READING through the admiring English-language reviews of Eric
Rohmer's films that have accumulated over the years, one can't help but
be struck by the frequent recurrence of words like ''perfect'' and
''flawless'' -- phrases dutifully reproduced, sometimes out of context, on
lobby posters and VHS boxes. But acknowledging perfection in a work
of art - especially, perhaps, in a movie -- can sometimes be a form of
faint praise, even of condescension. Flawlessness involves the mastery
of small proportions and brief measures, a preference for concentration
over risk. The appetite of critics and audiences is more often for size,
scale and heroic ambition.
Behind the celebration of Mr. Rohmer's perfection lies an implied
accusation of complacency: even approving critics have at times
grumbled that the world he portrays on the screen is too narrow, its
emotions too circumscribed, its ironies too schematic, to sustain our
curiosity or feed our hunger for vicarious experience. How many times
must we observe a knot of well-dressed, well-spoken and usually well-
heeled French people sit around cafe tables or promenade down country
lanes discussing the fine points of their romantic confusion?
The answer, of course, is as much as we possibly can. Mr. Rohmer's art
is cumulative. With very few exceptions, he conceived and made his
major films not individually but in thematic sequences: the Moral
Tales(the best known of which are probably ''Claire's Knee'' and ''My
Night at Maud's'') of the late 1960's and early 1970's, the Comedies and
Proverbs (including ''Pauline at the Beach'' and ''Full Moon in Paris'') of
the late 70's and 80's, and the Tales of the Four Seasons of recent years.
At 80, Mr. Rohmer still seems capable of finding new variations on the
themes he has pursued indefatigably over three and a half decades and
two dozen films: the shifting dynamics of heterosexual desire, the subtle
emotional politics of rivalry and alliance between men and women, and
the erotic and intellectual pleasures of talking about it all. To see a single
Rohmer film is never sufficient: you can be charmed or irritated --
sometimes both at once -- but his sly sense of narrative rhythm and the
understated elegance of his visual style may not be altogether evident.
His stories, as they refract and complicate one another, gain in clarity
and nuance. A movie that seems, in isolation, much too thin can turn out
to be, viewed in the context of its companions, impossibly rich.
In his youth Mr. Rohmer, born Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer, was an
aspiring novelist. Seduced by cinema, he became a formidable and
passionate critic, championing the work of Nicholas Ray and Alfred
Hitchcock and serving, from 1957 to 1963, as the editor of Cahiers du
Cinéma. In part because of this background, it has become a
commonplace to think of him as a quintessentially literary filmmaker,
especially in contrast to the other filmmakers -- Jean-Luc Godard,
François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol -- associated with Cahiers and the
New Wave. It was a description he responded to, somewhat testily, in a
1971 essay for the Nouvelle Revue Française called ''Letter to a Critic.''
''My films, you say, are literary,'' he wrote. ''The things I say could be
said in a novel. Yes, but what do I say?''
Now Winstar Cinema, by issuing new prints of a dozen of his features,
has made available something like a Pléiade edition of his major work --
a generous, manageable collection that forms the centerpiece of a five-
week, 22-film retrospective, which is showing at Film Forum through
March 15 and will then travel around the country over the next few
months. (Winstar's subsidiary Fox Lorber has also released a handsome
set of videos, but why order takeout when each movie offers a perfect
night on the town?)
To see Rohmer in full -- especially to trace the arc from the early, black-
and-white Moral Tales to the lush, expansive colors of the Four Seasons
-- is to discover rigorous consistency and staggering variety. Yes, the
movies, including to some extent the anomalous mid-70's costume
dramas ''The Marquise of O'' and ''Perceval,'' tend to be about love
affairs -- successful, failed or equivocal. But desire is a variable that, in
Mr. Rohmer's careful algebra, yields a different solution to every
equation. ''Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,'' goes a
line from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and Mr. Rohmer, as though
elaborating on this insight, has constructed a universe of alteration, in
which no two love stories are ever the same.
Though his preferred subject is romance, Mr. Rohmer has always been a
classicist at heart, plotting the irrational vicissitudes of his characters'
affections with the cool precision of a Cartesian geometrician. The X
axis is the tendency of people, normatively but not exclusively women,
to be inscrutable to others; the Y axis is the durable human capacity,
generally but not universally male, for self-delusion.
The stories seem to proceed as much by accident and misdirection as by
design. Or, rather, the characters follow the twisting paths of destiny in
full confidence of their own control, oblivious to the invisible,
omnipotent hand of the filmmaker leading them gradually astray. They
seem -- to themselves and to us -- perfectly free and enviably conscious
of the consequences of their choices. But even happy endings take them
by surprise, as they are revealed, time and again, to be unreliable
narrators of their own lives.
In the first of the Moral Tales, a 20-minute 16-millimeter black-and-
white short called ''The Girl at the Monceau Bakery,'' Mr. Rohmer
established the template that he would expand and embellish in later
films. A student -- whose life seems to alternate, like those of so many
of Mr. Rohmer's protagonists, between indolence and anxiety -- spends
his lunch hours wandering the streets of a busy, workaday Parisian
neighborhood. He develops an infatuation with a young blonde who
works in a local antique store, and, after fruitlessly trying to contrive an
excuse to speak to her, bumps into her entirely by accident, whereupon
he summons the nerve to ask her out for coffee. ''Another time,'' she
promises. ''We run into each other so often.''
But then she disappears, and to console himself the young man starts
frequenting an out-of-the way bakery and begins a cynical flirtation with
the dark-haired girl behind the counter. Just as he has worn down her
resistance, the first young woman reappears, recovering from a leg
injury, and reveals that she's been watching the young man's comings
and goings from her apartment, which is just across the street from the
bakery. The final twist is left to the imagination: the film's last shot is of
young man and the blonde, now married, entering the bakery. The
camera is positioned where the jilted bakery assistant would be, and our
intimation of her chagrin undercuts the young man's blithe triumph.
If ''The Girl at the Monceau Bakery'' has the lucid compression of a
Maupassant short story, the subsequent Moral Tales have the discursive
intricacy of Henry James. ''Claire's Knee'' (1971), which turns on its
central character's extravagant obsession with a perfectly ordinary
teenage coquette, owes something to James's beloved novella ''Daisy
Miller.'' Mr. Rohmer is singularly possessed of what James liked to call
''the moral sense''-- not so much an interest in determining how people
should behave as an almost scientific curiosity about how they do.
''What I call a conte moral is not a tale with a moral,'' Mr. Rohmer once
told an interviewer, ''but a story which deals less with what people do
than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.''
As with James, this interest endows simple stories with both
psychological complexity and aesthetic refinement. (Mr. Rohmer's
inspirations were not only literary, of course. In a 1955 essay, he
recalled the epiphany of seeing ''It Happened One Night'' as a teenager:
''It touched . . . that innate taste that we French never lose for a moment
-- beyond all changes of fashion, for the art of the moralist.) And like
James -- who had, according to T. S. Eliot, ''a mind so fine that no idea
ever violated it'' -- Mr. Rohmer's brilliantly analytical dialogue steers
away from ideology, politics and history. Nearly every one of his films
seems to feature an earnest, thoughtful discussion of types -- as in ''she's
not my type'' -- that would, translated into the idiom of Hollywood
romantic comedy, seem unspeakably vulgar.
Yet even as he treats his characters' motives with gentle mockery, Mr.
Rohmer allows them to take themselves seriously as they amble across
the gorgeous landscapes and tasteful interiors of modern France in a
state of undisturbed self-absorption, abstracted from the noise and
confusion of the wider world. Love flourishes in a curious middle
kingdom between the mundane and the metaphysical, a hexagonal
expanse of territory bounded by Spain, Germany and the Mediterranean
sea.
But at the same time, few filmmakers or novelists have so acutely parsed
the deep logic of contemporary life. ''We live in a leisure society,'' notes
the world-weary aesthete who narrates ''La Collectioneuse,'' echoing
remarks the director himself had made to his old comrades at Cahiers.
And while Mr. Rohmer's characters are involved in various worldly
pursuits -- as antique dealers, proto-yuppie businessmen, ethnographers
or government functionaries -- we tend to see them on vacation, at
dinner parties or at lunch. Unlike the tea drinkers and adulterers of 19th-
century fiction, though, the people in Mr. Rohmer's movies are not
supported by vast fortunes or retinues of servants: they are the idle
middle class, acting out comedies of manners that would once have been
the exclusive privilege of the landed or the titled.
To those living in its midst, and to those who make a living delivering
ideological diagnoses of its condition, contemporary post-industrial
society often seems to proceed in the absence of norms and codes. The
citizens of Mr. Rohmer's republic are free to choose lovers and careers,
to change their minds at will, and to devote their energies to the
cultivation of whatever hobbies and tastes suit their whims. But this
liberty is less a condition of amorality than a moral order in its own
right, the parameters of which can only be determined experimentally.
In each of the Moral Tales, and in the many of the later movies as well, a
character will willingly enter into a kind of ethical experiment, with
himself (and less often herself) as both scientist and research subject. In
''Claire's Knee,'' Jérome, a clever ladies' man on the brink of marriage to
an unseen fiancée, enters into an easygoing wager with his friend
Aurora, a novelist who has similarly retired from the field of sexual
competition. The object of their bet is a precocious girl named Laura,
who appears to succumb, all to easily, to Jérome's pompous suavity.
But Jérome is soon distracted by Laura's half-sister, Claire -- by her
shapely and slender knee, to be precise. But Claire would rather hang
around with her sullen, antisocial boyfriend, Vincent. Through a
complex series of accidents, Jérome finds himself in a position both to
rescue Claire from the duplicitous Vincent and to caress her bare knee,
which he insists on representing to the amused Aurora as a purely
selfless ethical act. The irony, among Mr. Rohmer's driest and most
pointed, is that Claire, as soon as Jérome is gone, goes back to Vincent,
revealing the older man -- to us, if not to himself or to her -- as a self-
deceiving wolf in philosopher's clothing.
From ''La Collectioneuse'' (1967), in which he was able to move from
black-and-white to color, to ''Autumn Tale'' in 1998, Mr. Rohmer's films
have refused to date. Yes, the haircuts and fashions alter somewhat, and
the technological environment changes perceptibly, but the basic shape
of civilization -- in particular its sexual mores and idioms of feeling --
seems remarkably constant, and seems, moreover, to be observed with
almost documentary naturalism. Mr. Rohmer's casting of
nonprofessional actors and his disdain for showy camera techniques and
background music disguise the crystalline artifice of his plots, which
becomes apparent only in retrospect.
Just as the world they depict is, for all its hectic quotidian rhythms,
governed by invisible norms and patterns of behavior, so are the films,
for all the breezy haphazardness with which they unfold, governed by a
fierce formal intelligence and a classical sense of symmetry. In the late
60's and early 70's, directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini
and François Truffaut (in ''Day for Night'') argued that cinema should
self-consciously reflect on its own techniques and procedures. Mr.
Rohmer preferred to transfer this self-reflexiveness to his characters, and
to maintain an illusion of transparency and detachment.
But this illusion is sustained by a remarkable sense of spatial
composition and narrative symmetry -- the invisible source of the
perfection that is Mr. Rohmer's critical legacy. ''Chloe in the Afternoon''
(1971), for example, unfolds out of the daydreams and random
encounters of Frédéric, a prosperous young businessman who is devoted
to his wife, Hélène, and their children, but nonetheless tempted by the
wild vulnerability of Chloe, the ex-lover of an old friend, who turns up
unexpectedly in Frédéric's office. The middle sections of the film follow
their friendship as it develops, in the course of lunches and shopping
excursions, into something riskier.
What appear at first to be the trivial occurrences of ordinary life turn out
to be subtle motifs. In both the film's opening and its climax, a woman --
first Hélène, then Chloe -- emerges naked from her shower into
Frédéric's embrace. The offhand words the characters exchange --
Hélène warns Frédéric against getting wet; Chloe assures him that water
won't stain his clothes -- turn out to be loaded with psychological
subtext, and the movie's moment of moral crisis is the result of
Frédéric's fondness for turtleneck sweaters. Midway through the movie,
he pulls his turtleneck up around his ears to make funny faces at his
infant son. Later, in the midst of undressing, about to make love with
Chloe, he catches sight of himself in the mirror with his shirt in the same
position, and flees without a word.
There is a comical absurdity to this scene, as there is to the perfect,
color-coordinated pairing off that concludes ''Boyfriends and
Girlfriends'' (''L'Ami de mon Amie,'' 1987), in which the woman in the
green dress ends up with the man in the blue shirt and the woman in the
blue blouse goes off with the man in green -- but also a surprising
emotional charge. Frédéric and Hélène shed real tears at the end of
''Chloe in the Afternoon'' -- tears of relief, compassion and estrangment.
For all his light-hearted sense of comedy and complication, such
estrangement, the sense that modern relationships are at bottom the
persistence of failed connections, is at the heart of Mr. Rohmer's perfect
vision of an imperfect world.