28Aug06
Once upon a time, in a country of the old, civilized Europe, an article of the civil code allowed a rapist to go free if the victim agreed to marry him. The wedding voided the crime. And once upon a time, which after all was not so long ago—less than fifty years—in the old, civilized Europe, there was a filmmaker who was very angry about the cultural flaws of his civil society and made a film accordingly: with courage, rage, and a lot of dark humor.
Pietro Germi’s previous film, Divorce Italian Style, had been the stunning national and international success of 1961–62 and won an Academy Award for its script. The only place where it flopped was in southern Italy: the local public didn’t appreciate Germi’s bitter irony on such serious subjects as the so-called delitto d’onore—crime of honor—the real legal aberration by which the film’s fictional baron, Fefé Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni), could kill his ugly wife, in order to marry the young and beautiful Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), and go free.
21Aug06
There’s plenty of wit on the surface,” I wrote in my capsule review of Kicking and Screaming when it was released a little over a decade ago, “but the pain of paralysis comes through loud and clear.” Having voluntarily spent five years as an undergraduate myself, I could and still can find plenty of reasons to identify with the four desperate antiheroes of this brittle comedy, who graduate from college and then proceed to spend the next half year on or around campus, doing as little as possible.
Grover (Josh Hamilton), expecting to live in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jane (Olivia d’Abo), is so dumbstruck and angry when she accepts a scholarship to study in Prague that he won’t reply to any of her phone messages and can only brood over their past in five strategically placed flashbacks, each one heralded by a black-and-white snapshot of her. Otis (Carlos Jacott) finds himself incapable of flying to grad school in Milwaukee, only one time zone away, and reverts to living with his mother. Max (Chris Eigeman), who’d rather label broken glass as such on the floor than sweep it up, finds nothing better to do than chide Otis, do crossword puzzles, and have sex with Miami (Parker Posey), the girlfriend of Skippy (Jason Wiles). And Skippy literally returns to school but can’t bring himself to do any of the work. As Miami and Kate (Cara Buono)—a sixteen-year-old to whom Max turns next—both point out at separate junctures, these four friends tend to talk and behave in the same way, inventing arcane quizzes (“Can you name eight movies in which monkeys play a major role?”) while downing lots of scotch and beer and in general comprising something that resembles a four-man frat house.
14Aug06
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 Voyage in Italy (1954), a cornerstone of the French new wave’s developing aesthetic. Like Rossellini, that is, 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 Voyage in 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 (1946).
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.
14Aug06
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, in 1959. Yet these two short works are an important blueprint for Rohmer's fantastically prolific and brilliant oeuvre, which now spans six decades: for their meticulously charted Parisian 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. Not incidentally, they also inaugurate the first of 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 vérité 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 16mm camera and several nonprofessional actors, including friends. 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 co-wrote a book with Chabrol, in 1957, 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, and, as Pascal Bonitzer argues, he 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 heritage 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 1963), clearly places him within the new-wave ethos. He would retain this independence for virtually his entire career.
14Aug06
In terms of consistency of both the content and form of his films, Eric Rohmer is without a doubt one of the most distinctive auteurs in the history of cinema. As with Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu, within minutes—seconds, even—of starting to watch one of his movies, it’s clear who made it. Not that his visual style is even remotely flashy; like Howard Hawks—one of the Hollywood directors Rohmer greatly admired when he was critic and editor, in the 1950s and early ’60s, for Cahiers du cinéma—Rohmer prefers to keep technology and technique invisible. Indeed, so deceptively simple and straightforward is his work that some dismiss it as “talking heads.” Such an assessment is right (but not particularly bright) to point to his love of conversation, and accurate insofar as it alludes—accidentally—to his fascination and skill in terms of exploring feelings, opinions, and thoughts, rather than depicting the kinds of actions (catching crooks, killing enemies, saving the world, seeing the light) favored by most directors. But it fatally ignores the remarkable emotional, intellectual, and dramaturgic subtlety of his work. A Rohmer movie is not simply a drama or a comedy, a love story or an exercise in suspense, a psychological study or a philosophical disquisition; it’s all these and considerably more. Whether an original piece or an adaptation, be it set in the present or the past, the city or the country, it’s always first and foremost a Rohmer film. In essence, he invented his own genre.
With the benefit of hindsight, that clearly applies even to his underrated first feature, Le signe du Lion, but it’s more obviously apparent in the case of the Six Moral Tales, made over the next decade. The first two films—The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962) and Suzanne’s Career (1963)—were shorts, cheaply made on 16mm, and for all their astute intelligence and charm, they look (especially when compared with the marvels that followed) like minor apprentice works. But in their basic subject matter—a young man already attracted to one woman is distracted by another—and focus on the endless emotional shifts and self-deluding rationalizations that the wholly unromanticized protagonists put themselves through, they set the tone for the whole series. Rohmer had decided to embark upon a series as a means both of securing financing and of helping viewers to get used to his unusually genre-lite and unfashionably literary narratives. But the strategy also allowed him to create a wonderfully imaginative series of variations on a single but rich theme and to bring his own idiosyncratic style to mature fruition in a remarkably short time.
14Aug06
“Some people think Rohmer is in league with the devil,” wrote cinematographer nestor almendros in his book of autobiographical reflections on the cinema, a man with a camera. He was describing his working experience on My Night at Maud's (1969). “Months before, he had scheduled the exact date for shooting the scene where it snows; that day, right on time, it snowed, and the snow lasted all day long, not just a few minutes.” Later, Almendros makes a curious shift. “It is not just a question of luck; the key lies in Rohmer’s detailed preparation.”
One wonders exactly what Almendros means here. If it hadn’t snowed, would Rohmer’s detailed preparation have paid off so handsomely? Given the fact that he was working with a minuscule budget and a production schedule for which the term rushed seems generous, isn’t it likely that the entire production would have come to a standstill, depriving the film not only of its seasonal atmosphere but of one of its key dramatic elements? (In fact, such a disaster befell the shoot of The Green Ray [1986], when the eponymous phenomenon failed to materialize, and Rohmer was forced to wait an entire year before he got the shot he needed.)
But Almendros was on to something with his seemingly contradictory statements: Rohmer’s meticulous preparation neither dispels the need for luck nor compensates for it. In fact, he creates situations, in his filmmaking and for his characters, in which preparation and chance go hand in hand. Jean-Claude Brialy’s Jérôme, in Claire’s Knee (1970), might be the ultimate Rohmer hero, in that his quest offers a mirror image of Rohmer’s as an artist: to lay the groundwork for a situation in which chance will play the decisive role. No one’s films are more “written,” more narrative based, or more logistically tied to particular places and times of year—Rohmer’s cinema is nothing if not preplanned. On the other hand, Rohmer is just as enamored of the aesthetic felicities of raw, unfolding reality as Jean Renoir or Roberto Rossellini—aesthetic felicities and moral complexities, which are infinitely richer and more . . . complex than in the work of almost any other filmmaker. François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette may have been known as the Jamesians, but while Rohmer is a temperamental world away from the author of “The Beast in the Jungle” and The Wings of the Dove, he is similarly sensitive to the layered proximity of the mental and the physical, the subjective and the objective.
14Aug06
La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste. In retrospect, it is both classically Rohmer-esque and atypical, as befits a film in which the director was still finding his way. The first full-length feature in the Moral Tales, the first one in color, the first collaboration between the director and his great cameraman Nestor Almendros, it is also more sexually explicit and linguistically gruff—less chivalric, if you will.
By the time Eric Rohmer began shooting La collectionneuse, in 1967, he had already made the first two of his Moral Tales, the featurettes The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962) and Suzanne’s Career (1963), and the thematic template of the series had been established: a man committed to one woman is tempted by a second but resists having sex with her, in the meantime turning himself inside out with analytical self-scrutiny.
He had actually planned to do La collectionneuse after My Night at Maud’s (1969), but the prospective star of that film, Jean-Louis Trintignant, was tied up with another shooting, and so the director decided to go ahead and direct this feature out of sequence, on a very low budget, with nonprofessionals and limited sets. As James Monaco tells it in his valuable book The New Wave, “The only expenses that summer were for film stock and rent for the house in Saint-Tropez, which was the set and which also housed cast and crew. There was also a small budget line for the salary of the cook, who, the stories go, cooked nothing but minestrone during the entire shooting schedule.” All this may help explain why La collectionneuse has a somewhat transitional, in-between air: its three main characters, mooching for the summer off their absentee friend Rudolph’s beneficence, and Rohmer himself, waiting to start shooting the bigger-budget production that would come to be regarded as his masterpiece, are all marking time.
14Aug06
It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that eric rohmer’s six moral tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze, insult, tease, provoke, skirmish, flirt, philosophize, lie, in an endless round of glittering verbal maneuvers that constitute the late twentieth century’s most literate tales of love, our latter-day Liaisons dangereuses. On the other, the actors seem too perfectly cast, as if they’d been the models for the characters, not the other way around, and Rohmer had used what we know and sense about them to shape roles that seem to emanate from their very skins and psyches. And then there’s the incandescent (and sometimes underrated) imagery—the precise locations, the crucial weather, the endlessly variable expressions of the human face and body, all those seductive surfaces that raise crucial questions about the “morals” that are the heart of the stories and that are analogous to the spell cast by cinema itself, the ruthless geometry of choice and the royalty of sex appeal at the heart of its addictive power.
A girl in a bikini whose coltlike body is dissected as she walks along the water’s edge at the beginning of La collectionneuse (1967); the camera forsaking its neutrality in My Night at Maud’s (1969) to focus on the wittily inviting Françoise Fabian, lying under a fur coverlet as thick and white as the snow outside; Love in the Afternoon’s (1972) happily married Bernard having fantasies about the damsels he encounters in the streets of Paris. And of the six tales, none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee (1970), the joint in question, that of a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male.
