Eric Rohmer makes films in series; now nearly 81, he recently finished his third series, a group of seasonal tales. The Brattle is doing a retrospective of all 12 films that make up the first and second series, “Six Moral Tales” and “Comedies and Proverbs.” When first released, these films seemed as isolated and wonderful as the appearances of a comet; but now, seen in close proximity, they disclose a rich pattern.
Of the director critics who launched the French New Wave in the late ’50s, Rohmer has gone farthest in pursuing the æsthetic that originally inspired the school. Expounded by the group’s mentor, the great critic André Bazin, and perfected by Jean Renoir, the group’s preferred French director, this æsthetic defined cinema as a double process: the creation of a fluid spacial-temporal whole and the mystical revelation of reality.
The reality that concerns Rohmer is not just physical. In his Moral Tales, he locates it in human self-consciousness. “I love to show in cinema things that seem to resist cinematographic transcription, to express feelings that aren’t filmable because they’re deeply buried in consciousness. . . . My tales deal with the distance that someone can have toward his own tastes, his desires, his feelings. The character speaks about himself and judges himself: he is filmed as someone who judges.”
In Rohmer’s sense, the word “moral” designates this taste for self-examination. The first two Moral Tales — the short Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962; February 26 at 5:30 and 9:15 p.m.) and the medium-length Suzanne’s Career (1963; on the same program) — are loose yet precise black-and-white studies steeped in the instant nostalgia of the early New Wave: Paris settings, students for characters, an atmosphere mixing dandyism and a chaste libertinism. Bakery Girl of Monceau gives us the basic situation of the Moral Tales in its pure form: a man committed to one woman is tempted for a while by a second, only to return to the first. Suzanne’s Career, in which two male friends amuse themselves at the expense of a charming and intelligent girl they think worthless, is richer and more ambivalent. It has Rohmer’s trademark ending: a reversal that changes the tone of the film and stamps all the ruses, diversions, and hesitations that have gone before with the judgment of the future.
Great as they are, these two films are only sketches for the four full-length masterpieces that make up the rest of the Moral Tales. In La collectionneuse (1967; February 25 at 1:30, 5:30, and 9:30 p.m.), two young aristocrats of the late ’60s — a cool, purring art dealer (Patrick Bauchau) and a severe artist (Daniel Pommereulle) — hover around the sprawling beauty (Haydée Politoff) with whom they share a summer house near Saint-Tropez. Idleness gives birth to a curiosity that ripens into obsession; the film’s mood of sardonic playfulness combines with a psychological concentration and a Warholian feeling for pose and emptiness that are unique in Rohmer’s work.
In My Night at Maud’s (1969; February 23 at 5:15 and 9:45 p.m. and February 24 at 1, 5:15, and 9:45), the best of the Moral Tales if you had to pick only one, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays an engineer who decides to marry a blonde (Marie-Christine Barrault) he sees in church; in the meantime, he spends a night and half a day talking with Maud, a divorced brunette (Françoise Fabian). In no other filmmaker’s work are place and season more important: Rohmer’s setting determines his story’s mood, as does the time of year; they even drive the story. My Night at Maud’s is set in a provincial city in winter: a vacant but optimistic atmosphere prevails, keyed to Trintignant’s agreeable alienation (an outsider, he has a few casual acquaintances and no intimate friends, but has no difficulty expressing himself, when given a chance, on such topics as love, wine, and Pascal’s wager). The falling snow both cools the air in the long scene in Maud’s apartment and makes it possible for the hero to meet and spend the night with his feminine ideal.
The provincial city or suburb is one of three types of settings Rohmer explores throughout the Moral Tales and the Comedies and Proverbs, the others being the holiday resort — such as the lake and mountain range of Claire’s Knee (1970; February 23 at 7:30 p.m. and February 24 at 3 and 7:30 p.m.) — and Paris, where Rohmer returns in the last of the Moral Tales, Chloé in the Afternoon (1972; February 26 at 7:15 p.m.). The vacationing hero of Claire’s Knee (Jean-Claude Brialy) lets himself be recruited as the guinea pig in an experiment in seduction and free will masterminded by a sly novelist (real-life novelist Aurora Cornu — one of the most dazzling of the many remarkable personalities revealed in Rohmer’s films). One of the loveliest and most enigmatic of all vacation films, Claire’s Knee has an original sense of relaxation and space, and it has Rohmer’s characteristic eroticism — passionless, disabused in advance, but hopeful. Visually, Claire’s Knee progresses from the weird, threatening looseness of La collectionneuse and the fierce wintry privacy of My Night at Maud’s. Rohmer’s camera animates the settings with gestures that trace an optional, mental reality — life lived in the subjunctive. Shots are extended, inquisitive, and fluid, as if everything had just happened by itself; but the question of when to cut has never been made more urgent.
In Chloé in the Afternoon, insistent short track-ins create a more punctual sense of time, appropriate to the urban setting and to characters more preoccupied than those in the previous films with daily routines and earning a living. Here the protagonist (Bernard Verley) is a young lawyer who’s a little too contented with his pregnant schoolteacher wife (Françoise Verley), his modest success, and his daily habits of losing himself in books or in a crowd and daydreaming about women. Much of the movie is about trying on clothes, and that’s indicative of how little the Moral Tales have dated, even though fashions have changed.
For the Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer turns from male to female protagonists and from people observing themselves as they flirt with life to people trying to change their lives. The series opens with The Aviator’s Wife (1980; February 27 at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.), in which office worker Marie Rivière is ditched by a married lover (Mathieu Carrière) and pursued by a younger student (Philippe Marlaud). The fascination of just watching people, which surely lies near the heart of the power of movies, reaches its purest state in the long sequence in which the dogged Marlaud and his skeptical but amused teenage accomplice-for-the-day (Anne-Laure Meury) follow another couple through a park. Despite the mood of afternoon idleness and the sometimes seemingly random mise-en-scène, nothing could be more exact and economical than the way a background extra suddenly enters the story just by looking up from her book (a recurrent move by Rohmer characters).
The underestimated Le beau marriage (1982; February 27 at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.) has a more architectural style and a cooler tone. Determined to get married, Sabine (Béatrice Romand) latches onto a lawyer (André Dussollier) who backs away from her. This film establishes the main mode of Rohmer’s relationship to his characters in the Comedies and Proverbs: he doesn’t condemn Sabine but keeps her at arm’s length, compassionate toward her lack of self-knowledge, viewing with reserve her tirade against a former boyfriend’s bourgeois lifestyle and the triumphant contempt with which she quits her antiques-store job. The beauty of the film’s lighting and compositions rhymes with Sabine’s desire to “create.”
The next two films in the series, Pauline at the Beach (1983; February 28 at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.) and Full Moon in Paris (1984; February 28 at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.), also have main female characters who are in various states of self-deception and whom Rohmer invites us to view with an attitude somewhere between antipathy and regret. These are perhaps the most minor of the Comedies and Proverbs, because they have the least substantial characters (they’re also, coincidentally, the most dated — by bad dance music), but they’re funny, they improve on repeated viewing, and they form a necessary intermediate stage toward the two absolute masterpieces that follow.
Summer (1986; March 1 at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.) is about Delphine (Marie Rivière), whose fear of solitude (about to embark on her summer vacation, she’s ditched at the last minute by her traveling companion and resigns herself to staying with a friend’s family in the provinces) progressively reveals to us her deep loneliness. More open in form than any preceding Rohmer film, Summer was shot in 16mm with no script and a small crew. It’s structured unpredictably in scenes that turn from anodyne encounters into adventures in embarrassment, as Delphine finds herself less and less able either to accept the people she’s with or to escape from herself. The film’s ending — which is enough to send every viewer out of the theater in tears — is a magical exception to and at the same time a transcendent affirmation of Rohmer’s principled realism.
Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987; March 1 at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.) takes place in the most artificial, banal, and meticulously observed of Rohmer’s settings — a small city that exists as a complete separate universe: office park, university, apartment complex, and resort (with waterskiing) in one. The film is at once a science-fiction exploration of this extraordinary creation, a continuation of the study of alienation begun in Summer, a wry farewell to childhood, and, in its deft last scene, a Shakespearean comedy of reshuffled couples.
