The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Eric Rohmer's final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, is a charming, deeply felt ode to the follies and pleasures of devoted love, a fitting subject for this last statement from a director who always concerned himself with both the emotions and the philosophies of love. The film opens with some text that suggests Rohmer's unique approach to realism and fidelity to his sources. The film is adapted from a 17th Century romance set in 5th Century Gaul, so its sense of period realism is of course already at a remove: the denizens of one century imagining what the inhabitants of another thought and acted like, and then Rohmer enters the picture to imagine about those imaginings, at an even further remove. Even so, he acknowledges that unfortunately he had to change the setting of the story, since the Forez plain that served as the original story's setting is no longer as pastoral and serene as the story requires, having been overrun with "urban blight" in the intervening centuries. The text conveys Rohmer's regret at having to make these kinds of changes, necessary as they are in adapting a story that's so remote from the modern era. It's a sly introduction to a film that purposefully places itself in an alien time and place, with foreign customs and ways of thinking that seem absurd and goofy to modern sensibilities. The sense of distance allows Rohmer to remain true to the spirit of the old source while always maintaining his own modern perspective on the material.

The film is a love story between the two title characters, the shepherdess Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour) and her lover Celadon (Andy Gillet). Theirs is a Romeo and Juliet-style forbidden love, since their families have long quarreled over a trivial slight from the past. In order to disguise their affair, Astrea tells Celadon to pretend to be in love with another girl, but, due to his strong sense of duty and obedience, he pretends too well and causes Astrea to reject him in a fit of jealousy. He tries to kill himself, apparently succeeds, and is washed up in a land down the river, ruled over by nymphs and druids. This basic scenario prompts a convoluted series of misunderstandings and ruses that keep the lovers separated for the remainder of the film, with Astrea believing her beloved to be dead and Celadon refusing to return to her due to his strict adherence to his code of love. She told him never to come near her again, and though she now desperately wishes he were back with her, alive, he remains true to her final words to him.

Rohmer portrays love as a folly and a madness, a delirious devotion to a pure and impossible ideal. Much of the film is devoted to philosophical debates about love and religion. Celadon's brother Lycidas (Jocelyn Quivrin) represents the side of love and devotion in rhetorical battles with the lascivious singer Hylas (Rodolphe Pauly), who represents promiscuity and lust. In these discussions, Lycidas comes across as cool and collected, a rational proponent of love with his wife smiling sweetly by his side in mute agreement. Hylas, for his part, seems half-mad and wild-eyed, a Dionysian figure of lust and pleasure, his mouth constantly twisted into a sneer and his eyes popping with exaggerated desire. At the same time, Hylas' skepticism seems founded when Lycidas says that one who's in love literally becomes his beloved. Even the most cool-headed love, like the seemingly ideal relationship between Lycidas and his wife, contains an element of irrationality, a gap over which one must make a leap of faith without questioning or trying to understand the ineffable. The romance between Astrea and Celadon combines the stolid devotion of Lycidas with the mad lust of Hylas, and Rohmer suggests that perhaps this madness, which seems so absurd and even silly, is true love.


Indeed, the film's plot grows increasingly wild with each new wrinkle. In the final act, Celadon impersonates a girl, the daughter of a druid (Serge Renko), in order to remain close to his beloved without revealing his identity to her. The premise is fundamentally absurd, and must have seemed so even on the page, but when it's actually enacted and visualized it becomes a hysterical farce. Celadon, for all the talk of how pretty he is and how girlish he looks, is thoroughly unconvincing when disguised as a girl. The druid even explicitly says that he has a herb that will hide Celadon's beard — but then, in the subsequent scenes where he appears as a girl, he has a prominent five o'clock shadow that can't be missed. It's yet another example of the sly wit of Rohmer's literary adaptations: he remains fanatically true to the letter of his source even when the result onscreen is silly and hilarious, even when his images directly contradict the text. Perhaps this is a metaphor for love itself. Rohmer's devotion to his text risks absurdity even as the lover does in professing his adoration for his beloved, remaining true to strict codes of behavior that have meaning, if at all, only for him and his love. True love, in this film, creates its own world and its own rules, as remote from ordinary reality as this film seems from the present world.

Rohmer explicitly links this mad devotion to religion and spirituality, which abut romance throughout the film. The gods of the film are Roman gods, but the conversations between Celadon and the druid, which center around whether there are many gods or a single god with many aspects, obviously refer to Christianity without naming it as such. At one point, the druid, having tried to explain some of the "mysteries" of his faith, such as the division of a single god into several secondary aspects and the birth of one aspect of god from a human virgin, finally looks to heaven and declares that he can say no more, lest he taint the mystery. In a nice, subtle touch, Celadon's eyes follow the druid's towards the top of the frame, as though trying to see what the holy man sees above them. Love and religion are the twin "mysteries" of the film, the twin madnesses that possess human beings and make them behave in ways that may seem absurd or illogical or out-of-touch with the world. Thus, though the film's final act — in which a comical, "lesbian" desire develops between Astrea and Celadon, apparently without the former realizing that the latter is actually her lost (male) lover — can only be described as a farce, it's a farce with real feeling animating these unbelievable actions and contrivances.

Rohmer was always concerned with characters who stuck to rigid codes, embodied in the conflicted Catholic moralism of My Night At Maud's or the idealistic search for an abstractly "perfect" love in films like The Green Ray or A Winter's Tale. It's fitting that Rohmer ended his career with The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, since this film presents a vision of that kind of philosophical purity taken to its (il)logical extreme. Its pastoral beauty provides a languid setting for these musings on love, especially in an interlude where Celadon wanders through the forest, singing about his love as images of natural splendor fade into idealized images of Astrea smiling sweetly, flirting with the camera. This is a film that pays tribute to youth and beauty, to those who madly pursue ideals rather than settling for the more accessible pleasures that the world has to offer. It is a sublimely goofy film, and it's not the least bit ashamed of it.

The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque

Eric Rohmer's The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque is a charming country film, a kind of political romance centering on a rural mayor's plans to build a comprehensive cultural center in a small rural town with a declining agricultural tradition. The mayor, Julien (Pascal Greggory), is a socialist who believes that his bold plan for a big center combining a theater, a cinema, a sports complex and a library will revitalize the countryside. Not everyone agrees, from his novelist girlfriend Bérénice (Arielle Dombasle), who's skeptical of the project's ambition to be modern while blending into the country, to the local schoolteacher Rossignol (Fabrice Luchini), who's mortified by the project's prospective erasure of a whole tract of beautiful green land. The film consists largely of a series of conversations, between these characters and others, that become debates on the oppositions of right and left, city and country, progress and conservation, tradition and modernity.

Julien's project, his grand ambition to reshape the country, is posed as a leftist idea, as a way to invigorate a countryside that's been decimated by the changes of industrial agriculture — the few small farms left are struggling and it's obvious that many more will have disappeared within a few more years. Thus Julien can position the ecologists, the nature-lovers and conservationists, as "reactionaries" in his political vocabulary: the left wants to develop the country, to institute progress, while the right gets hung up on a few trees that would be uprooted, a few picturesque views that might be tarnished. It's a neat reversal, one that illustrates just how fluid the definitions of right and left can be, and how inadequate such dialectics can be for encompassing the complexity of real politics. The magazine editor Régis (François-Marie Banier) and his reporter Blandine (Clémentine Amouroux) also identify as leftists, but they have very different visions of this leftism from one another and from Julien. Régis is a political dogmatist who seems to think in terms of taking sides, and thus looks on Julien's local politics as a distraction from the broader theoretical dialectics that define political philosophy on a national scale. Blandine, on the other hand, keeps her own opinions largely to herself, arguing first one way then another, a true journalist who seeks to clarify and identify the views of others.

These conversations circle around the same issues again and again, using this small local issue as a focal point for discussions that are often very dense and theoretical but never dry. There's something charming, even playful, in the film's endless dialogues. In the early scenes, Julien walks around his garden estate with Bérénice, explaining his project to her as they examine the plants, flowers and vegetables growing on his expansive grounds. The two are talking about abstract and political issues, debating the importance of the proposed cultural center and quibbling over the authenticity of a modern building that would be styled to blend in with the aged local architecture, even appropriating stones from disused local buildings. Their conversation is thus impersonal and political, at least on the surface, but the way they talk to one another is flirtatious and charming, as though they're courting one another through talk that seemingly has nothing to do with romance or love. The quick-witted repartee is fluid and spontaneous, establishing the comfort of these lovers with one another and their intense interest in one another: they're talking about rural development and local electoral politics, but the subtext is much more personal.


Just how personal is revealed in Bérénice's references to the beach: "I don't do anything at the beach either, but I don't get bored there." Sure, because for Rohmer the beach is the site of sexual intrigues, of dalliances, of fleeting loves and summer romances — the territory of Pauline at the Beach or the sensual opening of A Winter's Tale. Of course, Dombasle herself was a star of Pauline at the Beach, and Greggory was in the film too, so the reference seems especially self-conscious, an acknowledgment that, as in many of Rohmer's films, these particular actors have been chosen for the continuity they provide with the director's previous work. The rural paradise of this film is thus connected to the seaside retreats of past films, and these characters who charmingly chat about politics are associated with other Rohmer heroes and heroines who were more overtly concerned with love and sex.

Rohmer also uses the landscape itself as a counterpoint to all these words. Julien can be very eloquent about the appeal of his project, very convincing, but his vision of reinvigorating the countryside is continually belied by the vigor all around him. The beauty of the country, its peace and warmth, seems to be mocking his belief that anything further is needed. The early scenes when Julien walks around the garden with Bérénice are especially bucolic and lovely, but the whole film is an ode to greenery and lushness, as the bright hues of the countryside provide an evocative backdrop to the characters' perambulations. It's as though the landscape is conspiring to subtly support the perspective of Rossignol, with his passionate, verbose defenses of unspoiled natural beauty. (Luchini, another Rohmer veteran, delivers a lively performance as the schoolteacher with an activist's angry conviction and a defeatist's pessimism.)

By the end of the film, it's obvious that Rohmer is having a bit of fun at the expense of political conviction itself, suggesting that "the people" about whom everyone purports to care so much will just continue to make their own way through life while grand political ambitions thrive or fail with little concrete impact. Julien is pompous and loves to hear himself talk, and a big part of his project is certainly the feeding of his own ego. Rohmer absolutely demolishes the character in a scene where he stomps back and forth, delivering a grandstanding political oratory to a ten-year-old girl who has just thoroughly out-argued the politician. But Rohmer doesn't eliminate the character's appeal; Julien is at least refreshingly unconcerned with being the "right" kind of socialist or politician, an issue that concerns the much more dogmatic Régis a great deal.


That dogmatism is a leftover of the sectarian squabbling of '60s leftists, even though Régis himself castigates that very mentality. At one point, Régis makes reference to the "totalitarianism" and Maoism of 1968, which seems to be a bit of a jab at Godard and the other New Wave filmmakers and youths who fully embraced the radicalism of that era. It's also an acknowledgment that all extremism — all idealism, perhaps — is ultimately totalitarian to the extent that one wants to impress one's own vision of the world onto others. Everyone in the film keeps arguing for their own way of thinking, their own perspective, based on their relative weightings of the values they hold dearest, without pausing for a moment to consider other ways of thinking, other possibilities.

That's why it's so refreshing when Blandine, gathering material for a story on Julien's project, doesn't just talk to Julien and Rossignol, but wanders around the rest of the village, talking to farmers and local residents, asking them questions that are more theoretical than directly about the project itself. It turns out that people have their little dissatisfactions and their big problems, that they have some small ways they could imagine improving things, that they're as stumped as the politicians about the big issues, and that none of these people align neatly with the clichés imposed upon them from outside. After all the circular debate and philosophical blather of Julien and Rossignol and Régis, it's great to hear real people talk about their real lives, and these sequences have the quality of a documentary interlude spliced into the fictional film. The locals provide an alternate perspective to the more dogmatic competing ideologies of "progress" and "ecology" represented by Julien and Rossignol, respectively. The women, too, provide a counterpoint to the men, as both Bérénice and Blandine play the role of "devil's advocate," the latter quite literally in her role as a reporter asking questions, and the former more subtly as she deflates Julien's ambitions with deliberate provocations while playing the part of the unapologetic urban woman of the world.

The film ends with what's basically a shrug, as the project falls through and country life returns to normal. The finale takes place at a park where the locals are holding a community fair, everyone picnicking and having fun, children running around, playing games, the beauty of nature surrounding them all. In the midst of this idyll, all that's left for the principal characters to do is to sing, to face the camera in some of the film's very first closeups, brazenly breaking the fourth wall as they narrate this saga's disappointments and lessons in song. It's a wonderfully unexpected finale, playful and flippant, but also so very wise. Sometimes, it's far better to cast all the politics aside, to play in the meadows and sing. At the end of the film, these characters put aside their debates and their rhetoric and allow themselves to be seduced by the sensual pleasures that had been wrapped around them, verdant and ripe, throughout the film.

Rendezvous In Paris

Rendezvous In Paris is one of Eric Rohmer's episodic films, like his sadly unknown 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. This is a triptych of three stories set in Paris, with the concept of the rendezvous as the driving force and structural foundation of all three. The three stories concern two-timers and cheaters, and revolve around O. Henryesque ironies and coincidences, the stories marked by cute twists and wry reversals that mask the more quietly emotional subcurrents running through all three tales. These are simple, even stereotypical stories — one girl discovers her boyfriend is cheating, another cheats on her boyfriend with an older man, and a painter clumsily juggles two women who aren't interested in him — told with the directness and playfulness that Rohmer typically brings to his work. It is a light film, even minor, in the context of Rohmer's career as a whole, but its simplicity is also a virtue. The dialogue, as usual in Rohmer, is refreshingly open and eloquent: Rohmer's characters don't always say what they mean, or even know what they mean, but they always speak in ways that reveal their souls, whether intentionally or not. Rohmer seems to have a profound belief in the power of talk, even when it's idle banter or lies.

In the first of the film's three stories, Esther (Clara Bellar) becomes obsessed with the idea, mentioned in passing by an admirer, that her boyfriend Horace (Antoine Basler) is seeing another girl on the side. The rendezvous here is an idée fixe for Esther: she's told that Horace meets another girl at a certain café at 7:00 on the evenings when he's not with Esther. After introducing this structuring idea, Rohmer allows the plot to meander along, with Esther's obsession with this supposed meeting always percolating subtly in the background. She tries to study for a test, confesses her worries to a friend, and then indulges a playful flirtation with a man (Mathias Mégard) she meets in an outdoor market, and all the while she's thinking about Horace's supposed meeting with another girl.

The scene where Esther flirts in the marketplace is a masterful piece of staging. As Esther walks along in the foreground of the shot, turning her head this way and that to look at the various stalls in the market, the man trails along behind her, telling her that he has a dentist's appointment and wants to pass some pleasurable time with her beforehand. Rohmer's camera drifts along with the pair as they walk, capturing the delicate struggle between them as the man flirts and tries to charm her, while she maintains a pose of faux-aloofness, pretending to be absorbed by the sights of the market around her, hardly ever even looking directly at the man who's strolling just behind her. It's a game, and a fun game to watch, this jockeying for position within the frame, this struggle to get the upper hand in a game of romance and flirtation. Rohmer captures the little details — Esther's studied air of casualness offset by a charmingly genuine smile, the way she keeps subtly cutting off her would-be suitor, preventing him from walking exactly next to her — that characterize these games between men and women, the games that are the subject of so many of Rohmer's films.

The games continue as Esther sets a fake date for the same café that Horace is rumored to frequent, a date she really has no intention of keeping. But when her wallet is stolen and then returned by a stranger named Aricie (Judith Chancel), who also has a date at that same café, it becomes obvious that Esther is meant to be at that meeting at 7:00, just as it becomes obvious to the audience what the ironic twist is going to be. The denouement is no less delightful for its obviousness and contrivance, though. It's a cutesy twist, a pat irony, but Rohmer uses it as a way of probing how the seemingly light games that men and women play with each other in love disguise deeper reservoirs of feeling. Esther plays off her confrontation with Horace as a game at first, acting as though she doesn't know him, letting herself be introduced as an old friend by Aricie, hiding bits of coded malice in her superficially playful patter. But it's obvious how much she's hurt, how shaken she is by this betrayal, and finally she can't hide behind the games anymore, and storms away. It's fitting that the final irony is also hurtful: she leaves without fulfilling her date with the man from the market, who shows up just after the drama has played out, looking around expectantly and hesitantly, already fearing the disappointment of the girl not showing up. These games of love, Rohmer suggests, are not the laughing matter that we sometimes pretend they are.


The middle story of this triptych also deals with unfaithful lovers, although from the opposite perspective: a woman (Aurore Rauscher) meets with a somewhat older man (Serge Renko) in parks around Paris, cheating on a longtime boyfriend who she almost thinks of as her husband. Rohmer's sense of geography, his attention to the nuances of place, is on full display here, as the two lovers meet in one park after another, always searching for novelty and "poetry" as they get to know one another and try to negotiate their clandestine relationship. They always meet in public, because the woman doesn't want to risk going too far by visiting his apartment, and as a result their relationship exists only in public, in parks where they walk with arms wrapped around each other, or kiss on benches in secluded areas, or playfully trot from place to place. Their conversation is at times banal, just idle chit-chat, at times touching on the deeper issues of love and intimacy that concern their relationship and the woman's continuing but increasingly loveless relationship with her other boyfriend.

The two lovers are unnamed, credited only as "elle" and "lui," suggesting that they are archetypes, paradigms of the dueling negotiations between men and women as they try to form relationships. They lie to one another, in small ways, telling each other conflicting stories about their desires and their feelings, never quite forming a solid bond: she's leading him on, keeping him at a distance, while he wants more but seems disappointed when she finally offers it. It's as though their relationship is perfect within the limited confines they set for it, and outside of that narrow purview it will inevitably collapse. As they slowly work towards discovering this truth, Rohmer revels in the beauty of the Parisian parks they visit, surrounding these hesitant lovers in rich, vibrant green hues that seem to enfold them at first, and which are increasingly replaced by bare trees and paths strewn with browning leaves as fall leads into the winter chill. Rohmer has always had a great feel for the seasons, around which he built a four-film series late in his career, and here he manages to film the chilly air, the coldness that makes these lovers want to cuddle closer on damp benches.

In the end, for their last tryst, the lovers play at being tourists in Paris, pretending that they've arrived for a sightseeing trip, and the metaphor of tourism in a subtle way comments on their own relationship. There's a sense of the temporary, of the scenic and superficial, in this relationship that exists only in parks. The ending is another ironic twist worthy of O. Henry, but as in the first segment, it's also an opportunity for the playfulness and games to give way to stark honesty. The woman, dropping her tourist act and dropping, too, the flirty charm with which she'd strung along her lover, finally tells him her true feelings, in blunt and painfully honest terms. It's yet another reminder that the charm and surface lightness of much of Rohmer's work can be deceptive, that the emotions at stake in these seemingly trifling stories can in fact be quite profound.


The third and final segment of Rendezvous In Paris, though, concerns much more frivolous and transient relationships than the more enduring ones in the first two stories. A painter (Michael Kraft) gets a visit from a friend of a friend, a Swedish woman (Veronika Johansson) who's visiting Paris and needs someone to show her around. He's not too interested in her, and she seems indifferent to him, and he takes her to a museum where he becomes fascinated by another woman (Bénédicte Loyen), who turns out to be married. There's a more subtle irony at work in this story than in the first two, with their broadly telegraphed twist endings. Throughout this story, the painter uses his work as an excuse, as a pretext, as a prop for conversation: when he doesn't want to do something, he says he's engaged in painting, and when he wants to impress a girl he talks about painting, pompously lecturing on form and color and history to seem intelligent. He's kind of a fraud and an arrogant jerk, like so many of Rohmer's male protagonists, absorbed in himself and so insecure as an artist that his art hardly seems as important to him as meeting girls. The irony arises because, at the end of the film, having passed an afternoon with the married girl who makes it clear that she's not interested, and having been stood up by the Swedish girl who he'd earlier intended to stand up himself, he's finally left alone with his painting, and the events of the day send him off in a new and potentially fruitful direction, injecting some life and vigor into his previously dull work.

This is, perhaps, another not-so-complex ironic twist, if a more subtly communicated one than in the first two segments. But it's Rohmer's sensitivity and wit that allows this point to resonate, as he patiently observes this cad at work and play. "I thought you were an artist, not a pick-up artist," the newly married girl observes wryly as he trots along behind her, much as the stranger in the market had behind Esther in the film's first segment. Like Esther, she seems playfully receptive, committed to her new husband but not so much that she won't indulge in a little harmless banter with this stranger, and even visit his apartment to see his paintings. And as in the first segment, Rohmer's fluency with body language is compelling to watch: the conversation in the painter's studio is a study in distance and intimacy, as the two slowly drift together only for her to abruptly break away, shattering the intimacy that occasionally threatens to develop between them. Their conversation, about art and the importance of searching for one's aesthetic, is a kind of mask for their innocent flirtation, but it's also the first time in the film, one senses, that when the painter talks about his art, he's doing so genuinely, rather than using his painting as an excuse or a tool or a symbol for his identity.

This kind of multi-leveled conversation, where surface meanings and subtexts intertwine and words are both revealing and deceptive, is typical of Rohmer. Even in such a simple, essentially light-hearted film, with its jaunty illustrated titles and interludes of street singers to introduce each tale, Rohmer is dealing with complicated emotions, with the question of how we discover what's important to us and what we want from our lives and relationships. This is, as with so many of the films Rohmer made in his later career, a youthful film made by an older man, with its cute young actresses and handsome leading men, their vibrancy and vitality bringing Rohmer's agile dialogue to exciting life. It's a fun film where even its humor and its playfulness contribute to its deeper themes.

The Sign of Leo

Eric Rohmer's debut film, The Sign of Leo, is very different from the films Rohmer would later become known for. The director who would soon enough be acclaimed for his philosophical examinations of love and morality, with protagonists constantly talking, talking, talking, debuted with a film that contains only traces of his later style. His protagonist, the transplanted American Pierre Wesselrin (Jess Hahn), is not prone to self-analysis and philosophical inquiry as later Rohmer heroes and heroines would almost invariably be. Pierre is blustery and boisterous, a hard-living man always on the edge of poverty, relying on the generosity of his friends to keep him afloat as he stumbles through life, drinking and partying. When he learns that he's acquired an inheritance from a rich aunt, he arranges a lavish party to celebrate, liberally borrowing money and uncaring that he's getting kicked out of his apartment, thinking he's wonderfully lucky. But the inheritance doesn't come through after all, and Pierre finds himself suddenly adrift in Paris, without a home, with all his old friends either away or dodging him, as his constant need for money begins to wear on them.

The film is aesthetically quite distinct from Rohmer's later work. Its rough, realistic portrait of Paris' streets seems descended from the work of Rohmer's idol Jean Renoir, particularly the downtrodden hero, who's a more melancholy variant on Renoir's Boudu. Much of the film is dedicated to following Pierre as he wanders around Paris, trying to find friends, moving from one hotel to the next, gradually losing or squandering all his possessions, becoming increasingly desperate from one luckless day to the next. Unlike in later films, when Rohmer would forsake non-diegetic music, much of these wanderings are set to a constant soundtrack of violin music, a mournful accompaniment to Pierre's desperation. For a director who would later turn his attention almost exclusively to the materially comfortable middle and upper classes and their romantic travails, Rohmer here has a sharp eye for the details of poverty and deprivation. The mostly dialogue-free scenes of Pierre on the streets are very perceptively observed: Pierre watching as a pair of bums are humiliated while begging at a café; Pierre listening in on the casual chatter of people who don't have to worry about food or money in any real way; Pierre trying to shoplift from a market and getting beaten up. It's harrowing and stark, and has few parallels in Rohmer's later work; the ostentatious mood-setting music is the opposite of what Rohmer would strive for in later films, while the near-total lack of dialogue is a stark contrast to Rohmer's later commitment to probing character through what's said, and not said, in the midst of their inevitable searches for love.

Love, of course, is far from Pierre's mind, and his girlfriend Cathy (Jill Olivier) disappears from the film without ceremony after the opening party segment. The film shows how luxuries like love are stripped away when life is reduced to a certain baseline level, where food, money and shelter are the primary concerns. Pierre's disintegration is heartrending, and to some extent it's so affecting precisely because it's contrasted against the usual Rohmerian milieu glimpsed at the beginning of the film, in which love affairs are the most important problems facing these characters. The party scene provides the foundation for the rest of the film, for Pierre's fall. He's a musician, playing the violin at the party but unable to complete his composition, and the piece he plays here will be repeated throughout the film, a motif that continually evokes the moment when Pierre thought he was on top of the world, before it all came crashing down on him. The music, though uncharacteristically direct in its emotional shadings for Rohmer, is used inventively, appearing sporadically in the diegesis as well as separately on the soundtrack. At the party, Rohmer's New Wave colleague Jean-Luc Godard makes an appearance as a silent partygoer who camps out next to the record player, obsessively looping a record of classical music so it keeps playing the same segment over and over again; his careful, ritualistic gestures have the quality of comic mime. Later, music will appear on radios, or played by bums on the street, and then be taken up on the soundtrack as Pierre makes his lonely treks around Paris.


The soundtrack is also notable for the way it makes dialogue an incidental element, fading in and out as Pierre wanders silently by groups of chatting friends and young people out enjoying the summer weather. Trapped in his misery and isolation, to Pierre these people sound shallow and shrill in their happiness. At one point, he mocks a pair of young girls derisively, mimicking their excited talk with chirping noises. Several times, Pierre sits on a bench and listens to the unconcerned talk of the people nearby, who can afford to be cavalier about money and food, who have petty troubles like bosses, medical benefits, travel expenses, where to go for vacation. He passes two lovers by the riverside who are kissing and feeding one another, and it looks decadent, sensual, lurid to the starved Pierre.

Finally, after some time on the streets, Pierre takes up with another bum (Jean Le Poulain), whose comic antics bring some life back into the film but also further Pierre's humiliation, making him a street performer, an unwilling sidekick in the bum's theatrical begging routine. The bum wheels Pierre through the streets in a wheelbarrow and performs opera in haphazard drag, and his revelry is like an absurd parody of Pierre's enthusiasm at the beginning of the film, his celebration and sense of play. Again, the film seems to be nodding to Michel Simon as Boudu, the bold comic type, the clown, outrageous and confrontational, shameless in his degeneracy.

The film goes through several distinct modes, then, the styles of its disparate sections deliberately clashing against one another: there's the broad introductory party, then the increasingly stark and neorealist segment of Pierre wandering the streets, which gives way to a more comic sensibility when the performing bum is introduced. This sets the stage for the rather pat and unconvincing ending, in which Pierre is abruptly whisked away from his desolate life on the streets by the return of his friends Jean-François (Van Doude) and Dominique (Michèle Girardon who, interestingly, bridges the gap between the French New Wave and their American hero Howard Hawks; a few years later Girardon would appear in Hawks' Hatari!). The film's ending suggests that the poverty and desperation of the middle section could be overcome by luck, by stumbling unwittingly into fortune, and it has the effect of making Pierre's bleak period seem like merely a bad dream, forgotten in the morning. Seen as an introduction to the rest of Rohmer's career, it's as though he's dispensing with the treatment of the lower classes by having his hero descend into poverty only to be rescued from it as in a fairy tale; from then on, there'd be little enough trace of class consciousness in Rohmer's films. Not that there needed to be, of course; there have been few better documenters of romantic questing and moral/philosophical introspection than Rohmer, who truly found his subject once he began probing the inner lives of the middle class. This first film, then, is interesting as an anomaly, as a sign of what might've been, in which Rohmer is still working through the influence of Renoir, perhaps grappling a bit with neorealism as well. What's present already, in this first film, is the director's strong eye for detail, his feel for building character through setting and gesture, and above all, his deep love of people, with all their foibles and troubles, all their failings and idiosyncrasies.

4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle

The title characters of Eric Rohmer's 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle can be seen as Rohmer's incarnation of his New Wave contemporary Rivette's Celine and Julie. Reinette (Joëlle Miguel) and Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) are, in fact, the Celine and Julie of the mundane. Their "adventures," divided into four segments as the title suggests, are not fantastical or magical, as in Rivette's film, but prosaic. If Rivette's film is all about wonder and fiction, about playing games and going to the cinema to experience (and manipulate) stories, Rohmer's film is about the more ordinary adventure of forming and keeping friendships. In the first of the film's four segments, Reinette, a painter living alone in the country for the summer, first meets Mirabelle, a student from the city whose bike has a flat. Reinette repairs the flat and the two girls slowly become friends as they spend the next several days at Reinette's rustic home. While there, Mirabelle learns about farming and country living, and the girls try to wake up just in time for the so-called "blue hour," the single moment every morning when there is total silence. This conceit, in which the natural world provides nearly spiritual catharsis, is reminiscent of the driving force behind The Green Ray, in which the heroine's romantic quest is symbolized by the desire to glimpse a fleeting phenomenon that sometimes occurs just at sunset.

Although Rohmer transcribes the basic set-up of Celine and Julie Go Boating from the mystical territory of Rivette's film, Rohmer does preserve the sense of charm and humor that characterized his obvious influence. His heroines are bright, pretty young girls whose adventures are always light-hearted and marked by a sense of fun and playfulness, and above all by an openness to the possibilities that present themselves. Each of these four segments revolves around a new set of ideas, a new set of opportunities for these girls to interact with one another and the world around them in ways that reveal and explore their conflicting moral perspectives and priorities. Rohmer is examining the ways in which, from a common bond of friendship and affection, these new friends probe their different outlooks on life and morality. It's a typical Rohmer subject, starting from the dawning of a friendship and then revealing, in one incident after another, just how different these girls actually are in how they think about the world and each other.


In the film's second segment, Reinette has taken Mirabelle up on the latter's offer to come to Paris as her roommate while Reinette enrolls in art classes. It's the film's most straightforwardly comic segment, as Reinette has to deal with a rude waiter (Philippe Laudenbach) whose patter and arbitrary restrictions are absurd and frustrating. Reinette tries to pay him, but she only has a large bill that he insists he can't break — and since she doesn't have anything smaller, he treats her as though she's unable to pay, trying to stiff him, and even suggests that she was the same girl who had run out on him without paying on a previous day. This is especially maddening to Reinette, because as it emerges throughout the film, one of the principal differences between her and Mirabelle is the two girls' respective attitudes towards regulation, justice and order. Reinette seems to believe, implicitly and unquestioningly, in the rightness of the law; she believes that bad acts will/should be punished and that goodness will be rewarded, and that the rules should always be followed. Mirabelle, on the other hand, is more of a free spirit, unconstrained by such restrictions and aware that the world is often unfair, that Reinette's clichéd certainties don't always pan out. Lacking her friend's faith in justice and rules, she doesn't feel that same obligation to law and order. So while this is a genuine dilemma for Reinette, once Mirabelle arrives, the answer seems simple to her: the waiter is a jerk, so the girls take off, with Mirabelle in the lead dragging her friend along.

This theme, the subtext in this comic tale about the waiter, comes to the fore in the third segment, in which the two girls encounter panhandlers, swindlers and a kleptomaniac. These incidents provide the friends with an opportunity to discuss doing good, punishing bad, and the proper way to deal with breaking the rules. The central incident of the story is Mirabelle's observation of a shoplifter (Yasmine Haury) at a local market. Rohmer takes an interesting approach to this incident, first showing it in a wordless sequence as Mirabelle follows the shoplifter and the two store security personnel (cameos by filmmaker Gérard Courant and Rohmer favorite Béatrice Romand) who are keeping an eye on her. It's wonderfully staged, with a keen sense of comic timing as the shoplifter is trailed by the store guards who are in turn trailed by the curious Mirabelle, all three groups walking across the frame in sequence through the market's aisles. Mirabelle then recounts the whole story to Reinette — including the part where she cleverly helped the shoplifter get out of the store without getting caught, although she was then unable to give the woman back her ill-gotten goods. The scene essentially plays out twice, once visually and once in words, so that Rohmer can show the reactions of Mirabelle (bemused) and Reinette (horrified) to this anecdote.

Basically, the shoplifter's tale provides an opportunity for Reinette to discourse on right and wrong; she can't comprehend why Mirabelle would intervene like that to help a woman get away with stealing. Later, her outrage finds another outlet when she misses her train and winds up hanging around the train station for an afternoon, observing the swindlers and panhandlers doing their work. Ironically, Reinette herself is placed in the same position, since she needs change to make a phone call, but she doesn't seem to realize that she's doing the same thing these beggars are doing, asking strangers for money. Then she accosts a swindler (played by Rohmer regular Marie Rivière) who's giving passers-by a story about having her purse stolen. Here, Reinette's abstract morals are confronted with a reality more complicated than she'd expected: the swindler breaks down and cries about her troubled life and her desperate need for money, shaming Reinette out of her comfortable moral superiority.


The final segment continues this emphasis on economics and the struggle for money, as Reinette tries to sell one of her paintings, hampered by her rash bet that she can maintain a vow of silence for an entire day. Class is one unspoken subtext running through the film, actually, even though of all the French New Wave greats Rohmer is often thought of as the filmmaker least concerned with such socio-political matters. But in this fourth section Reinette is struggling to make her rent, afraid that she'll have to go back to the country since she's unable to make a living in Paris. Instead, she goes to see a pompous art dealer (Perceval le Gallois star Fabrice Luchini) who spits out so much overly analytical nonsense about her painting that, at first, he doesn't even realize that she's not talking. Nevertheless, he's the one in the position of power, and only the intervention of Mirabelle, rebellious as ever, is able to destabilize things and switch the upper hand to the younger, less financially secure girls. (The film's final line, then, is a wryly ironic reminder that even this small victory has no real impact on the capitalist, who ultimately retains his power and his profit.)

This is an especially rich film, with a wealth of substance and depth in the way it explores a burgeoning relationship and all the moral, political and philosophical ideas that flow between these two intellectually curious and lively friends. Rohmer focuses on his titular heroines in a playful way, reflected in the primary colors that flow through the film, often in the girls' clothes — most often bright red and blue — and the striking static compositions. The film's visual aesthetic shifts from the warm natural palette of the opening scenes, with fields of tall grass swaying in the wind and thin veils of drizzling rain, to the more minimalist austerity of the city, where the girls, in their simply colored outfits, are often set off from the bare white walls of their apartment. Above all, the film is a quiet delight, possessing a more directly humorous sensibility than Rohmer usually displays. Several scenes here play out as skits, especially Mirabelle's final showdown with the art dealer, in which she overpowers him with the sheer profusion of her chatter. That's a distinctly Rohmerian ending, if nothing else: victory is achieved through an excess of talk, even if the film as a whole is equally defined by its quieter, more graceful moments.

The Lady and the Duke

The Lady and the Duke is one of Eric Rohmer's atypical ventures into historical drama. The interesting thing about Rohmer's period films — like the theatrical, literary Perceval le Gallois or The Marquise of O... — is that they are generally far more overtly stylized and deconstructive than the modern romantic comedies for which he is known. It is as though the distance of the past, the abstraction of history, allows Rohmer the license to filter these events through extreme visual and aesthetic systems. In this film, he interprets the past specifically through the lens of its paintings. The film is set during the French Revolution, and Rohmer captures the feel of this era by digitally combining his sets and actors with paintings layered into the background. The effect is startling and strangely haunting. During the film's opening, onscreen text establishes the setting and the basic history of the revolution, while Rohmer collages together various paintings from the era. After this introduction, several of the paintings repeat, but this time the people within the paintings begin to move. Crowd scenes come to life, bustling with activity, moving within this static world. When Rohmer cuts to closeups, the texture of the brushstrokes within these canvases is even visible, reminders of the artificiality of his aesthetic.

Although the film's aesthetic and historical period sets it apart from much of Rohmer's other work, like his other films it is driven by talk, and by the ideological, philosophical and emotional undercurrents obscured by and encoded within this talk. The film focuses on the Scottish emigré Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a bold woman who was the mistress of many powerful men and who was brought to France prior to the Revolution by the older Duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). She was his lover and, after their relationship ended, remained his friend and outspoken confidante, advising him about politics as the Duke became entangled in the Revolution. Even though Grace is a devout royalist, loyal to the King, while the Duke joins the Jacobins' revolt, they remain close even as things get worse and worse all around them.

At the heart of the film is, as usual with Rohmer, a moral inquiry. It's all about conscience and the willingness to acquiesce or go along with social horrors. The Duke is a weak-willed, basically foolish man, easily manipulated and convinced of his own rightness even when all evidence begins to pile up to the contrary. Despite his aristocratic status, he supports the Jacobins out of an idealistic belief that the common people of the country deserve equality and liberty that isn't offered to them under a monarchy. Even though King Louis XV is his cousin, the Duke opposes the monarchy and rallies behind the revolutionaries. In multiple visits with Grace, they argue about the politics of the time, and she attempts, mostly in vain, to convince him that the brutality and violence of the Revolution is not justified by his ideals, however well-intentioned they might be. Grace is a fearless and principled woman, unafraid to speak her mind even as her opinions become unpopular and even treasonous. While everyone around her tries to keep their opinions in check, maintaining the rules of decorum and tradition as though they were still living in polite society, Grace alone seems to understand how important it is to speak out, to try to sway the opinions of those who support the Jacobins even as they're shocked by the violence committed in the name of the Revolution. Grace preserves her nobility and class, and her status, but is too much of a determined, intelligent woman to play the role of the "good citizen."


Of course, the irony of the film's recurring dialogue about being a "good citizen" is that citizenship in this society requires a willingness to tacitly endorse inhumanity and horror. In one of the film's most striking images, a massed crowd marches while holding aloft a stake with the head of a noblewoman skewered on top. It's a stylized image like many in the film; the head is greenish and artificial-looking, with blood flowing from its ragged neck. It's a horrible icon of the Revolution's violence, and it affects the audience as viscerally as it does Grace, who witnesses it while trying to make her way through Paris to the home of a friend.

Images like this lend force to the film's moral thrust; Rohmer's allegiances are clear. He is suggesting that if platitudes about equality and freedom, about helping the working class, about overthrowing tyrants, lead to this, then the ideals are empty and hollow. He is not necessarily aligning himself with either the royalists or the rebels so much as he is taking a humanist slant on this material, evincing a concern for life and fairness that goes beyond abstract ideology. Towards the end of the film, Rohmer portrays the functioning of the Revolution's "justice" as a series of Kafkaesque absurdities, where suspicion furnishes its own proof and overzealous revolutionaries can levy accusations based on pure supposition and innocuous conversations. The film is a powerful critique of political violence and oppression, especially when it disguises itself in the form of a popular movement.

Of course, Rohmer explores all of these themes and ideas in his characteristic way, buried in the subtext of various conversations that dance around these issues rather than engaging with them directly. Grace and the Duke meet several times over the course of the film, and in between social niceties and exchanges of affectionate patter, they have brief outbursts of political sparring, which inevitably end with the Duke urging his former love to keep silent, not to talk politics. That's not Rohmer's way, though. Rohmer's films, where people inevitably talk about everything, support the idea that talk is the key to understanding and analyzing the substance of life, whether the conversations centers on love or spirituality, as they do in so many of Rohmer's films, or on the politics and events of the day. The Duke is essentially the film's villain because he is the enemy of such openness.

Rohmer's approach to this story is typically sensitive and probing, both ethically and aesthetically. His use of digital technology to tell this historical tale is frequently stunning; watching these paintings move and shift allows Rohmer to filter his view of history through the perspectives of the era's artists. He seamlessly integrates this art with the flat, mundane interiors, which are worn and grimy in comparison to the textured gloss of the painted scenes. These rooms look lived-in, and the props in Grace's home frequently intrude into the narrative and the mise en scène, like the way her letters and writing implements become important to the film's denouement. Rohmer's feel for nuanced emotions is as keen as ever, particularly in the scene where Grace and her maid stand on a distant hill, watching the execution of the king through a telescope. With a gorgeous painted landscape stretching off into the distance, Grace stands in all black, unable to look, seized with momentary false hopes before accepting the inevitable. The majesty of the composition, in which she and her servant are small figures within the grand scale of this painted countryside, puts her strong emotional reaction into the context of history, as one small response to the big events that change the world. For Rohmer, though, just because this story may be simply one small, provincial perspective on world-changing events, it is no less important; he privileges the individuals affected by history and the ideas they cherish and fight for.

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010

It is with great sadness I report that the French New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer has died at the age of 89. One of the greatest careers in the cinema has come to an end after 25 theatrical features and numerous short films, documentaries and TV productions. Rohmer's aesthetic, his reliance on subtle dialogue and restrained emotions, his seeming visual straightforwardness, has often led to him being misunderstood as a maker of boring talkfests. Even the BBC's obituary calls his work "completely devoid of action," as though he should have inserted more explosions or car chases into his patient, acutely observed films. As though Rohmer wasn't simply concerned with different kinds of action.

In fact, Rohmer was one of the most sensitive and intellectually probing of directors. He had an ear, not only for the way people talked, but for the ways in which their words related obliquely to their inner states. His films require careful attention and a willingness to read between the lines, to become attuned to the emotional and intellectual undercurrents of his scenarios. For Rohmer, as for many of his protagonists, life is something that should be considered and analyzed as well as simply experienced. Though he was not immune to sensual pleasures — the sand and water in Pauline at the Beach, the romantic interlude that opens A Winter's Tale, the lushly green park at the center of The Aviator's Wife — he was also always conscious of the multiplicity of thoughts and decisions that constitute human consciousness. His cinema was moral, but not moralistic; his parables are open-ended and ambiguous, suggesting that the decision, the judgment, belongs to the viewer alone.

In film after film, Rohmer returned to his favored topics, namely the formation, maintenance, and disintegration of love and relationships, ethics and spirituality, the natural world, the gap between thought and action, between imagination and reality. Many of his protagonists set out with an ideal in mind, seeking to make it real, and Rohmer both respects their determination and highlights their absurdity. Sometimes, these protagonists seek some seemingly unattainable romantic perfection, as in The Green Ray and countless other films, while in Perceval le gallois Rohmer's determined hero is a knight who clumsily integrates his ideals and theories with the real world. Rohmer's cinema, despite its unearned reputation for dreary chatter, could be funny, uplifting, deeply romantic, ironic, bittersweet, playful. He loved youth, and beauty. He loved love itself. He will be truly, sadly, missed.

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I have not written as much as I would have liked about Rohmer here. He has long been one of my favorite directors, but as with other favorites I've watched and digested much of his work long before starting this site. I hope to write, in the coming weeks, about a few of his later films I haven't yet caught up with, as a way of saying goodbye to this cherished auteur. In the meantime, I direct you to my writeups of his Four Seasons cycle (A Tale Of Springtime, A Winter's Tale, A Summer's Tale, Autumn Tale), his uncharacteristic and delightful Perceval le Gallois, his historical spy thriller Triple Agent, and one of my favorites from his lengthy career, the charming The Aviator's Wife.

Also, for those who might see this as a reason to become acquainted, or reacquainted, with the work of this French master, might I suggest, in addition to some of the above, a few of his very finest films: Pauline at the Beach, My Night At Maud's, La collectionneuse, Claire's Knee and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend. The best way to honor Rohmer, and to remember him, is to watch his films.

Triple Agent

Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent is an elusive, enigmatic spy thriller, one in which all the actual spy action takes place offscreen, unseen but much talked about afterward. Rohmer, hardly known as a director of spy pictures, structures the film much like one of his much more characteristic observational relationship dramas, except that in this case the characters' relaxed, naturalistic conversations dance around the edges of political intrigues in 1937 France, just on the verge of World War II. The film centers on a single couple: the White Russian exile Fiodor (Serge Renko) and his Greek wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou). Fiodor is a political attaché with a right-leaning group ostensibly dedicated to providing aid to exiled veterans of the White Russian Army, who had fought against the Bolsheviks. In fact, he cavorts around Europe on shadowy tasks, courting contacts with the Nazis, the Soviets, various national Communist parties, and other groups of varying political allegiances. His purpose is mysterious, even to his wife, who catches only momentary glimpses of his activities. He is reticent with her, but in conversation with others he is constantly making references to his mysterious activities, sometimes seeming to be supporting one side, sometimes another. He is intriguingly opaque, especially since he more or less admits to Arsinoé that he often lies when speaking to others, deliberately making them think he's doing one thing when he might be doing another. He says that he doesn't want to lie to his wife, but throughout the film it becomes increasingly clear that this, too, is not true, that he is not only keeping secrets from her, which would be expected in his line of work, but is actually telling her lies as well, like disguising high-level meetings in Berlin as a minor detour to Brussels.

The way Rohmer explores this enigmatic figure is fascinating to behold. Never once does Rohmer ever actually show Fiodor on his trips or spy missions, or whatever it is he's doing in the long stretches of time where he's away from home. His activities and allegiances are left entirely to the imagination. The only information Rohmer doles out about this man comes from the spy's elliptical, often frustrating conversations with his wife. At times, the normally reserved Fiodor becomes positively animated, spilling out complicated torrents of information and heading off on so many tangents that the main point of the question he was supposed to be answering is quickly forgotten. It's apparent that he's an expert talker, that this unassuming man can be dazzlingly clever and manipulative. He knows it, too, and in his conversations with his wife he sometimes takes on an attitude of gleeful pride in how he is able to control and manipulate world affairs. According to him, a word from him — or the lack of a word — can change the course of events for entire nations. Since Rohmer never follows Fiodor away from his wife, it's impossible to know how much of his patter is truth and how much lies, how much he's exaggerating his own importance.

Who is he working for? What is he up to? What's his agenda? What does he really believe? Fiodor is extraordinarily difficult to pin down, especially since his ideas, as expressed verbally anyway, are constantly in flux. Talking to his Communist neighbors (Amanda Langlet and Emmanuel Salinger), he espouses rightist ideas and sardonically points out the contradictions in the Soviet party line, enjoying the Red couple's squirming. But when speaking to his royalist Russian cousin (Vitalyi Cheremet) he disparages the fascist regime of Franco and calls the Communists reasonable. He seems to be deliberately blurring his allegiances, and never more so than in the breathless monologues directed at his wife, punctuated with his curt assurances, "let me explain," a disclaimer almost always followed up with lengthy and ludicrously detailed stories, complete with to-the-minute timetables. His wife, in any event, is less interested in the details of his stories than in the mere fact that he seems to be opening up to her for once, letting out glimpses of the emotions he usually maintained clamped shut behind his bland demeanor. Arsinoé is the film's heart, as confused and out of the loop as the audience, and placed in the same position: forced to either disbelieve Fiodor entirely, or take his tortured explanations and rambling discourses about his political actions at face value.


Thus, while the film is seeped in politics, set in an era of extreme political turmoil, possibly the most tense and uncertain era in European politics, its center is actually another relationship drama from a director who has long explored the complex interplay of deceit and desire between men and women in love. Arsinoé is devoted to her husband, sometimes nauseatingly so. Every time he leaves home on one of his mysterious trips, she acts out a repetitive ritualistic goodbye: she holds his coat for him, cuddles close for a warm, loving goodbye kiss, and then watches him with smiling eyes as he leaves, seeming to savor this glimpse of him to last for a while. The slightly stylized romance of these goodbyes begins to unravel, however, when Arsinoé starts to become more suspicious of and frustrated with the extreme secrecy of her husband's lifestyle. She hears him casually telling other people things she never knew about, and hears stories from her friends that contradict things he has told her, and she realizes that in many ways she is entirely shut out from his life. Rohmer, always subtle, leaves much of this unstated, communicated by the expressions on Arsinoé's face and the kinds of questions she starts to ask her husband with probing interest.

Rohmer observes these scenes from a calm, languid distance, never quite breaking the surface of these characters but carefully catching the nuances of what they choose to show, and what they're unable to hide. In Fiodor's case, what primarily becomes apparent about him is his eagerness, his love of the spy's life, his image of himself — whether imaginary or accurate — as a bon vivant man of action with the fate of the world in his hands. There's an excitement and energy in his voice when he talks about his spy activities, and even in his posture, eagerly leaning forward to explain what he does and why. This danger-loving spy seems to emerge only occasionally from Fiodor's Walter Mitty exterior, his guise as a bureaucratic "pencil pusher" bored by his job. One wonders which is the truth: is Fiodor a bored office drone playing at being a spy, or is he really a top-level agent playing everyone against each other? Arsinoé, meanwhile, is patient and loving, though she does, in a moment of characteristically Rohmerian subtlety, let out a brief glare of annoyance when Fiodor, in his eagerness, interrupts her to tell a story of his own. The moment passes and Arsinoé silently forgives her husband, her annoyance fading into a smile, but the audience sees the truth: Fiodor is self-absorbed and doesn't much care what his wife has to say about her own life. He never takes the interest in her, or her artistic activities, that she takes in him.

Though this relationship is at the core of the film, Rohmer is also dealing with the historical context of the pre-war era, when the pieces were slowly shifting into place for what would eventually become World War II. He peppers the film with genuine newsreels, artifacts of the time, documents that provide a sense of verisimilitude. As with the unseen spy action, history seems to be happening elsewhere, at the fringes of the story, only sporadically commented upon by the characters. These people are not oblivious to politics, to the state of the world; quite to the contrary, they are constantly engaged with it. And yet even they seem to be on the periphery, not catching the significance of what's happening, unable to understand where things are heading — and incapable of grasping just how ancillary everything they do really is on the historical scale. After an abrupt and startling conclusion to Arsinoé and Fiodor's story, Rohmer finally pulls back for a more objective, large-scale observation of the events going on in this era. The ten-minute epilogue condenses the post-1937 build-up to World War II, and the invasion of France by the Nazis, into a dense collage of newsreel images, history taking over from the small-scale personal drama of one Parisian couple. The film's final moments are an irreverent, morbidly comic final tweak at Rohmer's characters, indeed at the entire story he's decided to tell, exhibiting a deadpan wit about just how pointless it all is, how so much talk and talk about politics could actually say so little about concrete realities.

Perceval le Gallois

Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois must surely be a shock to those familiar with the French New Wave auteur's chatty, philosophical modern films. This deeply strange, idiosyncratic film is adapted from an unfinished 12th Century adventure poem by Chrétien de Troyes. The film follows the adventures of a Welsh youth named Perceval (Fabrice Luchini), who had been raised in isolation and ignorance by his mother following the deaths of his father and two brothers, all of them knights. His mother, wishing to keep her youngest and sole living son safe, ensured that he would never hear any stories of knighthood, knowing that if he ever heard of these adventures he would leave her. Sure enough, when Perceval one day encounters a procession of knights in the forest near his home, he is enchanted by their armor and weapons, amazed by their beauty, and he immediately sets out to become a knight himself. The story is standard, an Arthurian romance in which Perceval encounters various challenges, must right wrongs and woo damsels and fight duels, while learning about the world and the codes of chivalry and honor. He progresses from a callow, ignorant youth into a man of the world, mature and self-possessed, seeking to understand things and to correct his path when he does wrong.

What makes the film so unsettling, however, is Rohmer's odd, heavily stylized treatment of Perceval's narrative. The film is set in a theatrical, patently artificial world, with no attempt at naturalism or realism. Perceval wanders on horseback across a cramped stage where the backdrop is a painted wash of muted blues to represent the sky. The trees in the forest are abstract sculptures, and the sets are wooden and tiny: entire castles and towns, coated in gold paper, are dwarfed by the horses. In order to convey the impression of riding for long distances, Perceval most often guides his mount in circles around the stage, and each time he comes across a new castle, it is obviously the same awkwardly built little construction with different banners hanging from the walls. The mise en scène deliberately undermines the narrative at every turn, creating a strangely magical artificial world in which the poetry of the narration takes on an otherworldly quality.

This narration too is unusual, mingling stylized poetic speech with gorgeous singing, set off against medieval orchestrations for flute and stringed instruments, along with occasional cymbal crashes and bird calls for sound effects. The film is populated with a roaming band of singers and instrumentalists — among them Solange Boulanger, Catherine Schroeder, Francisco Orozco, and flutist Deborah Nathan, and many others — who play various roles depending on the setting, justifying their presence at the fringes of the narrative. Their presence, and the film's metafictional structure, is more reminiscent of the contemporaneous films of Jacques Rivette than of Rohmer's other work. The characters often speak in the third person, prefacing their dialogue with "he said" or "she said." At other times, they sing stage directions and descriptions of action before speaking their lines. This frequent stylized disruption of the narrative gives the film a haunting, dreamlike quality. Rohmer's approach to this material privileges its medieval origins and its mythic grandeur, and yet he doesn't try to realistically recreate the time in which it is set. Instead, his film gives the impression of antiquity while always maintaining a modernist perspective on the past, a slyly ironic sensibility that stands aloof from Perceval's story, observing from the distance of several centuries.


This is most readily apparent in the film's absurd little improvisational touches, like the way Perceval, riding nobly off into a painted sunset, is forced to duck to get under an overhanging tree, or the way, during one of his many fights, he has to quickly adjust his crooked helmet to push its central cross-beam back into place. There's something endearingly rough and loose about this film, in the way its narrative skips around from place to place without regard for continuity, eliding long stretches of time and important details. The narration sometimes comically comments on what it's leaving out, particularly when the original text leaves out a description of a feast Perceval enjoyed one night: Rohmer shows the table being set up, but then his camera pans away to a servant, who says that he will not describe what was eaten, since the tale says only that they ate well. The fights too are incompletely described, and the sung narration wittily apologizes for this fact with a rhetorical question: "They fought at length/ I could describe each blow/ but is it worth your time and mine?"

Obviously, this is far from a conventional Arthurian romance, since Rohmer makes no attempt to smooth out the bumps in the original poetry's incomplete narrative. Late in the film, the story shifts, without explanation, to an account of the adventures of Sir Gauvain (André Dussollier) as he tries to clear his name of a false accusation. If Perceval's story is about a selfish, arrogant youth maturing and learning about life, Gauvain's tale is of an already-mature and good-hearted man retaining his good nature even when everything seems to conspire against him. The narrative leaves Perceval behind without fanfare and follows Gauvain until it reaches what seems to be a climax: he's trapped in a city whose inhabitants mistakenly believe he killed their king, and he's facing an angry mob intent on getting revenge. Here, Rohmer abruptly cuts away, in the middle of a clearly unfinished scene, and returns for a short time to Perceval, before again detouring into a stylized, theatrical staging of the death of Christ.

Rohmer's strategy of discontinuity here is almost academically faithful to the original text, which was left unfinished upon Chrétien's death, and later added to by other poets. Both central stories, of Gauvain and Perceval, are left incomplete, cut off at pivotal moments, with Gauvain facing a horde of angry peasants and the prospect of either clearing his name or losing his life, and Perceval facing a moment of possible spiritual redemption. Neither knight gets to complete his arc, neither gets to fulfill his destiny by playing out the remainder of his undoubtedly heroic story. This abrupt ending leaves Perceval in an especially perilous place as a hero. He is a decidedly ambiguous character, in many ways rather foolish and brutish. His youthful inexperience and lack of knowledge about the world sometimes causes him to behave awfully, as when, early on in the film, he misunderstands his mother's advice about the proper way to treat maidens, and forces himself upon a young woman (Clémentine Amouroux), kissing her and stealing her ring.


Throughout the film, scene by scene, he begins to learn more about the ways of the world and the proper behaviors for a "worthy man." A nobleman (Raoul Billerey) teaches him about the virtue of silence, the finer points of combat, and also about mercy and compassion for a knight who loses in battle. The nobleman's lovely niece, Blanchefleur (Arielle Dombasle), teaches Perceval about love, about how to defend a woman and also how to romance her, how to love her. A supernatural experience in a vanishing castle teaches him that sometimes, what's good advice in one situation might not serve him well in another — taking his mentor's advice too literally, he errs by staying silent when he should have spoken. These incidents each advance Perceval's maturation, and yet the film cuts off at a point when he has just realized how badly he has neglected his spirituality, and also how badly he has treated his loving, grieving mother, who died when he abandoned her. The film leaves Perceval forever stuck at a moment of indecision and penitence, trapped between youthful ignorance and full adulthood.

This story of arrested maturation is off-kilter and often goofy, shot through with low-key humor, particularly in the giggling asides of the singing servants who comment on the main action. There's also a raw poetry to Rohmer's idiosyncratic approach, a strange beauty in his flat, stylized imagery. In one of the film's most arresting and unusual sequences, Perceval is riding through a stark white, snow-covered plain, framed in his red armor against a gray sky, through which flies a flock of animated birds. Rohmer cuts briefly to an animated closeup of one of these birds, wounded and bleeding into the snow. The marks it leaves behind, three bright red spots on the white ground, remind Perceval of his beloved Blanchefleur, and the abstract bloodspots fade into an image of her face, one spot the bloody smear of her lips, the others the color on her rouged cheeks. It's a haunting silent interlude, a reverie of love and longing, and the sudden intrusion of traditional animation into the film's theatrical world is another of Rohmer's disjunctive techniques. What's striking about the film in moments like this is how emotionally affecting it can be despite its arm's length distance from its material, its artificial sets and textual fidelity. Rohmer has created a romantic fantasy of startling clarity and ethereal beauty.

Autumn Tale

The final chapter of Eric Rohmer's "Four Seasons" cycle is Autumn Tale. Like the other films in the series, it takes its title as more than a mere invitation to set its story in a particular season; its evocation of autumn is concerned with the moods, emotions and resonances associated with the fall. Rohmer, who in his maturity often worked with very youthful casts (as he had, for the most part, in the cycle's previous three films), seems very conscious of the fact that autumn is not just a time of year but also a time in a person's life. Thus, this film shifts the focus of the narrative away from the younger protagonists of the other "Four Seasons" films, centering the story around a pair of middle-aged friends, Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and Magali (Béatrice Romand). This casting is surely very self-conscious, since both Rivière and Romand have not only worked with Rohmer quite frequently before, but had both been, roughly a decade earlier, the stars of two films from his "Comedies and Proverbs" cycle. In those films, Rivière (in The Green Ray) and Romand (in A Good Marriage) had both played stubborn, determined, idiosyncratic women looking for love but willing to accept it only on their own terms. They are different women here, different characters, but there is nevertheless no escaping the resonance of seeing them reappear, a decade or fifteen years older, matured into middle age, with very different concerns and attitudes from the women they'd played in Rohmer's earlier films.

Isabelle is married and settled, content in her life and about to see her daughter (Aurélia Alcaïs) get married. Magali, on the other hand, is discontented; she is a widow, and now that her children have grown up and are moving out on their own, she feels loneliness setting up. She is a true Rohmer heroine, though, stubborn and self-reliant, and she refuses to lower herself or appear desperate in order to find a man. Instead, she pours herself into the work at the vineyard she owns, maintaining her fierce pride for the quality of the wine she produces. She is also comforted by the presence of the young and vibrant Rosine (Alexia Portal), the girlfriend of her son Léo (Stéphane Darmon). Rosine isn't serious about Léo — she's just getting over an affair with her teacher Étienne (Didier Sandre) — but she is fascinated by Magali, and loves spending time with her at the older woman's vineyard. Rosine concocts a plan to get over her professor and simultaneously find someone for Magali, so she plots to bring the two of them together. At the same time, Isabelle is planning something very similar; she places an ad in a newspaper, and when the divorced businessman Gérald (Alain Libolt) answers it, she initially poses as Magali in order to judge this man's acceptability for her friend.

Obviously, the romantic entanglements in this film are complex: triangles and quadrangles worthy of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, including the younger generation as well as the older. Rohmer juggles it all with a lightness and irreverence that keeps the plot's twists and turns from descending into melodrama. No one bursts into tears or makes sudden rash pronouncements; everything is played with smiles and subtleties as theses characters glide around each other, flirting and matchmaking and playing games with love. It's a breezy, playful film, treating middle-aged romance with the kind of breathless charm and sentimentality usually reserved for depictions of young lovers. When Gérald and Magali first meet, their conversation is touchingly awkward and halting, interrupted by slight pauses and nervous giggling. The chemistry is obvious, though, inscribed in their body language and immediate intimacy, the way they subtly shift their bodies towards one another as they talk, shuffling nervously and coming together as though dancing.


No one is better than Rohmer at capturing the intricate and layered subtleties of these kinds of meetings, these kinds of relationships, either developing or disintegrating or hovering between states. The tentative romance between Magali and Gérald is only one thread running through a film whose structure is criss-crossed with delicate strands connecting its characters. There's even the flirtation between Gérald and Isabelle, since the former initially thinks that it's Isabelle, and not Magali, whose ad he has answered: a connection forms between them and is then aborted when Isabelle finally reveals the truth, though Rohmer continues to examine the aftermath of this revelation with characteristic candor.

There is a devastating moment where Isabelle, having already started Gérald on the path towards hooking up with her friend, continues to semi-innocently flirt with him, to toy with him a little, and it's devastating because it feels so real, so naked and emotionally vulnerable. It's obvious, in every movement of Isabelle's body, in every nuanced expression nervously playing across her face, that she's feeling a brief tinge of middle-aged insecurity, a desire to feel wanted, to feel some passion. It's not that she's dissatisfied with her own marriage, only that she wants a little more of the youthful excitement she felt when arranging clandestine dates with Gérald. Rohmer doesn't judge, and he doesn't allow this moment — only a moment, transitory but no less powerfully felt — to overwhelm either the narrative or the characters. He's only interested in getting at the complex feelings awakened by this airy matchmaking comedy.

More than anything, Rohmer recognizes the danger inherent in love, the complicated mixture of trust and openness and spontaneity that love requires to really blossom. And he understands how fragile it is, how easily stifled by factors beyond either party's control. Rohmer's touch is light, and his style is nearly invisible, subtly framing his characters within luminous outdoor landscapes where their romantic dramas can play out. His characters are always conscious of their surroundings, and Magali's love of the countryside is a constant presence here, as is the pair of industrial smokestacks that can be seen from various angles around the countryside and often appear in the background of shots, an intrusion of the modern age into this idyllic region. As the characters speak about the scenery, Rohmer's images quietly capture the essence of these places, the natural beauty that these people cherish so much. The film opens with a montage of silent, mostly unpopulated street scenes interspersed with the titles, setting the mood through an evocation of place. Rohmer is deeply sensitive to small touches like this, and this fine, charming film, populated with wonderful performances and enduring characters, is a fun and affecting final movement to complete his seasonal quartet.

A Summer's Tale

If there's a single season I associate most intimately with Eric Rohmer, it is definitely the summer. Many of his best films are not only set in the summer but treat the concept of this sunshine-filled vacation season as a thematic subtext, a subject unto itself. Pauline at the Beach, Claire's Knee, The Green Ray (whose alternate title was simply Summer), and La Collectionneuse all deal with the multiple resonances of the summer holidays: as a time for self-examination, new beginnings, new bonds, and quite often a "holiday" of sorts from the ordinary moral, sexual, relational, and identity obligations of the films' characters. These films conceive of vacations not just as geographical displacements, but affective, emotional, and intellectual ones as well. For Rohmer, the summer holds the potential to introduce great change, and yet conversely there is an ephemeral quality to everything that happens during this season, as though all these changes might be fleeting, forgotten by autumn. Moreover, one primary source of the oft-overlooked sensual pleasures of Rohmer's films is the appreciation of the natural world and its relationship to the film's characters, and a summertime setting has frequently provided the filmmaker with some of his most beautiful imagery. Even the second film in Rohmer's "Four Seasons" cycle, A Winter's Tale, opens with one of the most sumptuous, emotionally moving evocations of summer romance on film.

Naturally, the third film in the seasonal quartet, A Summer's Tale, picks up on the themes of self-examination and renewal that run through so many of Rohmer's most summery films. The film follows the adventures of Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), an earnest but perpetually uncommitted young man spending his vacation at a friend's beachside home. He is, at least ostensibly, waiting for the arrival of his girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), with whom he has an ambiguous on/off relationship, and for whom he nurses a cooling but never quite extinguished devotion. She has halfheartedly promised to meet him here, and as a result he is only half-expecting her to show up; he's not surprised or even too disappointed when the weeks go by with no sign of her. In the meantime, this period of inactivity leads into similarly ambiguous relationships with two other girls. Margot (Amanda Langlet) is also waiting for a distant boyfriend she's not sure she loves, and she becomes close friends with Gaspard rather quickly; there is a constant hint of attraction between these two flirty but relatively chaste friends, a suggestion that they could be more if either pushed their subtle flirtation just a little further than usual. The second girl is Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who's passionate, sexy, and spirited; she instantly attracts Gaspard in a visceral way. Gaspard spends his summer essentially torn between three women, two of them attractive, fun and obviously fond of him, and a third who is absent for the bulk of the film, and who when she finally arrives is tyrannical, moody, and inconstant; nevertheless, she is the one who consumes most of Gaspard's thoughts.

Rohmer structures the film around Gaspard and his women, adopting a loose three-part structure in which the young man spends time with each of the women in turn, revealing different aspects of his personality with each. His friendship with Margot is characterized by thoughtful, meandering conversation. They take long walks together, enjoying some playful repartee and trading stories as they wander along the beach and its surrounding paths. With Solene, Gaspard takes on more of a lustful, erotic sensibility, caressing her long tanned legs and eying her body with obvious admiration. His interest in her is more sensual than intellectual, though she does share his passion for music and enjoys singing a sea shanty that he originally wrote for the absent Lena to sing. Lena herself, though her presence hangs over the entire film — first signaled by a photograph, one of Rohmer's favorite markers of absence — is onscreen for a relatively short time towards the end of the film. With her, Gaspard becomes clingy and reactive, his behavior reflecting her shifting moods. One day, she greets him cheerfully and the reunited couple walks along the beach with their arms wrapped comfortably around one another, but the next day she insults him and says she doesn't want him to touch her.


Rohmer's structural interest in this tripartite story extends to the use of music. The idea of sailing and of seafarers' songs runs throughout the film, and each segment features a scene in which one of Gaspard's women sings one of these songs with him. With Margot, he sings in the car while driving to see a sailor who knows a lot about local folk music. Later, Gaspard gives Solene the sea shanty he wrote, about a pirate's daughter, and accompanies her on the guitar while she sings it; they reprise the song again on a boat with Solene's uncle and some friends, with an accordion accompaniment this time. Finally, when Gaspard is reunited with Lena, she sings him a song whose lyrics ironically comment on the summer he spent before her arrival, though she doesn't realize it: the song is a wistful lament upon leaving a girl named Margot, and incorporates the names of many local towns. The differences between these three performances indicate the differences between the girls and their relationships to the lead. Margot and Gaspard sing without artifice, out of tune and casually, just belting out a few snatches of lyrics as a lark while driving. It's less spontaneous with Solene, who carefully prepares before singing the tune, though in her more refined way she is also a passionate singer. In the later scene where they perform the song on her uncle's boat, she practically becomes the pirate's daughter, forcefully shouting over the howl of the wind, as she sways with the waves, her hair blowing majestically behind her. Lena's song, too, reflects her relationship to Gaspard: superficial, without getting at deeper significances. The song's lyrics make her want to visit one of the islands that's mentioned, but it's clear from Gaspard's stuttering reaction that the words about Margot affect him more than he ever lets on.

Rohmer often gets at emotional reactions in this indirect fashion. His characters talk and talk, frequently about their emotions and what they want, but it remains necessary to read between the lines, to pick up subtle cues, to understand that what they say they want is not necessarily what they actually want. The form of this film, as with many of Rohmer's films, is technically a romantic comedy, albeit a particularly straight-faced one; there are plenty of moments that elicit a smile, but Rohmer could rarely be described as outright funny. What sets his romances apart is that he represents relationships with no hint of movie conventions. His films have an instinctive realism, an ear for the way real people talk and interact, and a knack for drawing multi-layered and always appealing performances out of his cast. This is not a film where one is rooting for two people to get together against all odds — indeed, at many points most people probably wouldn't be rooting for Gaspard at all, since he can be an arrogant, self-centered jerk, stringing along three women because of his own insecurity. He's essentially hedging his bets throughout the film, setting up substitutes and surrogates for the missing Lena; and even when she arrives, not letting go of his contingency plans lest she should back out. Gaspard's self-created predicament, juggling three women who have varying degrees of commitment and affection for him, is amusing, but most of the film's sympathy actually lies with the women, especially Solene and Margot. They are very different but each is charming and intelligent, and as usual Rohmer proves magical at getting rich, vibrant performances from his actresses. Even Lena, who might be the villainess at times, is fleshed out, given a chance to verbalize her stubborn, arrogant streak and explain her sometimes exasperating behavior.

Rohmer excels at this kind of complex characterization. There is no traditional romantic arc here, and Gaspard's summer ends without a resolution to any of these potential relationships, other than one final mournful return of the song bidding farewell to Margot, which emerges on the soundtrack as Gaspard's boat pulls away at the end of the season. This film is a simple, supple pleasure, a celebration of youth, beauty, and the fickleness of love and affection.