Eric Rohmer : Dialectical Romance

 

 Eric Rohmer is one of the few filmmakers whose name, no less than those of Hitchcock or Chaplin, has become an adjective. A Rohmerian film is one in which people talk, and talk at length, whether they’re walking or at home, at work or in transit, on the job or on vacation. What they talk about, mostly, is love. Even when they’re talking about other things, as they often do—about art, philosophy, other relationships, personal preferences of various sorts—they’re still talking, by proxy, about matters of the heart. The easily recognizable style of Rohmer’s films, however, has often got in the way of a clear recognition of the underlying subjects around which his entire œuvre gravitates: the avoidance of false or illusory love in the quest for the real thing, and the recognition of true love as the very essence of culture over all. Those are the themes that animate “Tales of the Four Seasons,” a tetralogy of films that Rohmer made in the nineteen-nineties, which will be streaming on Film Forum’s virtual cinema, starting this Friday.
 
Film Forum is releasing the four movies in chronological order, a week apart. In the first, “A Tale of Springtime,” from 1990, Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) is a thirtyish high-school philosophy teacher who lives in Paris but has no place to stay. She has an apartment of her own but has lent it to a cousin; she often lives with her boyfriend at his place, but he’s out of town and his apartment is such a mess that she can’t bear to be there alone. Jeanne takes refuge at a party, where she is befriended by an eighteen-year-old conservatory student named Natacha (Florence Darel), who invites Jeanne to stay with her at her father’s large and comfortable apartment. But Natacha has an ulterior motive: she wants to set Jeanne up with her father, Igor (Hugues Quester). Igor, an arts administrator and critic, is a young forty, intellectual and fastidious. He and Jeanne turn out to get along very well; theirs is a meeting of the minds, and, in her boyfriend’s absence, Jeanne finds herself tempted. Rohmer, who was seventy when he made the film, was interested in intergenerational dynamics and their psychological implications—including symbolic (and solely symbolic) evocations of incest. Natacha is dating a man who’s nearly her father’s age, and Igor’s girlfriend (whom Natacha detests) is about the same age as Natacha. Jeanne is aware that she’s being recruited as Natacha’s stepmother, and she finds herself dragged into their crisscrossing power struggles, including in a strange subplot involving a missing family heirloom. The breezily hyper-rational Jeanne, who adorns her conversation with disquisitions on Plato and Kant and organizes her life on logical principles, discovers the perversity of reason when it comes to matters of the heart.
 
This perversity is as central to Rohmer’s movies as the cultivated dialogue or poised behavior. His characters are seized by desire and driven to distraction by it—and that distraction is, in his cinematic world view, a primal danger. For some, the cheaters and adulterers who weave webs of deceit, gratification of desire comes at the mere expense of their word or leads to comedic threats to their dignity; for others, it obliterates a fundamental sense of morality. Rohmer considered fierce lust the human condition and the repression or sublimation of it (including through the very dialectical pirouettes and curlicues that adorn his movies) the definition of society, culture, religion, and humanity at large. The smooth surfaces of Rohmer’s movies are taut, stretched nearly to the breaking point by the violence that they contain. In the 1976 film “The Marquise of O,” with a clear-eyed sense of horror, he dramatized rape as the pathological yet logical end point of the inability to control desire.
 
Rohmer’s movies are, for the most part, intimate and small-scale. Made on low budgets, they’re rooted in sharp-eyed, documentary-like attention to landscape and architecture and to the finest points of his actors’ behaviors—which Rohmer often developed on the basis of their personal lives and characteristics. But the films’ outward modesty is yet another ruse. The intellectual scope of Rohmer’s vision is philosophically and conceptually vast. He was a polymath who was a talented artist in his adolescence, and he also produced, directed, and starred in local theatrical productions. (His given name was Maurice Schérer; Éric Rohmer was his movie-world pseudonym.) He conceived his first novel at nineteen and wrote it at twenty-four, while completing a degree that allowed him to teach high-school Greek and Latin. (The book, “Élisabeth,” for which he adopted the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, was released, in 1946, by France’s most prestigious publishing house, Gallimard.) He became a quiet pillar of the postwar cultural whirlwind of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in Paris. With virtually no prior experience with movies, he became friends with the journalist, critic, and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc and began watching films with a keen creative fervor.
 
In 1948, Rohmer published an article titled “Cinema, an Art of Space,” which Jean-Luc Godard and others have called the opening salvo of the French New Wave. In many other ways, Rohmer was the movement’s godfather. He started making films in the nonprofessional 16-mm. format, and became, in 1948, the public ringleader of the so-called Ciné-Club of the Latin Quarter, which attracted the young Godard and also François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Rohmer founded a magazine, La Gazette du Cinéma, in which he published his young friends’ writings and his own (along with those of Sartre and other luminaries). When Cahiers du Cinéma was founded, in 1951, Rohmer was one of its writers and wise counsellors, and he brought his passionate acolytes over with him.
 
Rohmer was also a rightist—a practicing Catholic and monarchist who preached the superiority of European culture and upheld the cinema as its greatest modern exemplar. Indeed, there was something inherently conservative about Rohmer’s principled resistance to desire and his belief in its built-in tendency to lead to monstrosity. His artistic enshrinement of the notion of one true love transformed the monogamous ideal from a rule of religious faith to a secular and aestheticized substitute for it. Yet there was also a veiled element of confession in his cinema of elaborate sublimation. Only a few of Rohmer’s movies deal directly with religion, but nearly all contain the elements of a theodicy: there is a sense, in his cinematic universe, of the divine finger tilting the world’s scales just enough to keep society running, and of that higher authority’s subtly decisive presence in the lives of his characters. He dramatizes the crucial mechanism of that fate, the scale on which the divine finger is poised, as chance—and faith as the irrational confidence in yielding to it. Most of his movies (including the “Tales of the Four Seasons”) are built around characters who experience chance as destiny; it’s an idea that he theorized long before filming it.

 
Those ideas come together most explicitly in the second film in the “Seasons” set, “A Tale of Winter,” from 1992. It starts with a hairdresser named Félicie (Charlotte Véry) meeting a man named Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) while on vacation. They have a passionate affair just before he’s to embark on a long trip abroad. She gives him her address so that he can write, but, in a slip of the tongue, she tells him the wrong Paris suburb and never hears from him again. After the affair, Félicie discovers that she is pregnant by Charles. Five years later, she is raising the child alone, and is romantically involved with two other men in Paris: Loïc (Hervé Furic), a librarian, and Maxence (Michel Voletti), the owner of the salon where she works. But she is obsessed with the possibility of running into Charles again. She decides to leave Paris with Maxence, who’s opening a salon in the provincial town of Nevers, in the hope of purging herself of that obsession, but once there she still can’t get Charles—or, for that matter, Loïc—entirely out of her mind. The movie is filled with discussions about religious and spiritual matters, Catholic practice and the concept of reincarnation, Plato’s concept of the immortality of the soul and the dramatic reanimation in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale.” It takes place in December, at Christmastime, and it pivots on an apt stroke of chance that resembles a miracle.
 
  
Many of the crucial concepts behind Rohmer’s filmmaking were foreshadowed in his early film criticism. In 1948, for instance, he wrote a piece for Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes titled “For a Talking Cinema,” in which he argued for the creation of a new, dialogue-centered style of film that would necessarily mark the cinema’s “avant-garde.” Several years later, in 1955, he wrote a quintet of pieces in Cahiers du Cinéma called “Celluloid and Marble,” which weren’t reissued in any of the collections of Rohmer’s criticism that were published during his lifetime. (He died in 2010, at the age of eighty-nine, and the essays were published as a book later the same year.) As early as 1963, Rohmer wrote that he wouldn’t reissue them because he could no longer stand by some of the “reactionary” views that he expressed there. He didn’t specify which opinions in particular (nor did he offer an apology), but the pieces evince, in one section, a fervent and prideful Eurocentrism (indeed, a metropolitan Western-Eurocentrism), along with scorn toward non-European cultures and societies. At the same time, his five essays furnish some of the most exciting, far-reaching, philosophically insightful reflections on the art of movies that I’ve ever read.
 
Rohmer’s fundamental idea in “Celluloid and Marble” was to consider the cinema in light of other arts—painting, literature, music, and architecture. He wanted to show what was distinctive about movies, and why, at the time of his writing, movies were aesthetically ahead of the pack. At Cahiers, Rohmer was one of the principal proponents of the politique des auteurs, the concept that has often been mistranslated, and misconceived, as “auteur theory.” His five essays put into action the auteur idea (which, pace Andrew Sarris, is not a theory but a practice): Rohmer was watching movies not like a spectator but like an artist.
 
In the first and second essays, he develops his idea of the cinema in terms of “classicism.” Modern art is the destruction of a tradition, he argues, and the movies—by substituting the representation of reality for figures of style—have the power to reclaim and reaffirm that tradition, but in a form “rejuvenated, washed of the patina that justified our former disaffection.” The third essay, “On Metaphor,” which centered on the relation between cinema and literature, is where Rohmer’s ideas take full flight. His goal is to reclaim rhetorical figures of style for movies—and to recognize them in the medium’s representations of reality. His argument is sinuous, speculative, and seemingly academic, but it contains a passionately insightful view of other directors’ movies and a visionary anticipation of the ones that he himself would make. Rohmer contrasts the “decadence” of modern poetry with the enduring poetic originality of Balzac’s novels and other major works of nineteenth-century fiction (such as Poe’s). These narratives, he says, are filled with great metaphors, which draw their power from their expression of a vast, consistent, unifying philosophy—one that they share, an “idea of universal magnetism” derived from the eighteenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Rohmer contends that modern poetry and literature have lost such an “abstract framework of a quasi-mathematical rigor,” but that the cinema has it—and that the directors whose films best display it are F. W. Murnau, Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roberto Rossellini. In their movies, he says, realistic images are transformed into metaphors by evoking “the presence of the great laws of the Universe”—a sense of fate or destiny.
 
In Rohmer’s fourth essay, he stands these ideas of mystical unities and teleologies on their heads. Here he likens the cinema to music, arguing that the forms share a relationship to time. He contends that this similarity to music balances the “determinism” of the cinema’s literary heritage with “freedom”—the freedom of characters—and affirms the supreme artistic value of the minutiae of ordinary people’s daily lives. By “music,” however, Rohmer has something specific in mind: classical music from German-speaking countries made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he contends that the cinema is inextricably connected to this sense of place and culture: “Occidental . . . by its origins, so the cinema remains, to this day, in its spirit.” He deigns to acknowledge “the right of India or Japan to make films,” but, absurdly, adds, “I believe that the traditions to which these peoples still remain attached are less fecund than ours. . . . The cinema isn’t only the product of our technical genius but of a long odyssey of our art. . . . We are the most apt for the cinema because the screen rejects artifice and because we Europeans have a more acute sense of the natural.” He shamelessly goes on in this vein for three long paragraphs, in which he also demeans European folk dances, ethnological study, tango, jazz, and yoga. These passages are as ridiculous as they are offensive, as racist as they are ignorant (including of Asian cinema itself). At the same time, they suggest a peculiar category error, one that reflects Rohmer’s own conflicting fields of activity. Not content to elucidate his own viewing (and listening) pleasures and his own artistic intentions, he tries to dignify criticism with his academic robes and to render his judgments of the arts universal and absolute.
 
In 1984, interviewed for the preface of “The Taste for Beauty,” a collection of his critical essays, Rohmer called his thinking at the time that he wrote the five essays “monstrously naïve.” Still, an odd trace of his old attitudes crops up in the third film in the “Tales” series, “A Tale of Summer,” from 1996. It’s the only one of the four films with a male protagonist, and its story has roots in Rohmer’s own youth. It stars Melvil Poupaud as Gaspard, a talented guitarist and songwriter who has a newly minted master’s degree in math (and a job awaiting him in that field). But his main love is music. He arrives for a summer vacation in a seaside town in Brittany, where a friend has lent him a room. His girlfriend, Léna (Aurelia Nolin), is supposed to meet him there but she’s delayed. In the meantime, he chances to meet, on the beach, a postdoctoral ethnography student named Margot (Amanda Langlet). Their friendship intensifies, but Margot—whose boyfriend is away on an extended trip—rebuffs Gaspard’s romantic overtures and, instead, proposes to introduce him to an acquaintance named Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon). Then the long-delayed Léna arrives, and Gaspard’s love life grows increasingly complicated and duplicitous. He ultimately finds a surprising resolution to his problem, one that (no spoilers) is inspired by the passion and the power of his artistic ambitions.
 
Gaspard is onscreen in nearly every scene, but it’s Margot who emerges as one of the most vivid characters in Rohmer’s entire cinematic universe. Her insight and foresight, her practical sense and impulsive audacity, are the main drivers of the drama, and she sees Gaspard more clearly than he sees himself. In that sense, she is a sort of Jamesian central consciousness: her gaze and judgment exert a constant, magnetic power on the action, even in her absence. (She’s also a character with strange echoes of Rohmer’s long-ago prejudices. She tells Gaspard that she’d done ethnographic fieldwork in Asia before discovering that she found it more interesting to study the lives and customs of people in her native country.) Rohmer wrote, in the fifth of his essays, that he considers Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” to be the exemplary film of spectatorship, because its hero “forces us to take a salutary step back from the action.” Rohmer put this idea into practice with Margot, a third-party observer to romance. But he also anticipated the pitfalls of the general trend toward spectatorship in modern media culture. “Soon, television will bring us to a near-total isolation: a chair and a receiver may well be the sole furniture of tomorrow,” he wrote, in the fifth essay. Future filmmakers, looking out their own rear windows, might therefore have a depressing view: “This homo spectator, in millions of copies, would be a truly feeble subject for a screenwriter.”
 

Rohmer revels in the pleasures of immediate experience, the splendors of nature—and of first-hand, practical, and creative activity—in the last entry in quartet, “A Tale of Autumn,” from 1998, which is one of Rohmer’s most rapturous and luminous films. It’s centered on two fortysomething women, friends since childhood, who live in the south of France, in wine country, the Rhône Valley. Isabelle (Marie Rivière), long married, owns a bookstore in town; Magali (Béatrice Romand), a widow, owns an organic vineyard. Realizing that Magali is suffering from her solitude, Isabelle tries to find her friend a suitable suitor. Yet she does so through a clever, and perhaps too-clever, ruse that threatens their friendship and the tranquility of their family lives. The story is a familiar tangle of intrigues and friendships across the generations, of menacing desires and wavering commitments, yet Rohmer films it with an exalted, loving cinematic embrace. Romand and Rivière were Rohmer’s longtime associates, accomplices, and friends, and his joy in working with them is palpable, as is his delight in the film’s setting—the intimate and fragrant particulars of the vineyard, the region and its vistas (including its despoilment by nuclear power plants, which Rohmer films with a sardonic ruefulness). “The Tale of Autumn” is also a breathtakingly bittersweet farewell of sorts. It isn’t Rohmer’s last film—he went on to make three more features, each a great one in its way—but it’s the last Rohmerian film, the last of his masterpieces of dialectical romance.

Looking Behind Éric Rohmer’s Cinematic Style. By Richard Brody. The New Yorker, March 24, 2021. 

“I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry,” scoffs Harry Moseby, the gruff private eye played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s classic 1975 neo-noir “Night Moves.” Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the breezy, sophisticated entertainments of French New Wave legend Éric Rohmer appealing to a meat-and-potatoes ex-footballer like Harry. But the line pays dividends later when Moseby discovers he’s been fitted with the horns of a cuckold by his wife and an effete art dealer at a screening of Rohmer’s 1969 infidelity comedy “My Night at Maud's,” a sly twist of the knife in a movie about a detective too blinded by his own blustery machismo to solve a mystery that’s unraveling right under his nose.
 
You won’t find any tough-guy blowhards like Harry in the films of Éric Rohmer. These are gentle, classy pictures about well-educated people with impeccable manners. They know which wine pairs best with your fish, but precious little, as it turns out, about their own hearts. So they talk. Heavens, do they talk. Rohmer’s characters talk themselves around in circles, in and out of affairs. They construct elaborate excuses for doing what they feel like or make up ridiculous reasons why they won’t. In his 1970 “Claire’s Knee” — one of the director’s drollest films — our long-winded protagonist spends most of the second hour concocting an insane intellectual justification for his overwhelming desire to caress the knee of a teenage girl next door. Rohmer doesn’t judge these characters for their folly so much as he regards them with wry bemusement.
 
A novelist and critic from the Cahiers du Cinéma crew that included Jean Luc-Godard, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, Rohmer directed 20-something theatrical features and all sorts of television and shorts over a career that spanned 57 years. His style was less flashy and experimental than that of his peers, which is perhaps why it proved more durable at the box office over the long haul. Rohmer was still helming arthouse hits almost right up until his death in 2010 at the age of 89. He loved shooting cycles of films centered around similar themes, as with the “Six Moral Tales” that kicked off his career and “Comedies and Proverbs” in the 1980s. The director’s final film series, “Tales of the Four Seasons,” has just been beautifully restored (and in two cases, retitled) by the good folks at Janus Films. All four features start streaming this weekend at the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Virtual Screening Room.
 
Rohmer was pushing 70 when he began the project, and these films exude the relaxed command of an old master. None of the storylines or characters overlap from movie to movie — you can watch them in any order you’d like — but they all include slight variations on recurring motifs of matchmaking, missed opportunities and what happens when lofty, abstract ideals about love have to compete with our more mundane reality. A practicing Catholic whose faith figured prominently (though not overbearingly) in his work, Rohmer favors chance encounters and crazy coincidences that might be explained by a higher power pulling some of these strings, but the movies maintain plausible deniability. Each of these “Tales of the Four Seasons” ends with a deus ex machina that could also just be good luck. Either way, there’s a sunny sense of fortune smiling upon these lovelorn fools.

 
The first and least essential in the cycle is 1990’s “A Tale of Springtime,” about a philosophy teacher (Anne Teyssèdre) striking up a fast friendship with a conservatory student (Florence Darel) who feels the former might make a good match for her dad. Like most divorcées in these movies, he’s currently dating a woman his daughter’s age, and the student’s clumsily transparent setup brings all four of them together at a country estate for a payoff that lacks the snap of farce but veers off somewhere potentially more interesting as the wised-up marks try to politely take control of an awkward situation. It’s enjoyable enough, but these ideas are explored with more finesse elsewhere in the series.
 
 “A Tale of Winter” begins in the summer, when Félicie’s sexy, beachfront idyll with a chef named Charles comes to a close as he heads off to Paris and the two lose touch. Cut to five years later and she’s raising his daughter, longing for the day they might somehow meet again. (It’s pre-cellphone era 1992, so they can’t just look each other up on Facebook.) Played by the fetching Charlotte Véry, Félicie vacillates between two suitors. There’s a pragmatic hairdresser (Michel Voletti) and a lovestruck librarian (Hervé Furic), but neither can compete with her idealized memories of Charles. Notably, the only movie in the cycle that doesn’t take place at a luxurious vacation spot, it’s shot in gorgeously grainy 16mm on slushy streets and comes back to the concept of Pascal’s wager, a philosophical argument for faith that was a favorite of Rohmer’s going back to “My Night at Maud’s.” This is a Christmas movie so you know there’s going to be a miracle in here somewhere, and it also features my favorite line in any of these films: “I love you. But not enough to live with you, only enough to ruin your life.”
 
Rohmer has admitted there’s more than a bit of autobiography in 1996’s “A Tale of Summer” (formerly “A Summer’s Tale”) which might explain why it’s the most wistful of the quartet. Melvil Poupaud — a tousle-headed, proto-Timothée Chalamet — stars as a callow recent maths graduate vacationing on the Brittany coast before he’s set to start a big job in the fall. But his summer of wine, women and song gets complicated as he tries to juggle the affections of two different girlfriends in whom he’s not particularly interested, confiding his schemes to a sharp-tongued cafe waitress (Amanda Langlet) who’s got his number. It’s a deceptively sunny movie with a melancholic undertow, looking back at a young man who's got an awful lot of living and learning to do, and wondering for a moment what might have been. (It also contains a surprising amount of sea shanty content for the TikTokers.)

 
Finally, “A Tale of Autumn” (released stateside in 1999 as “Autumn Tale”) is regarded by many as Rohmer’s final masterpiece. Doubling up on the “Springtime” matchmaking premise, the film stars Béatrice Romand as a frizzy-haired widow who runs a winery and is suffering from empty nest syndrome now that her children have grown. Her best friend (Marie Rivière) has secretly placed a personal ad on her behalf and is surreptitiously auditioning suitors. Meanwhile — in the most quintessentially “French movie” plot development I can recall — her son’s girlfriend wants to fix her up with an older college professor she used to sleep with back at school. Of course, everybody ends up invited to the same wedding.
 
But all these misunderstandings and mistaken identities play out in a quieter, more contemplative register than one might expect from such a silly synopsis. These characters are older and more cautious than Rohmer’s regular lovers, a bit more bruised by life and less susceptible to romantic whims. (Yes, the word “autumnal” comes to mind.) Make sure to keep watching through the closing credits for a final shot that opens up an entire other world of possibilities easily missed the first time around. Maybe the protagonist of the picture isn’t really who we thought it was all along? “A Tale of Autumn” made me feel like Hackman’s Harry Moseby outside that movie theater showing “My Night at Maud's,” realizing I hadn’t seen what was happening right in front of me.
 
Coolidge Corner Theatre Streams Director Éric Rohmer's 'Tales Of The Four Seasons'. By Sean Burns. Wbur ,  April 1, 2021. 

A Tale of Springtime (1990), the inaugural entry in Éric Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons” cycle (a quartet of movies that will stream via Film Forum’s virtual cinema this April), opens with a brief study in displacement. We first see Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) exiting the Lycée Jacques Brel, spotlit amid the students by her blazer, pumps, and belted chinos. Jeanne drives through a suburb and across the Seine into central Paris, where she enters an apartment strewn with tangled bedsheets, men’s shirts, and the crumbs of a half-eaten baguette. Soon abandoning her reflexive tidying to pack a duffel bag with some clothes and two volumes of philosophy (Plato and Kant), she then drives to a second apartment. Here she finds things in better order, save for the strange young man (Marc Lelou) in his underpants. Is this place her home, and not the other? It is and it isn’t, we learn, as her cousin and houseguest Gaëlle (Sophie Robin) appears and asks if she and her boyfriend can stay a few more days. Jeanne says no problem, claims she was only stopping by to switch out some clothes; it’s spring, she adds. The ease with which Jeanne adopts the pretense of just passing through invites the viewer’s admiration—how gracious—as well as her scrutiny. Is this deception in the name of courtesy, or vice versa? Where does this woman actually live? How to measure the gap between what Jeanne says and what she really wants?
 
We next see Jeanne in yet another apartment, striking the afflicted pose of the peripheral party guest. Seated on a couch apart from the action, she is joined by Natacha (Florence Darel), an eighteen-year-old conservatory student who has just been stranded there by her much older boyfriend. Talk of when and how to escape the party turns to that of their respective living situations: Jeanne’s boyfriend, Mathieu, is away, and she can’t bear to stay in his apartment alone; Natacha now has her childhood home to herself, her divorced father Igor (Hugues Quester) having effectively moved in with his twenty-year-old girlfriend, Ève (Eloïse Bennett).
 
Bound by their navigation of different transitional phases, the pair’s contrasting presentation suggests a larger shift in progress. In her shoulder pads, frosted lipstick, and Mary Lou Retton crop, Jeanne, a philosophy teacher in her late twenties, still cuts an ’80s silhouette. Wearing crushed velvet bodysuits and ultra-high-waisted everything, at the turn of the decade Natacha already has both feet in the ’90s. Yet the distance between them adjusts only slightly their engagement with the questions that bedevil so many Rohmer characters: how to form a coherent account of one’s own desires and act in accordance with them, how to marry notions of selfhood with one’s actual self, how to take possession of what one already has. Jeanne accepts Natacha’s invitation to spend the night at her apartment, a gently dilapidated space with original moldings where the host complains about her mother and Ève, laments her father’s failed literary ambitions, plays from Robert Schumann’s Songs of Dawn on the piano, and exhibits a little girl’s glee in showing Jeanne her bedroom.

 
By turns tentative and expansive, the connection between Jeanne and Natacha forms the seabed over which the film’s various moods, schemes, and ideas flow. Each sees an opportunity in the other—Jeanne the remedy for her self-imposed exile, and Natacha a more suitable girlfriend for her father. When Natacha contrives a series of encounters between Jeanne and Igor—a mild, diffident civil servant—Jeanne is willing to see what happens. Despite abhorring Mathieu’s personal disorder, Jeanne blames their relationship’s current malaise on the untenable gap between acting married and actually being married. When Natacha expresses surprise at Jeanne’s plan to wed a man she has just called “utterly despicable,” Jeanne shrugs in the way of someone who has accepted compromise and practicality as the true songs of adult life. Enough doubt lingers, however, for her to dabble in Rohmerian economics—whereby ordinary, extremely verbose individuals negotiate interwoven hierarchies of romantic love and personal freedom, conscious to the point of paralysis of getting the best deal, making the optimal choice, holding out for whatever the real thing might be.
 
Though numerous scenes play out in the pastoral setting of Natacha and Igor’s country house—where petulant, dad-obsessed Natacha clashes with smug, hair-swishing Ève, and Jeanne and Igor talk circles around whether to bone—the film’s aesthetic is one of private interiors, the spaces that serve as vessels for our lives, if not for time itself. Back and forth these characters go, packing and unpacking their bags. Here as in each entry in the four-seasons series, Rohmer extracts from what amounts to chronic human dithering a story of transience and possibility. Long takes and simple, picture-book compositions foreground a talky script whose chatter serves—as chatter so often does—mainly as a distraction.
 
At stake is the shifting relationship between character and behavior, essence and expression, what is constant and what remains subject to constant change. Least reliable when they describe themselves, which they do frequently and at length, Rohmer’s characters make self-awareness look a lot like self-delusion. They are also capable of bruising frankness: the sex is good because we know it won’t last; I’m just playing this out until something better comes along. About love they are at once pragmatists and true believers, trusting in chance but filling the interim with cold assessment. Whatever triumph romantic attachment affords such restless creatures has less to do with personal (much less erotic) fulfillment than the hope of fixing one’s self in time; of easing, even for a little while, its relentless passage.
 
Throughout A Tale of Springtime Jeanne calls herself fussy, clumsy; “fanatical about other people’s freedom”; someone who “thinks about her thoughts, maybe too much”; not mad and therefore not capable of loving madly. Others note her calm: physically her solid presence cuts against Natacha’s flouncing and Igor’s noodley unease. Teyssèdre emits a subtle magnetism, her face a flickering mask, her vibe a sort of ardent detachment. Viewed at a distance, Jeanne’s moral essence is clear, yet in the film’s reality she remains inscrutable. It is this gap that interests Rohmer, and that viewers are invited to consider, to push past their judgment toward something closer to recognition. A source of folly at times, the gap also lets the light in. The film’s effect is sneaky, cumulative, much like that of years gone past. Springtime ends on a note of resignation and sweetness, its final moments evincing the relief of possibility’s closure: the solace of having chosen, freely and in good faith, before it’s too late.
 
A Tale of Springtime. By Michelle Orange.  4 Columns,  April 2,  2021

In Éric Rohmer movies, the men talk too much. Almost all that talk is about women. His men obsess over women, philosophically musing on the desire for new female companions to a maybe-ex-girlfriend even as they’re already yoked to a significant other (Claire’s Knee); they detail the Catholic morals that prevent them from acting on their desires, replacing sex with conversation (My Night at Maud’s); and they bemoan sexually liberated women who leave the men’s desires unfulfilled (La Collectionneuse). Few capture the pitiful foibles of man in such an entertaining, witty, visually splendid manner as Rohmer.

 While I find almost all of the French New Wave auteur’s films (including the aforementioned titles) sublime, his underseen and underrated 1987 film Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle—in which men are secondary, if not tertiary characters—stands out as a delightful deviation in his filmography. A new restoration of this film will receive a virtual premiere on Metrograph starting September 11, with a weeklong engagement as part of its Rohmer retrospective. (Earlier this year, Rohmer would have turned 100.)

 The ’80s saw Rohmer exploring more female protagonists and perspectives. In Four Adventures, there are no male leads. This is also somewhat true of the film he is best known for during this period, The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert), which he made the previous year, with Marie Rivière playing the lonely-hearted Delphine embarking on a sad and solo vacation around France that ends in Biarritz. The Green Ray and Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle were shot on 16 millimeter and share a majority of technical crew members (some on their first jobs), who filmed very inconspicuously in public settings around Paris. For these reasons, Rohmer called them his “amateur” films, differentiating them: “One is a vacation film [The Green Ray], the other a weekend film [Four Adventures].”

 While waiting to shoot the final scene of the titular green ray—a rare meteorological phenomenon of a verdant flash on the horizon at sunrise or sunset—Rohmer made Four Adventures, an episodic comedy about two young women: the country-mouse painter Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) and the savvy Parisian ethnology student Mirabelle (Jessica Forde). The two meet in the French countryside when the latter gets a flat tire on her bicycle. Reinette invites Mirabelle to stay with her; Mirabelle later tells her that a room in her Paris flat is opening up, and they become roommates in the city.

 Though it sits between The Green Ray and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) in Rohmer’s filmography, Four Adventures is not part of his Comedies and Proverbs series, a sextet of films based on famous proverbs and how imagined ideals drive people. It also does not belong in his Six Moral Tales, though the middle two chapters of this film (“The Waiter” and “The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac, the Hustler”) explicitly explore questions of morality. The films in his Moral Tales set concern men who are committed to one woman and are tempted by a second, only to return to their first. Here, the morals in question deal with the ethics of theft and charity. The rigid Reinette—who can be generous but also believes a little too steadfastly in law and order—finds her inflexible position shaken upon her move to the metropole, where she is swindled.

 Rohmer made his name on Impressionistic aesthetics—his pictures stippled with vibrant colors and film grain—and sharp romantic dynamics between men and women. With Four Adventures, an unmistakable Rohmerness remains, but romance is peripheral at best, giving way to a lighthearted but realistic platonic relationship between two women. Four Adventures is considered neither part of the female friendship canon nor a major Rohmer, but it should be included in both.

 This film features not a man who talks too much but a woman who does. Reinette and Miquel have this in common. Having been a fan of Rohmer’s 1984 film Full Moon in Paris, the actress asked to briefly meet the filmmaker and ended up staying for hours, telling him all sorts of stories, which informed the four adventures of the film. Funnily enough, the bookends of the film concern the pursuit of silence. In the first chapter, “The Blue Hour,” Reinette excitedly promises to show Mirabelle the coveted blue hour—a short period of twilight just before sunrise when “the day birds aren’t up yet and the night birds are already asleep”—and becomes nearly hysterical when a car driving by disrupts the peace. In consolation, Mirabelle agrees to extend her stay with Reinette to experience this serene moment the next morning, and her prolongation leads to friendship and cohabitation in the city. So begin these four adventures.

 Reinette and Mirabelle are opposites—naive and cynical, respectively—and their conversations about ethics can get heated. Though they disagree, for example, on who deserves their charity and such concerns, their differences never reach a climactic break. They have a lived-in, loving dynamic: Reinette brings an excitable energy to Mirabelle’s life, and Mirabelle is generous with her patience and urban shrewdness. Between moments of bickering and comforting, Reinette and Mirabelle end up being one of the most functional pairs of Rohmer’s catalog. And the everyday details of their see-saw dynamic work up to a beautiful grand finale.

 Its final chapter (“Selling the Picture”) finds Rohmer in peak comedic form. Reinette gets into a financial pinch when she cannot afford her overdue rent and calls a gallery that might be interested in buying one of her paintings. When no one picks up, she launches into a monologue about how she prefers to let her paintings talk instead of words—all, ironically, while tripping over her overstuffed monologue. When Mirabelle points out how loquacious her friend is—almost like an audience member commenting on the talkiness of Rohmer films—Reinette promises in a huff to take a vow of silence. What timing: The gallerist calls back, and Reinette must sell her painting while completely mute. This leads to a quietly slapstick ending to the quartet of adventures that involves heady ruminations on the previous three chapters as well as a delightful cameo from Rohmer regular Fabrice Luchini as the gallery owner. When he tries to lowball the now-taciturn Reinette, the street-smart Mirabelle steps in to save the day without the gesture coming off saccharine. Rohmer pulls off this low-key art “heist” with sharpness and gentleness and some meta humor, birthed from something Miquel said to him early in their first meeting: “I organize my life in accord with principles. When I have decided to do something, I do it. Once I’d decided not to talk, and I didn’t talk.”

 Éric Rohmer’s Most Underrated Masterpiece. By Kristen Yoonsoo Kim. The Nation, September 14, 2020.