of the greatest of all filmmakers. Dip in at any point, and enjoy!
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