Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons: Another Year

By Hamza El-Oualili

Waves dancing in the wake of a ferry, the tide receding on a rocky beach, a tree-lined canal
glimpsed from a speeding car, fountains splashing in sleepy courtyards. Each of the films in
Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons cycle opens with a prelude that drops us with fresh
immediacy into a place, and into a flow of time that carries us along like a leaf on a stream.
Rohmer’s films are justly famous for their feasts of words but not always sufficiently
celebrated for the pacing, rhythms, and elegant structures that give them, despite their cerebral
cast, such a feeling of lightness and fluidity. They are never still. Even when characters are
parked in place—lingering over a leisurely outdoor meal, say—conversations, glances, shifts
of feeling and thought, are continually circulating around them like a breeze.
A current of ideas and motifs runs through Rohmer’s films, connecting and enriching them.
Tales of the Four Seasons was the third of his film cycles, and it creates a beautifully balanced
synthesis between the earlier two. Six Moral Tales (1963–72) established his trademark
philosophical approach to matters of the heart, and introduced his method of composing films
as variations on a theme, an approach that is as much musical as literary. In his second cycle,
Comedies and Proverbs (1981–87), Rohmer shifted his gaze from compulsively rationalizing
male protagonists with wandering eyes to women in restless transit not only between lovers
but between apartments, vacation homes, and friendships.
Around 1988, he began planning a cycle that would move through the seasons (Rohmer
would later refer to the spring tale as first and the winter one as fourth, though the films in the
series were not made and released in that order). Times of year and times of day, nature and
weather, had always been important in his films: the full moon, a snowstorm, the hushed
“blue hour” just before dawn. Bringing the seasons to the foreground subtly heightens the
themes of change and impermanence. Each of the four films is set over a span of a week or
two during which the characters are in some state of flux and uncertainty, contemplating
choices, possibilities, endings and beginnings. The seasonal settings are more than backdrops
for the stories; they create complex harmonies and dissonances. Summer vacation is not
carefree, new seeds are planted in autumn, and revival comes in the dead of winter. Spring
brings plenty of flowers—from blossoming fruit trees to wilting tulips, plastic-wrapped
bouquets, and bright window pots—but the tale is also nipped by the season’s teasing chills
and blustery squalls.
Rohmer also noted that the quartet can be divided into pairs linked by rhymes, resonances,
and inversions. A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Autumn (1998) both involve
female friendships, philosophy professors, couples widely separated in age, and matchmaking
schemes. With their ensemble casts and intricately branching stories, they recall the Comedies
and Proverbs. Meanwhile, the man who meets two women while waiting for a third in A Tale
of Summer (1996) mirrors the woman vacillating between two men while pining for an absent
one in A Tale of Winter (1992), and both of these indecisive protagonists hark back to the
romantic hesitations of Six Moral Tales. These echoes are unstressed; when you notice them,
they enrich Rohmer’s motifs and themes, but the tales’ carefully wrought and balanced
structures still allow for a feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns and causes
too complex to ever be fully predictable.
Thinking About Thoughts
A Tale of Springtime sprouts from the same premise as two Rohmer films from 1987,
Boyfriends and Girlfriends and Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle: a pair of young
women meet by chance and become inseparable friends overnight. Here, they are a
philosophy teacher and a pianist; Rohmer immersed himself in the work of Immanuel Kant
and Robert Schumann as he planned the film, a story about petty quarrels, overstaying
houseguests, a messy boyfriend, a missing necklace, and a disastrous Sunday in the country.
Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) meets Natacha (Florence Darel) at a party. They are a study in
opposites, one rigorously analytical, self-contained, and repelled by disorder, the other
emotional, unguarded, and prone to impulsive outbursts. Jeanne’s close-cropped hair and
plain button-down shirts contrast with Natacha’s titian locks and ballerina style. Yet they fall
into an easy intimacy, and Jeanne, temporarily displaced from her apartment, goes home with
her new friend. As the visit stretches on into multiple days and then a second week, she is
drawn reluctantly into the turmoil involving Natacha; her divorced father, Igor (Hugues
Quester); and Igor’s much younger girlfriend, Ève (Eloïse Bennett), whom Natacha detests.
She would much prefer to see her father with Jeanne.
During an excruciatingly awkward dinner, Jeanne and Ève talk philosophy, throwing around
phrases like “a priori synthetic judgment.” Conversations like this can make Rohmer’s films
seem intellectually daunting, but there’s no need to understand abstruse terminology in order
to follow the scene. It is really about Ève’s rather pathetic need to show off her knowledge, in
contrast to Jeanne’s sincere passion for “thinking about my thoughts,” and for helping her
working-class students—for whom, she recognizes, being good at philosophy is a matter of
pride. It is about Ève needling Natacha and Natacha rising to the bait, and Igor staying mum
and safely out of it. Rohmer said that his characters “exist when they start talking,” and
verbally pyrotechnic sequences like this are his equivalent of fistfights or dance numbers.
Jeanne is an unusual protagonist because she is not at the center of her own story. She is an
uneasy witness to other people’s dramas, constantly feeling like an intruder as she circulates
with her duffel bag of clothes among four different places: three apartments in Paris and
Natacha’s country house in Fontainebleau, with its overgrown walled garden. This kind of
unsettled existence is common to Rohmer’s men and women. His vacation movies—including
Claire’s Knee (1970), Pauline at the Beach (1983), and The Green Ray (1986)—observe
people away from home, liberated and disoriented by the temporariness of their arrangements.
But even in their everyday lives, people are often in transit; the heroine of A Tale of Winter
shuttles between her mother’s home in the suburbs and those of two men, one in Paris and one
in the provincial town of Nevers. She is constantly seen riding trains, subways, and buses, or
going in and out of metro stations. “It’s hard to live in two places,” says the heroine of Full
Moon in Paris (1984), whose life is upended by her acquisition of a pied-à-terre. It is not that
Rohmer’s people are footloose, that any place they hang their hat is home. On the contrary, it
is their sensitivity to their habitats—like Jeanne’s intense discomfort with her boyfriend’s
untidy flat—that keeps them moving. Rohmer often holds a shot for a beat after the people in
it have exited the frame. Like pauses in a musical score, these moments are essential to the
rhythm of his films, but they also quietly emphasize the action of leaving, the sense that his
characters can disappear.
After all this transience, it is moving to finally meet, in A Tale of Autumn, one person deeply
rooted in her home, and her land. Magali (Béatrice Romand) owns a vineyard in the Rhône
Valley, where she grows organic grapes and aspires to make a Côtes du Rhône vintage that
ages well. Rohmer had become increasingly concerned with ecology and conservation,
themes he brings in here with tender attention to the weeds and wildflowers growing between
Magali’s vines, and with debates about whether the valley’s pastoral beauty has been ruined
by overdevelopment.
It is harvest time, with grapes hanging in dusty purple bunches, chrysanthemums and
yellowing leaves, pale stone walls baking in golden sun. In concord with the season, this is
one of Rohmer’s few films about middle-aged people. Magali and her best friend, Isabelle
(Marie Rivière), are in their midforties, each with grown children, and the actors playing them
both had long associations with the director. As a teenager, Romand had played the
precocious Laura in Claire’s Knee, and she brings to Magali the same magnificently untamed
hair and forthright, spiky charisma. Isabelle has the lanky, ambling dreaminess that Rohmer
seemed to cherish in Rivière, but unlike her hypersensitive, uncertain characters in The
Aviator’s Wife (1981) and The Green Ray, here she is settled in a happy marriage.
Casting was crucial for Rohmer’s process, since characters are the heart of his cinema. He
often incorporated actors’ biographical details, habits, opinions, or talents into their roles (for
example, Magali, like Romand, was born in French North Africa), but there were strict limits
on how much leeway he gave performers to shape their own characters. Young actors often
wrote to Rohmer expressing their desire to work with him, and some of these eager suitors got
their wishes, including Charlotte Véry (Félicie in A Tale of Winter) and Gwenaëlle Simon
(Solène in A Tale of Summer). But he relied increasingly on a trusted circle of actors and
collaborators, including cinematographer Diane Baratier, editor Mary Stephen, and producers
Françoise Etchegaray and Margaret Ménégoz. Both behind the scenes and in his films, he
chose more and more to immerse himself in a community of women. By the time he made A
Tale of Summer, he confessed that returning to a male protagonist made him somewhat
uncomfortable: “Who can say? I don’t know—have I feminized myself to that point?”
If Rohmer used romantic and sexual love in his films to examine how people choose among
different paths, and how they try to make sense intellectually of the vagaries of physical
attraction, what role does friendship play? Films that revolve around female friends (male
friendships don’t seem to have interested Rohmer much) allow him to explore not what brings
people together, or breaks them apart, but how they exist together. Platonic relationships can
be fraught with misunderstandings, jealousies, hurt feelings, and emotional reunions, like
Jeanne and Natacha’s. Or they can age like good wine, as Magali and Isabelle’s has, gaining
both mellowness and complexity. “Friendship is serious,” Solène says in A Tale of Summer.
“Maybe more than love.”
Yet Rohmer’s people rarely forget l’amour for long. The stubborn, idealistic Magali, who
says that work has become her “sole passion,” is an instantly recognizable type: the vibrantly
attractive, accomplished woman who is alone because, as she herself puts it, “I want a man,
but under a host of conditions!” Piqued by her refusal to seek out love, both Isabelle and
Rosine (Alexia Portal), the girlfriend of Magali’s son, Léo (Stéphane Darmon), separately plot
to set her up. It is hard to say which of their schemes is more shockingly harebrained.
Rosine’s is entangled with her efforts to end a romantic relationship with her high-school
philosophy professor. Meanwhile, Isabelle places a personal ad for her friend, a well-meaning
betrayal both of Magali—who recoils from the idea of a “petite annonce”—and of Gérald
(Alain Libolt), the gentle and civilized man Isabelle proceeds to meet and date, posing as her
friend. (In doing so, she also risks betraying her husband, since she enjoys being courted by
Gérald.)
A Tale of Autumn recalls the sparkling Hollywood romantic comedies Rohmer loved as a
young movie critic—though, as with all his films, the humor does not reside in funny lines or
performances but in situations and ironies—and also resembles Shakespeare’s comic tales of
mistaken identities and blundering machinations. It all comes together at the outdoor wedding
of Isabelle’s daughter, a communal celebration where the two matchmaking plots converge.
There is some awkwardness and confusion, some rudeness and disappointment. But there is
no bitterness, no sting; the warmth and ripeness that pervade the film take off the sharp edges,
without blurring any of the complications.
It is not quite true to say that Rohmer’s films do not judge their characters. In a sense, they do
nothing else, lucidly cataloging people’s rationalizations, self-deceptions, and insensitive
lapses. But his films also go far beyond mere tolerance for human foibles. The wellspring of
Rohmer’s art is his fascination with how people think, with the impossible yet irresistible
quest to understand ourselves and others. What interested him in cinema, he said, was “the
secret of beings” and “the mystery of subjectivity.” This enigma is the source of moral
philosophy, narrative art—and gossip. In order to isolate and study the subject, Rohmer, like a
scientist conducting an experiment, eliminates the noise. He sets aside many of the things that
impinge on our lives—like money, politics, sickness, and death—creating a fantastical yet
strangely lifelike world. He filmed in real streets, landscapes, and buildings with a graceful,
unforced attention to the details of living spaces and everyday behavior, creating
environments so deceptively ordinary that it’s easy to ignore what is unreal about them. This
is a France in which hardly anyone smokes and no one ever talks about movies, where
people—almost invariably beautiful and young—have time to think and talk only about what
really matters: who they are, and whom they love.

Time and Tide

“Everything was planned,” actor Melvil Poupaud recalled of the making of A Tale of
Summer. “Eric had calculated the schedules of the tides, the statistics of the sun; he had
scouted the sites years in advance.” As with casting, Rohmer’s treatment of locations,
weather, and natural phenomena was an alchemical mixture of chance and control.
For both A Tale of Summer and A Tale of Winter, Rohmer returned to a favorite narrative
device, dividing the films into short chapters introduced by on-screen dates. In his vacation
films, the dates become countdowns, constant reminders of the finite span of the holidays,
even as they mark out idle, unstructured time. Gaspard (Poupaud) knows exactly when he
must leave the coastal town in Brittany where he is vacationing, and the dates also serve as a
relentless reminder of the late arrival of Léna (Aurélia Nolin), the “sort-of” girlfriend he is
expecting to meet. In A Tale of Winter, the countdown is to the end of the year—and, as it
turns out, to a holiday miracle. Within these strict chronological schemes, time ebbs and
flows. A Tale of Summer opens with a long, wordless sequence in which Gaspard arrives
alone in a sunny, crowded seaside town, settles into his borrowed room, wanders along the
beach eating ice cream, and noodles on the guitar. The smoothest of jump cuts moves us
between each of these fragmentary scenes, like a stone skipping over the surface of a pond;
the result is a languid mood with an undertone of anxiety.
By Rohmer’s own account, this was an unusually personal film. It was based on events he had
experienced or witnessed in his adolescence, he said—with his habitual secrecy, he would be
no more specific than that. Gaspard is a ruefully candid self-portrait of the artist as a young
man: insecure, self-absorbed, and nervously opportunistic. Poupaud, with his mop of dark
curls, makes Gaspard just the sort of shyly handsome, willing but not forward boy who might
be picked up by bolder women—as he is by the warm, outgoing Margot (Amanda Langlet)
and the brazenly assertive Solène. He tacks back and forth between them, confiding in Margot
and enjoying the novelty of a (mostly) platonic friendship with a woman, and then letting
himself be instantly seduced by Solène. When the blond, arrogantly superior Léna finally
shows up, he is plunged into even deeper confusion as she greets him with affection one day
and treats him with brutal disdain the next.
Through it all, Gaspard clings to his music, using it to ward off other commitments. The film
is buoyed by songs: sea chanteys, folk tunes, and pop, all about traveling to far-off places, the
restless urge to wander to the ends of the earth. But aside from a ferry ride and an afternoon
sail in the cyan waters off Saint-Malo, Gaspard never goes anywhere—especially not to the
island of Ouessant, which becomes a geographical symbol of the choice he must make, as he
clumsily manages to promise each of the three women that he will take her there. Margot
berates him for hedging his bets; she is right, but she is also jealous and sending wildly mixed
signals. Although Rohmer insisted that his own close relationships with women were based
on a principle of “absolute chastity,” in his films men and women never find it easy to be just
friends. They complain of blurry boundaries, feel stifled when the possibility of seduction is
removed, and can’t resist flirting a little. Gaspard says he can only be himself with Margot,
that with the other girls he is playing a part. It’s easier with a friend than with a lover, she
agrees, moments before they start kissing.
How will he get out of his bind? Gaspard believes in luck, in letting serendipity guide his
path. “A habit of coincidence? Quite a system,” Margot responds skeptically. But Rohmer’s
characters are always doing this kind of thing, looking for signs or playing games with their
own invented rules, the way Jeanne grants Igor three requests—to sit next to her, to hold her
hand, to kiss her—but no more, and tells him afterward that she acquiesced because of the
power of the number three. Do they really believe in surrendering to chance, or do they use
signs to justify choices they’ve already made? In A Tale of Winter, Félicie uses this coin-
flipping approach to make up her mind about whether to move in with her boss and lover,
Maxence (Michel Voletti), only to recognize later the mistake of making a decision “just to
decide.” Rohmer’s characters also talk incessantly about their “types,” using the claim of
certainty regarding their tastes to pare down their options. To believe in types is, in a way, to
believe in predestination, the other side of the coin from the flirtation with chance. Félicie
becomes Rohmer’s ultimate avatar of faithfulness to one’s destiny, concluding, “There are no
good or bad choices. Choice shouldn’t enter into it.”
A Tale of Winter begins in summer and back in Brittany, condensing a vacation romance into
a montage of almost cloyingly idyllic scenes. Félicie and Charles (Frédéric van den
Driessche) frolic on beaches, in bedrooms, and on country lanes, their bliss as unvaried as the
sunshine. Set five years before the main action of the film, this prologue is summer
remembered in winter, and it makes the damp, gray Parisian December that much drearier by
contrast. Félicie has lost Charles through the most random and foolish of accidents—she
wrote the wrong town when she gave him her address—and this finding and losing of true
love has become the central story of her life, endlessly rehashed and interrogated. A Tale of
Winter is in many ways a companion piece to My Night at Maud’s (1969), sharing both its
seasonal setting and its concern with faith, choice, chance, and grace. Félicie and her
sometime boyfriend Loïc (Hervé Furic), a cultured librarian and devout Catholic, discuss
Pascal’s wager, which also featured prominently in the earlier film. She is not religious, yet
following an epiphany in an empty church she embraces her faith in betting on infinite
happiness—that is, a reunion with Charles—rather than settling for security or practicality.
In pursuing this conviction, Félicie treats both of the men in her life horribly, abandoning
Maxence two days after moving in with him, and not only leaning on the rejected Loïc for
friendship and support but asking him to pray for her to get what she wants most—Charles.
There are times when one wants to tell her to grow up, to abandon the fantasy of a perfect
love and appreciate what a kind, loyal, intelligent man Loïc is, even if he is not her “type.”
But while My Night at Maud’s embraces ambivalence toward its protagonist’s path not taken,
A Tale of Winter sides wholeheartedly with its heroine, who movingly defends her gamble by
saying, “Not everyone lives with hope.”
Rohmer built the film around his fascination with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and he
embeds a performance of it, which moves Félicie to tears. (Originally, Rohmer hoped to cast
Françoise Fabian, the unforgettable Maud, as Queen Hermione and Jean-Claude Brialy, the
smugly self-deluding protagonist of Claire’s Knee, as King Leontes, which would have made
for a vertiginously self-reflexive mise en abyme. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.) Like all
of Shakespeare’s late romances, the play deals with grace and the miraculous restoration of
what was lost. Leontes, who destroys his family with false accusations of infidelity, is granted
unearned forgiveness and the return of the wife and daughter he believed dead; Félicie, guilty
of a thoughtless slip of the pen, sits down opposite her long-lost love on a city bus. Charles, a
blameless Leontes, regains both a lover and a daughter, Elise, he never knew he had.
It is this five-year-old who gets the last word, repeating her mother’s explanation that she is
shedding “tears of joy,” a phrase that alludes to Blaise Pascal’s rapturous description of a
religious experience. Transposing theology to the realm of earthly love is a typically radical
move for Rohmer, embedded within a subtle grace note. It is moments like this that give his
films their long finish; they linger and grow richer in the mind. To love them is to love
thinking about them, and to think about them is to love thinking.

Blueprints for a Brilliant Oeuvre

The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By
1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short
works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary techniques
and thrifty production values; their plots based on games of love, deception, and mistaken
identity; their “literary” voice-over narration and dialogue—provide an essential blueprint for
Rohmer’s fantastically prolific and brilliant oeuvre, which spanned nearly six decades. Not
incidentally, they also inaugurate Rohmer’s trademark series,Six Moral Tales—cerebral yet
humorous variations on the theme of love and deception in which male narrators are faced
with the ethical dilemma of having to choose between women.
Formerly a literature teacher and a novelist, Rohmer (born Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer to a
well-off provincial family in 1920) began his career as a film critic at Cahiers du cinéma,
which he also edited. And Bakery Girl and Suzanne’s Career testify to his central position
within the French New Wave. His realist aesthetics are heir to André Bazin’s influential
theories, as well as to the cinema verité of the anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch; thus
Bakery Girl and Suzanne’s Career are shot in black and white, in the streets, shops, and
cramped hotel rooms of Paris, with a mobile 16 mm camera and several nonprofessional
actors, including friends of the director’s. At the same time, Rohmer, like his younger Cahiers
colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol, admired the films of
Alfred Hitchcock, about whom he cowrote in 1957, with Chabrol, a book, the first to take the
Master of Suspense seriously. Rohmer’s Hitchcockian heritage informs his delight in plots—
both in the sense of narrative and of intrigue—that are often based on a complex architecture
of looks, sometimes between characters but not necessarily so. A recurrent plot device
involves characters misinterpreting what they see. Additionally, as Pascal Bonitzer argues,
Rohmer plays on the skillful exploitation of the gap between the point of view of the
protagonist/narrator and that of the camera. Rohmer, like Godard and Truffaut, combined this
double cinematic legacy with a passion for classical literature, which accounts for the
decorous manners and language in his films. And his independence from the mainstream,
concretized in his company Les Films du Losange (founded in 1962), clearly places him
within the New Wave ethos. He would retain this independence for virtually his entire career.
Back in 1962, Rohmer was smarting from the failure of Le signe du Lion. Hence, his decision
to make these two short films. As with all the other Moral Tales, they were based on stories
written by Rohmer and produced by Les Films du Losange, with Barbet Schroeder (who also
plays the protagonist in Bakery Girl) as director of production.
The twenty-three-minute-long Bakery Girl of Monceau is set near le parc Monceau and the
Villiers metro station, in a well-to-do part of northwestern Paris (which also happens to be
where the offices of Les Films du Losange were located). As the film carefully shows, the
area combines the familiar Parisian iconography of wide, leafy boulevards lined with
prosperous buildings and café terraces—the classic New Wave decor for amorous
encounters—with more populous, narrower streets housing markets and food shops, including
the bakery around which the action revolves. This class dichotomy is mirrored in the two
female characters: the tall, blonde, and artistic Sylvie (Michèle Girardon) and the short, dark
baker’s assistant Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier). The plot involves an unnamed law student
(Schroeder) falling for Sylvie after glimpsing her in the street. Just as he literally bumps into
her, she disappears. While looking for her through the quartier, he notices the pretty
Jacqueline in the bakery. Although he considers Sylvie “so superior,” he begins an elaborate
erotic ritual with Jacqueline, buying an increasing number of cakes and finally asking her out.
He unceremoniously dumps her, however, as soon as Sylvie reappears. Bakery Girl thus
perfectly illustrates Rohmer’s master plan for Six Moral Tales,as he recounted in a 1986
Positif interview: “While the narrator is looking for a woman, he meets another one, who
occupies his affection until he finds the first woman again.”
Sylvie, it turns out, lives opposite the baker. Immobilized by a broken leg, she saw the
student’s activities from her window—a neat example of the importance of the gaze in
Rohmer’s films but also a mark of its often deliberately confusing quality. The director
refrains from revealing whether she understood the student’s sadistic game with Jacqueline, or
whether she thought he was simply looking for her. A similar ambiguity characterizes the
treatment of the protagonist, the perfect bourgeois cad seducing a working-class girl for his
amusement, in the tradition of nineteenth-century literature. Rohmer here adopts the
modernist posture of the New Wave filmmaker as “entomologist,” observing his wicked
human specimen from an ironic, quasi-scientific distance—exposing his arrogance with
pronouncements such as “What upset me was not that she liked me but that she’d think there
was any way I’d like her.” But Rohmer also narrates the tale through his hero’s visual point of
view and oral narration. Jacqueline has our moral sympathy against the student’s
machinations, but our filmic identification is with him, the women never seeming more than
the objects of his desire. And yet, the charm and humor of the film mean that Rohmer never
comes near the cynicism of Chabrol’s similar seduction games in Les cousins (1959). (Also
typical of the New Wave is Rohmer’s use of friends from the film world as bit players. The
student protagonist’s narrator voice is dubbed by the future filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier; his
friend/confidant Schmidt is played by Fred Junck, who would become curator of the
Luxembourg Cinémathèque; and the film critic Michel Mardore plays a customer in the
bakery.)
Closer to Les cousins thematically, Suzanne’s Career, at fifty-five minutes, is an elaboration
on the themes of The Bakery Girl of Monceau, as well as its ambiguities. Located in the cafés
and hotels of the Latin Quarter, Suzanne’s Career deals with two bourgeois students, the
cynical Guillaume (Christian Charrière) and his shy friend Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen, the
narrator), and their relationship to Suzanne (Catherine Sée), a young woman who works
during the day to pay for her evening classes. Guillaume outrageously exploits Suzanne
financially and sexually, while Bertrand—a more developed version of Schroeder in Bakery
Girl—watches with a mixture of awe and disgust meant to duplicate that of the spectator.
Though less marked, the class and physical dichotomy operating here is similar to that of
Bakery Girl, with the down-to-earth Suzanne being contrasted with the beautiful and exotic
Sophie (Diane Wilkinson), whom both Guillaume and Bertrand desire. Suzanne is given more
screen time and dialogue than Jacqueline in the other film, but her behavior and language
seem designed to reinforce the misogyny of the men: she repeatedly lets herself be humiliated
and exploited and hardly reacts to Guillaume’s barbs (such as, “If I had good taste, I would
not like you”), and she forgives both men for abandoning her at a nightclub to which she paid
the admission. She does have her moment of triumph at the end, however. Broke and
dismissed by Guillaume, she disappears, to later return radiantly happy, married to the rich
and dashing Frank (Patrick Bauchau). Yet here, too, ambiguities prevail. As the envious
Bertrand watches, Frank complacently caresses Suzanne’s body poolside, and we finally
understand the irony of the title: as she has earlier abandoned her job, Suzanne’s “career” is,
basically, sexual. Besides, will Frank be another version of Guillaume? Suzanne’s Career, like
Bakery Girl, cleverly plays hide-and-seek with the spectator, keeping crucial scenes
offscreen—we never know for sure, for example, if it was Suzanne or Guillaume who stole
some money Bertrand had hidden in a book (though we suspect Guillaume).
In both films, Rohmer subtly oscillates between a celebration and a critique of his
protagonists. As he put it in a 1965 Cahiers article, “I am a man [. . .] and my tales are stories
told in the first person.” He does, however, increase the agency of his female characters as he
advances through the Moral Tales, and would do so even more in the Comedies and Proverbs
and Tales of the Four Seasonscycles in the eighties and nineties. With such films as Full
Moon in Paris (1984) and The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer indeed can be said to develop into
a major author of “women’s films.” But even in Six Moral Tales, he becomes increasingly
critical of the weakness of his heroes, especially their tendency to opt for the blander, “safer”
women over the more lively and sexually active “darker” women. In this respect, The Bakery
Girl of Monceau (Sylvie over Jacqueline) and Suzanne’s Career (Sophie over Suzanne)
prefigure most clearly the choices made by the heroes of My Night at Maud’s and Love in the
Afternoon.
The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career anticipate Rohmer’s later work in other
ways too: the “involuntary” realism of the location shooting offers an invaluable archive of
early-sixties Paris and of the behavior of social sets that have vanished or significantly
changed (students wearing suits and ties!), in the same way that his later series obliquely yet
tellingly document the appearance and mores of eighties and nineties France. The two earlier
films also herald Rohmer’s unparalleled ability to construct complex and absorbing stories out
of seemingly banal characters and undramatic situations. Although he said, “We must show
what is beyond behavior, while knowing that we can only show behavior,” his is a cinema of
behavior that also delves into psychological complexity. For Rohmer, the “moral tale” was
“not a moralistic tale but a story that describes not just what people do but what goes through
people’s minds while they do it.” In this respect as in others, The Bakery Girl of Monceau and
Suzanne’s Career are the fascinating first manifestations of the glorious series of films with
which Rohmer carved out his unique place in cinema.

Marriage, Rohmer-Style
The appearance of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in the midst of the sixties’ sexual
revolution brought unexpected sobriety to the European sexual drama and the comedy of
erotic manners. Their stateside popularity successfully challenged the sauciness and candor
audiences were accustomed to enjoying in other foreign-language romances. The Moral Tales
advanced a new model by mixing flirtation with intellectual tension. Rohmer was following
the spiritual neorealism of Roberto Rossellini’s marital drama Journey to Italy (1954), a
cornerstone of the French New Wave’s developing aesthetic. Like Rossellini, Rohmer was
interested in exploring sexual virtue in stories that at the same time did not put off the allures
that drew viewers to movies.
It’s fitting that the series completed its circle with Love in the Afternoon (1972)—¬originally
released in the United States as Chloé in the Afternoon—which, like Journey to Italy, uses
marriage as the fundamental social construction for sanctifying and containing men’s and
women’s erotic drives. Rohmer observes his characters’ conduct—particularly the men’s—
with a Catholic emphasis on choice and free will. Their behavior affects the social balance of
their somewhat privileged middle class while also reflecting it. More than an argument for
marriage, Love in the Afternoon tests the individual principles that form our moral universe.
Marriage, then, is a metaphor for social union—its strength and its fragility. This belief in
social institutions, and desire to explore their philosophical foundations, relates Rohmer’s film
to another great work of an earlier generation: David Lean’s bourgeois melodrama Brief
Encounter (1945).

When Rohmer’s series became an art-house hit, during the early seventies, much was made of
his almost literary dialogue and his affinities to such French rationalist dramatists as Racine
and Molière, Beaumarchais and Marivaux; but the Moral Tales do not offer epigrammatic
thesis-counterthesis-synthesis progressions. His New Wave bona fides are exhibited in the
Bazinian respect for real-time conversation, shown in naturalistic, real-world settings. Morally
weighted reality wins out over theatrical hypothesis.
So, like Lean’s postwar classic, with its emphasis on location and states of weather that serve
to verify and underscore its characters’ emotional turmoil, Love in the Afternoon is a movie
about temptation that also documents a specific moment in human history. Love in the
Afternoon is set during the gender wars following the gay and feminist movements. But, as
opposed to the tandem psychological difficulties featured by Lean and Rossellini, Rohmer
focuses on a male protagonist’s agony. This concentration on masculine ego prevails
throughout the Moral Tales and gets at the crux of patriarchal ideology. Beyond that critique,
however, lies an overall consideration of the basic, existential elements of life: emotion, time,
and space.
Frédéric (Bernard Verley) is a middle-class lawyer, proud of his home life and in love with
the idea of loving his pregnant wife and their first child, both safely ensconced in the suburbs.
Frédéric also loves traveling to the city to work; it connects him to the bustle of modernity.
He is invigorated by the freedom of city life, the proximity of chance, and, especially, the
nearness of young, attractive, available women.
Nearly the first half hour of the film is a prologue to the story of Frédéric’s temptation, in
which Rohmer exercises his most kinetic filmmaking ever, seeking to reveal the random,
itchy/horny thoughts in Frédéric’s mind. Candid yet lyrical, it is a roundelay of girl watching
and adult-male heterosexual daydreaming, its quick cutting and fleet rhythms attesting to
Rohmer’s newfound filmmaking sophistication. It is one elongated montage, flowing and
cresting along with Frédéric’s bookish, infatuated thoughts. Almost a self-contained New
Wave short in itself, this opening suggests Rohmer’s version of the life-caught-on-the-wing
caprices of François Truffaut (Stolen Kisses)and Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin féminin),and
even Agnès Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7), films made during the sixties as essays on the
revolutionary decade’s courtship manners. Rohmer’s prologue hums with the seventies’ sense
of sexual possibilities everywhere; Frédéric’s idle afternoon shopping sprees become
opportunities to cruise with a shopgirl and even pass off a come-on by an avid, possibly gay
salesman. The sequence—perhaps the textural, sensual high point of the cycle—holds
together through deliberately fleet editing and cinematographer Nestor Almendros’s soft light
and chalky palette. The imagery suggests a tumescent Rossellini—a sexualized realism—as
demonstrated in the extraordinary, self-referential episode where Frédéric dreams of meeting
random women in the streets.
These women, whose appearances resemble a series of theatrical curtain calls, turn out to be
the previous stars of the Moral Tales, each signifying one of the female idiosyncrasies that
taunts and mystifies Rohmer’s errant males. Frédéric describes them: Indifferent (Françoise
Fabian), Hurried (Béatrice Romand), Hesitant (Marie-Christine Barrault), Busy (Haydée
Politoff), Accompanied (Laurence de Monaghan), Alone (Aurora Cornu). They are not
necessarily the same Moral Tales characters we already know; the star-crossed coincidence of
their shared Paris habitat renders them autonomous and anonymous. (“These passing beauties
are simply an extension of my wife’s beauty,” Frédéric muses.) They are manifestations of
Woman, sprung from Rohmer’s consciousness rather like the interchanging of female roles
among Ingmar Bergman’s repertory of actresses. The women are introduced when Frédéric
fancies that he possesses a talisman with a magic potion that should make women
conquerable. It’s an idea he got from a book read in childhood—perhaps a Jules Verne idea,
anticipating the source of Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986). But here, the prologue concludes
with a whimsical bump: the sci-fi, fateful/faithful proposition doesn’t work as Frédéric
imagines.
This sets the stage for Chloé. Embodied by the actor Zouzou, Chloé is the most domineering
of all the Moral Tales’ women. A dark-eyed, dark-haired, aggressive bohemian, she
immediately unsettles Frédéric’s bourgeois complacency. Chloé has a rapacious, man-eater
jaw, a coarse, blunt, imposing manner. She’s socially unmoored, floats between jobs, and
speaks with the free-love attitude of the era’s liberated woman. Chloé is not the idealized
jeune fille of Frédéric’s prologue reverie but a gate-crasher to his high-minded, self-protective
suburban pretenses. (She even wears pants!)
Chloé could be a Fatal Attraction–type threat, exacerbating Frédéric’s afternoon anxieties of
lassitude and temptation. But the Moral Tales don’t countenance id monsters. Consistent with
Rohmer’s straitened, realistic style (and the film’s next two dramatic segments are more in
this vein), Chloé is able to articulate her challenge with personal logic, arguing against fidelity
and defending polygamy. (“That’s barbarian!” Frédéric objects. “It turns women into slaves.”
“Not if women do it as well,” Chloé shoots back.) Yet her final gambit is sexual: when
Frédéric traces the contours of Chloé’s leotard-clad body (the iconographic moment of the
film’s American ad campaign), her erotic allure is made almost palpable. This film presents
Rohmer’s most consistently provocative use of female sensuality, always through camera
kinetics: Frédéric’s wife, Hélène (Françoise Verley), is first glimpsed in the shower, when the
bathroom door swings open; the English nanny unexpectedly appears nude in the midst of
duty; and Chloé presents herself to Frédéric in a jolt, with the physical frankness of an
Édouard Manet odalisque.
The sudden reality of sex challenges Rohmer’s men, confronting their weaknesses and
compulsions with moral dilemmas. The Moral Tales are structured to explore each man’s
individual system of right and wrong conduct, eventually turning their private ethical battles
into psychological farce. Love in the Afternoon closes Rohmer’s circle with what at the time
must have seemed a shockingly conservative thesis. Frédéric’s reconciliation with Hélène
harks back to those moments of guilt common to both Brief Encounter and My Night at
Maud’s (1969). But there’s an element of salvation, too, that is in keeping with the Moral
Talesin their entirety and with the ethical observations of Rohmer’s later films. The discreet
ellipsis that occurs during Love in the Afternoon’s climactic portrayal of Frédéric and
Hélène’s marriage resembles the pact at the end of My Night at Maud’s, but with a stronger,
almost idealized, sense of stability. As if proving the thesis tested throughout Six Moral Tales,
Rohmer closes the series with an optimistic view of the ways in which women and men
eternally negotiate their trust and companionship, seeking a resolution to their spiritual
foundering on their quest toward the divine.
Rohmer’s clear-eyed, naturalistic manner is rarely recognized as an expressive style, because
of the subtlety with which he and Almendros meld his intellectual concerns with the visual
representation—appreciation—of the passing miracles of quotidian life. The vibrant final
sequence of Love in the Afternoon, capturing the afternoon sunlight that blesses a husband
and wife’s fidelity, is one of his most sublime, and cinematic, moments. Study it. This scene
is the consistent key to all the Moral Tales. It moves us from Frédéric’s imagination to his
conscious choice. Rohmer depicts a tryst beyond the petty intrigues of typical movie lust—as
a spiritual/rational phenomenon. It is the summation of the Moral Tales’ purpose.