Poor Eric Rohmer. You've got to feel for a guy who's probably best known for having his films likened to "watching paint dry."
At least that's how Gene Hackman's classic put-down goes in 1974's Night Moves, and odds are that more American moviegoers have seen that vintage Arthur Penn thriller than have actually watched anything by Rohmer. Happily, that situation may soon change with the release of the Criterion Collection's new box set of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales — an astonishing collection that finally sets the record straight, and that may just turn out to be the best DVD release of the year.
As with most clichés, there's a kernel of truth to that "watching paint dry" snipe, since not much seems to be happening in Rohmer's movies, at least not on the surface. A Rohmer film typically takes its sweet time unfolding, with lots of long takes, unassuming style, a maximum of chatter and a minimum of action. The director readily admits that his movies are far less concerned with what people do than with what they're thinking while they're doing it. The real story here is the life of the mind, the characters' emotional and psychological states — that's what these wry, witty films are really about.
You might even think of Rohmer as the French cinema's answer to Jane Austen, telling curiously literate stories of adult relationships that are classically structured yet delicate and coolly lucid. (Hey, at the height of America's brief infatuation with foreign films, in the '60s and '70s, Rohmer's pictures were practically considered date movies for eggheads.) Rohmer makes anti-action flicks in the best sense, driven by character and revealed through dialogue — or, more to the point, through the disparities between word and deed — and nowhere is this expressed more perfectly than in the classic films collected on Criterion's landmark set.
The moral tales, a cycle of six films Rohmer directed between 1963 and 1972, all feature variations on what appears to be the same basic narrative — a man torn between two women — but that's just a starting point, a frame of reference for the films' real work. The protagonists may be hung up on women (one of whom is generally "right" for them, and one not), but it's just as fair to say that their problems are largely self-imposed, and Rohmer roots these conflicts in the slippery slopes between obligation and desire, reality and imagination, even intellect and instinct. Each of these six films functions as a mini-essay on temptation, a gently ironic take on the battle of the sexes, and on the silly, sometimes profound and often perverse games that people play, both with others and with themselves.
Rohmer began the cycle in '63 with The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, a short but surprisingly assured sketch featuring future director Barbet Schroeder as a young man juggling dates with two different girls at the same time. Schroeder's character is the first in a long line of Rohmer males who aren't always particularly likeable and certainly aren't "heroic," but who are so richly drawn they serve as convincing examples of everyone's right to be the hero of his or her own life (or movie).
As in many of Rohmer's later films, Girl at the Monceau Bakery features an extensive voice-over but, as the narrator's perceptions are often contradicted by actual events, it's best taken with many grains of salt. For all the talking going on here, there's more to be gleaned by simply watching carefully and reading between the lines.
The even trickier Suzanne's Career, made the same year as Monceau Bakery, examines tensions between two male friends when one of them finds himself attracted to a woman only after his friend expresses interest in her. Some very curious mind games ensue (of a sort that, though basically whimsical, sets the stage for edgier, contemporary filmmakers like Neil LaBute), and the crisp, documentary-like footage shot on the streets of early-'60s Paris serves as an extraordinary time capsule of an enchanting, now-vanished world.
The third installment in the cycle, 1969's My Night at Maud's, was actually something of a hit in its day at the American box office; it nabbed a couple of Oscar nominations, and is considered by many to be Rohmer's masterpiece. Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as a serious, self-absorbed fellow whose well-ordered world is rocked by an evening spent with a beautiful, sophisticated woman. Nobody winds up doing the nasty (sorry if that's giving too much away), but the film is tantalizingly erotic as Trintignant and his sleek, smart and unabashedly aggressive companion spend the night lost in free-flowing conversation, sparring over religion, philosophy, politics and everything in between. Eloquent talkfests like Before Sunset and My Dinner with Andre, or even cruder, language-driven fare such as Clerks and Swingers wouldn't exist if Rohmer hadn't been here first.
La Collectionneuse (which was shot two years earlier than Maud but officially follows it in the cycle) is another sly look at characters (often self-conscious intellectuals, and more often males) deceiving themselves into thinking their analytical abilities somehow allow them to rise above their feelings. Rohmer's actors also collaborated with him on the script of this naturalistic study about a pair of vacationing artists attempting to resist and perhaps "reform" a promiscuous woman who collects experiences. This was Rohmer's first film in color, and Nestor Almendros's gorgeous imagery of the French Riviera is the icing on the cake.
One of the director's most intricate yet accessible films, Claire's Knee (1970) might be the perfect place to begin gauging whether Rohmer is really for you (this is a filmmaker, after all, who will not be to everyone's taste). Rohmer's powers of observation have never been so keen, nor his characters so alive, as in this perfectly composed tale of an older man perplexed by his attraction to two young sisters (one of whom possesses that eponymous, all-consuming knee). The midlife crisis theme expands even further in 1972's cunning yet gently lyrical Chloe in the Afternoon (also known as Love in the Afternoon), in which a happily married man strives to resist a seductive old flame, and Rohmer brings one of the cinema's great cycles to its elegant end.
The director himself (now a spry 86-year-old) personally supervised the extensive restoration work that resulted in the spotless, beautifully detailed transfers featured on the six discs of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. In addition to the great gift of presenting these films the way they've long demanded to be seen, Criterion's lovingly produced box set features a wealth of supplemental material, including no less than five rare Rohmer shorts (one starring fellow Nouvelle Vague conspirator Jean-Luc Godard); extensive in-depth interviews with the director and numerous key collaborators; and even a vintage Rohmer-produced TV episode on Blaise Pascal, the philosopher debated in Maud.
As if that weren't enough, the set also includes a handsomely designed 58-page booklet of essays by film critics and historians, highlighted by Rohmer's groundbreaking 1948 manifesto "For a Talking Cinema," as well as a 262-page soft-cover book of Rohmer's original stories of the moral tales, translated into English. Smart shoppers can pick this baby up online for under $65 shipped and, frankly, that's a steal for this essential purchase.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2006.
