Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology

Eric Rohmer Film as Theology

Keith Tester

Eric Rohmer

Also by Keith Tester ANIMALS AND SOCIETY: The Humanity of Animal Rights BAUMAN BEFORE POSTMODERNITY: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography 1953–1989 (with Michael Hviid Jacobsen) BAUMAN BEYOND POSTMODERNITY: Conversations, Critiques and Annotated Bibliography 1989–2005 (with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sophia Marshman) CIVIL SOCIETY COMPASSION, MORALITY AND THE MEDIA CONVERSATIONS WITH ZYGMUNT BAUMAN (with Zygmunt Bauman) MEDIA, CULTURE AND MORALITY MORAL CULTURE THE FLÂNEUR (editor) THE INHUMAN CONDITION THE LIFE AND TIMES OF POST-MODERNITY THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF ZYGMUNT BAUMAN THE TWO SOVEREIGNS: Social Contradictions of European Modernity

Eric Rohmer Film as Theology Keith Tester

© Keith Tester 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 – 1– 4039– 9659– 6 ISBN-10: 1– 4039– 9659– 8

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Contents Acknowledgements and Note

vi

Introduction

1

1 The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles

19

2 The Occasional Films: Scenes of the Ordinary Miracle

47

3 Moral Tales: Grace and Circumstance

76

4 Comedies and Proverbs: Dislocation and Love

108

5 Tales of the Four Seasons: Atmosphere and Faith

139

References

164

Index

169

v

Acknowledgements and Note This book has had a long gestation, and I am extremely grateful to the various friends and colleagues who supported and encouraged me through the process of writing it. Jill Lake at Palgrave was kind enough to take the project on, and Zygmunt Bauman has been enthusiastic and gently prodding since he first became aware of my love/obsession for things Rohmerian. Linda Rutherford and Maddy Tester lived with humour and good grace through an obsession that sometimes became a little too obsessive. I would also like to thank Kieran Flanagan, Sophia Marshman and Father Ian Vane for the good counsel and good humour with which they dealt with my requests for advice. Todo lo llenas tú, todo lo llenas Throughout this book, I have given the English translations of the titles of Rohmer’s films. It seemed a little too mannered to keep to the French, given that the rest of the text is in English and given that the book is aimed at an audience beyond film studies. This use of English translations means that I have deliberately avoided the different titles that have been given to three of the films in America. This is because the American titles are less accurate translations and, more significantly, too directive about the film itself. The English and American titles are all the same except for: French title

English title

American title

L’Amour l’après midi Le Rayon vert L’Ami de mon amie

Love in the Afternoon The Green Ray My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend

Chloe in the Afternoon Summer Girlfriends and Boyfriends

vi

Introduction

Film . . . teaches us to see Eric Rohmer Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer Simone Weil Eric Rohmer is one of the most important figures associated with the French New Wave that transformed cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Although less celebrated than the likes of Godard and Truffaut, he has been an influential figure as a critic, film theorist and, most importantly, film-maker. His all-round contribution to cinema was recognised in 2001 when he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival. Indeed, Rohmer’s strategy of making films in series, the six Moral Tales from 1962–72, the six Comedies and Proverbs of the period 1981–7 and the four Tales of the Four Seasons of 1990–8, has been taken to be an inspiration for the decision of the more feted Kieslowski to organise the Three Colours trilogy (Andrew 1998; Grey 2001). Kieslowski said that he liked Rohmer’s work, although before the late 1980s he was not aware that by then Rohmer had made two series of films (Kieslowski in Insdorf 1999: 84). Rohmer has also made four full-length feature films that are similar in style to those in the series, although they do not fit in with any of them (The Sign of Leo, 1959; Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, 1986; The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, 1993; Rendezvous in Paris, 1995). They might be considered occasional, but they remain important in Rohmer’s oeuvre. All of these films – serial and occasional alike – are so distinctive that one commentator has identified an ‘Eric Rohmer territory’ which is characterised by ‘Delicately stated emotional undercurrents, misdirected 1

2

Eric Rohmer

erotic attachments, articulate, civilised dialogue, and a strong sense of place’ (Kemp 2004: 42). They are situated in the old quarters of French cities such as Le Mans, Nevers, Paris (although Rohmer usually avoids Haussmann’s Paris, what Walter Benjamin called the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’), la banlieue and holiday resorts. The films frequently emphasise travel by train, and in cars that are very often driven by women. A broad social context is quite absent from Rohmer’s work that is set in the present. He concentrates on ‘micro-social structures’ such as partner relationships, co-habiting families, small groups on holiday and friendship networks (Durgnat 1990: 187). The films pay no attention to abstract social institutions or structures. Although the cinematic style of the films has changed over the years (but little since the early 1970s), it is possible to identify common characteristics among them. For the most part the films consist of carefully composed long-takes shot by cameras that are at, or slightly below, the eye-level of a standing person who is not herself or himself involved in the action. The camera is watching and, by extension, so is the audience. ‘Rohmer never indulges in “humanly” impossible shots . . . This is almost a moral principle for him. His camera angles always have the point of view and are at the height of the human eye’ (Almendros 1984: 159). The principle is maintained even in dolly shots when the camera moves to track a person walking, or to suggest the visual scanning of a field on the part of a character (for instance, the scanning of a beach in 1996’s A Summer’s Tale). When filming takes place in cars, it is invariably from the point of view of a back-seat passenger, and in trains from that of a passenger seated near – but not next to – the characters. The scenes have a deep focus (but not a deep staging), so that what is seen on the screen is immediately and obviously comparable with what we see through our own eyes as we look at the world around us. There is a general avoidance of reverse-angle shooting, and a total avoidance of montage and jump cuts. Rohmer’s mise en scène has deliberate commonsense validity. There are very few close-ups or focus pulls, and all the time a gap is maintained between the viewer and the viewed. This is a cinema of observation; observation by the film-maker and of the filmmaker’s production by the audience. But the audience is all the time encouraged to engage with the film, because the deep focus and long takes create the space and time in which choices can – and have to – be made about precisely what is going to be observed, and whether it will be remembered. A fine example of this can be seen towards the beginning of The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, where a foreground conversation in the Brasserie Lipp rather seems to be much less intriguing

Introduction 3

than one in the background between a young man and woman. Rohmer has confined his more overt directorial fancies to a series of extraordinary period films which are, by contrast, extremely artificial and draw on the devices of painting and newsreel in order to set the stage in which the characters move and, perhaps most noticeably, speak (The Marquise of O, 1975; Perceval, 1978; The Lady and the Duke, 2001; Triple Agent, 2004; Romance of Astrée and Céladon, 2007). The ‘territory’ of Rohmer’s films is not just spatial or stylistic, however. It is also thematic. Rohmer’s work concentrates relentlessly on the confusions and self-deceptions of young(ish) educated men and women who have realised that ‘Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life’ (Lukács 1974: 153). In the films that are set in the present, this theme is for the most part explored through stories about love and, in particular, the desires of men and women, and the mistakes and delusions into which they allow themselves blithely to fall (two of the more poignant explorations of this theme are A Good Marriage of 1982 and Full Moon in Paris of 1984). This is desire as wanting, or perhaps even as a request that is made to an other, as opposed to desire as eroticism and sexual activity. It is love as petition to the other, a love through which possibilities beyond the empirical might be seen if the characters have the sight and disposition so to see. The period films meanwhile examine the problem of how the empirical is transformed into the ‘real’, through examinations of what can only be called catastrophic events. Although Rohmer emerged in the context of the French New Wave, it is perhaps best to say that he was with it, but not of it, even though he published widely in – and between 1958 and 1963 was co-editor of – Cahiers du cinéma, the ‘house journal’ of the movement (Neupert 2002). Rohmer himself has been more likely to stress the differences rather than similarities between his own work and that of his New Wave colleagues (Calhoun 2003). Indeed, even the most superficial comparison of any film by Rohmer with anything by Truffaut or Godard shows that his ‘style bears little resemblance to that of the New Wave film-makers. Where they deliberately intruded themselves into their works, he maintained a sober detachment’ (Showalter 1993: 3). The difference between Rohmer and other New Wave figures became clear through the 1960s, and by the 1990s the gap was even wider. For example, in 1957 Rohmer had written a book with Claude Chabrol in which they were able to express shared views about Alfred Hitchcock (Rohmer & Chabrol 1979; for background on the book, see Vest 2004). In 1994 Chabrol released L’Enfer, a Hitchcockian study of marital jealousy and paranoia, featuring

4

Eric Rohmer

the then-new star of French cinema, Emmanuelle Béart (Austin 2003). Chabrol drew on controlled stylistic moves and a powerful narrative thrust to unsettle the relationship between the audience and the film. A year later Rohmer released Rendezvous in Paris, which contains three unconnected episodes (they cannot really be called ‘stories’) about the dreams and deceptions of characters in potentially romantic trysts set in Parisian markets, parks and an art gallery. For the most part, Rohmer’s actors were amateurs, and certainly none of them have become big stars in the way of Béart. He has often used untrained actors in his films, and it is only when they forget to maintain the pretence that they are not being filmed and glance directly at the camera that the carefully maintained distance between the viewers and the viewed comes anywhere near to collapse (for more on Rohmer’s use of amateur actors, see Monaco 1976: 301–2). Where Chabrol’s film builds up an extraordinary measure of tension through directorial artifice, Rohmer’s relies on the deeply focused and continuously edited filming of meandering characters in order to take the audience on a little journey that ends with a question mark. Chabrol seeks to excite and raise anxiety, while Rohmer is more concerned to observe and raise a wistful smile of recognition. Why the difference? Perhaps it is a matter of age. When the New Wave took form in the 1950s, it was motivated in no small part by the struggle of a new generation of film-makers to carve a space for themselves through a repudiation of everything that their cinematic fathers were taken to be standing for. This is clearest of all in the work of Truffaut, where there is a deliberate and breathtaking emancipation of film from the shackles of convention. The new directors had all been born in the 1930s and consequently started to make films before they were 30. Rohmer was around a decade their senior; he did not finish his first feature film until 1959, and it was not a success. The Sign of Leo was not released until 1962, and only 5000 viewers watched it (Crisp 1988: 27; the film was produced by Chabrol). In terms of age at least, Rohmer was closer to the fathers the New Wave sought to kill, than to the killers themselves. But as soon as an attempt is made to say exactly how much older Rohmer was, interesting problems begin. There is a degree of confusion about exactly when Rohmer was born: ‘He was born at Nancy on 4 April 1923 . . . or on 1 December 1920 . . . or on 4 April’ (Monaco 1976: 286). In his book about Rohmer, C.G. Crisp is confident that the birthdate is 4 April 1920 (1988: 14), but Showalter shows that such confidence might be misplaced. He lists the alternative birthdates that have been given: 4 April 1920, 21 March 1920, 1 December 1920 and 4 April 1923.

Introduction 5

Moreover, Rohmer might have been born in Tulle rather than in Nancy (Showalter 1993: 29). At least the weighting of the list of birthdates makes it look as if he was born in 1920. But even that minimal level of confidence gets shaken as soon as a little investigation is carried out. When an interviewer asked Rohmer the simple question, ‘where and when were you born?’ the answer was splendidly confusing: ‘What I say most often – and I don’t want to stake my life that it’s true – is that I was born at Nancy on April 4, 1923. Sometimes I give other dates, but if you use that one you’ll be in agreement with other biographies. It was certainly 1923’ (Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 34). The confusion gets worse because the name ‘Eric Rohmer’ is a pseudonym for Maurice Schérer (Crisp 1988: 1), or for Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer, and his parents were Lucien Schérer and Mathilde Bucher, or they could have been Désiré Schérer and Jeanne Monzat (Showalter 1993: 28). He is generally credited with having published a novel in 1946 under another name, Gilbert Cordier (Davis 1971: 38; Showalter 1993: 30), but when questioned about it in an interview in the early 1970s he replied, ‘I have never written a novel. It must be a mistake; as you know, this publicity material is full of mistakes’ (Rohmer in Chase & Fieden 1972: 20). However, it ought to be noted that in 2005 a German language novel called Elisabeth, that is identical to the one that had been originally credited to Gilbert Cordier, was republished with the author’s name being given as ‘Eric Rohmer’. The book contains a brief interview in which Rohmer accepts responsibility for the work (Rohmer 2005; but still it could be argued that up to the time of that republication Eric Rohmer had not in fact been the author of a novel). The name ‘Eric Rohmer’ first appeared in 1950 (Showalter 1993: 30), and has been used more or less exclusively as his public signature since October 1954 (Crisp 1988: 16). The name was chosen either as a homage to Erich von Stroheim and Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu Manchu mysteries (Jeffries 2004; Wiegand 2001: 9), or for no reason at all: ‘It was a name I chose just like that, for no particular reason, only because I liked it’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 38). Holding his head in his hands and groaning, he told C.G. Crisp that the name ‘Eric Rohmer’ was chosen for ‘personal reasons’. Crisp suggests that these ‘reasons’ were a desire to hide the fact that he was a film-maker from his mother, who evidently thought that her son was the school teacher he had trained to be (Crisp 1988: 16). However, in 2007, Rohmer gave an interview in which the mysteries surrounding his name were clarified, and very simply. He pointed out that Eric Rohmer is more or less an anagram of Maurice Schérer (Rohmer 2007).

6

Eric Rohmer

There can be little doubt that all of this confusion betrays the presence of a mischief-maker. The man who is known as Eric Rohmer is quite deliberately creating a web of confusion. It carries on with the intrigues and plots which feature in the novels of one of his favourite writers, Balzac (Rohmer 1989: 18), and often in his films (for example, An Autumn Tale of 1998). He has said of Balzac that ‘I would give up pages of some more rigorous prose writer, or a line of verse by the most celebrated poet, for just one of his master strokes’ (Rohmer in Williams 1980: 62). Yet there is good reason to believe that something much more significant than game-playing is also going on when Rohmer creates confusion. This is not just mischief; it is also a deliberate and quite conscious attempt to make sure that the body of work stands independently of, and is invested with greater value than, the body of the film-maker. It has been pointed out that even as the films appear at festivals (and frequently win prizes), Rohmer himself rarely attends. In 1971 it was said that ‘He never signs manifestos or petitions, belongs to no clique or coterie, refuses to own a car or install a telephone, and sends back letters that reach his home with “addressee unknown”’ (Davis 1971: 38). Indeed, according to one anecdote, when he was asked to provide a photograph for a biographical dictionary of the New Wave, Rohmer submitted the worst one he could find: ‘It’s important that people should realize what a boring person I am’, he said (Crisp 1988: 16). This is consistent with Crisp’s suggestion that the introduction of the pseudonym ‘Eric Rohmer’ reflects ‘the need to efface himself, control his sensuality and deny any world aspirations’ (Crisp 1977: 13; Rohmer’s selfeffacement is discussed through the prism of Triple Agent in Tracz 2005). In this way it is hard not to see a current to Rohmer that flows out from Balzac’s Père Goriot, a novel in which public identities are masks and in which no one is entirely what they seem. They hide their selves so that their public presence as a work might be accomplished and successful without giving away, or being dependent upon, private secrets. (Rohmer has commented on this one of Balzac’s works; Rohmer in Williams 1980: 62. But of course there is a difference because Balzac’s characters for the most part are obsessed with ‘world aspirations’.) ‘Rohmer territory’ is distinct from ‘Eric Rohmer’ (whoever he is), and this book is about the former not the latter. The key to unlocking ‘Rohmer territory’ is its realist commitment. Consequently, this Introduction seeks to provide a way into the ‘territory’, first of all by establishing the meaning of realism for Rohmer. Themes from that discussion are pursued, and the narrative proceeds to contend that Rohmer’s is a realism of a very specific sort. It is a realism that is indebted to, and which

Introduction 7

reflects, a distinctive Catholic theology. By way of pulling the discussion together and establishing a framework for the rest of the book, it is argued that Rohmer’s films stress the significance of theological grace to the processes and understandings of empirical life. The sociologist Kieran Flanagan has made the point that ‘Grace lies outside the realm of the social, but yet is embodied in it . . . Often manifestations of grace are noted within the social, in appearances, in roles that transmit unexpected insights, that just happen to be noticed’. But, Flanagan continues, ‘such cultivation of sight, of seeing and believing, requires a cultural site for cultivation, where the spiritual eye is nurtured to see’ (Flanagan 1996: 83). It is the thesis of this book that the work of Eric Rohmer and the ‘territory’ that it maps is precisely a site for the cultivation of sight to attend to the manifestations of grace. Through his own observation, Rohmer is inviting his audience to begin to see.

Realism With their dependence on long scenes and deep focus, Rohmer’s films draw on a very specific cinematic language that is derived from André Bazin’s cinema theory, and this is not terribly surprising, given the relationship between the two. They were both central figures in the film clubs that emerged in Paris in the late 1940s, and they worked closely together on Cahiers du cinéma. Rohmer called Bazin his ‘teacher and friend’ (Rohmer 1989: 93). Rohmer noted that ‘all of Bazin’s work is centered on one idea, the affirmation of cinematic “objectivity”’ (Rohmer 1989: 95). This idea presupposes a reality that is external to cinema itself, a reality which is both the object and the guarantee of ‘objectivity’, and from this it follows that the aim of cinema is to work towards the most object-adequate representation that is technically and stylistically feasible. This is the nub of Bazin’s ontological position on the cinema, and from it he deduced the form of a distinctive ‘language’ that can be seen to run through the work of Rohmer. (A good summary of Bazin’s ontological position is provided in Casetti 1999: 30–5.) According to Bazin, a retrospective of cinema between 1920 and 1940 reveals the coexistence of two different cinematic trends, pulling in opposite directions. He said that there are ‘those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality’ (Bazin 1967: 24). The former group, those who ‘put their faith in the image’, can be identified by their tendency to use montage editing and thus to create ‘a sense or meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived

8

Eric Rohmer

exclusively from their juxtaposition’. Bazin continued to say that directors such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Gance all used montage in such a way that they ‘did not give us the event; they alluded to it. Undoubtedly they derived at least the greater part of the constituent elements from the reality they were describing but the final significance of the film was found to reside in the ordering of these elements much more than in their objective content’ (Bazin 1967: 25). This particular cinematic language of montage consequently fails to accept the demand of objectivity, precisely because it relies on the image to make a point to the audience, and refuses to accept that events can be given. Although he does not say so in as many words, it is very clear that Bazin prefers the language that is used in the films of directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Murnau and Robert Flaherty. In their films ‘montage plays no part, unless it be the negative one of inevitable elimination where reality superabounds. The camera cannot see everything at once but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see’ (Bazin 1967: 27) – a principle that is reflected in Rohmer’s panning shots. This is a language that has faith in reality. Bazin emphasises the difference between the two languages with some comments on Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North. One scene shows the amount of time and the care that is required for Nanook to successfully hunt a seal. Bazin argues that Nanook’s perseverance could be suggested through montage techniques, but that Flaherty places his faith in reality: ‘Flaherty however confines himself to showing the actual waiting period; the length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object. Thus in the film this episode requires one set-up’ (Bazin 1967: 27). Rohmer made more or less the same point about Nanook of the North, and discussed exactly the scene upon which Bazin commented. Rohmer called the film a tragedy ‘of the dimension of time’, and explained that ‘film’s primary purpose is to give the present the weight that other arts deny it. In Nanook, the pathos, the pathos of waiting, which in other films is but a vulgar artifice, mysteriously plunges us to the heart of understanding’. He continues to say of the hunting scene that its ‘beauty’ can be attributed to ‘the fact that the point of view imposed on us by the camera is neither that of the actors of the drama nor that of the human eye, whose attention would have been drawn to one element to the exclusion of another’ (Rohmer 1989: 46). Indeed, in the Hitchcock book, this scene is identified as one in which the hunter and the audience share a ‘state of grace’ (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979: 124). Rohmer also embraces Stroheim and Murnau in a way that is obviously indebted to Bazin. According to the latter these directors use

Introduction 9

a language ‘in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it’ (Bazin 1967: 28). Meanwhile, what Rohmer commends in all of them is commitment to reality, and their refusal to impose meanings or to add to what objectively is: ‘let’s carefully hold on to an instrument we know can still portray us as we see ourselves. May this very simple certainty reassure us and keep us from pointless exercises’ (Rohmer 1989: 53. Original emphasis). Commitment to reality implies a cinematic language which avoids ‘pointless exercises’, which refuses to impose meanings upon the world, and which instead shows us as we see ourselves. It requires ‘a form of self-effacement before reality’ (Bazin 1967: 29), of exactly the kind that is represented by Rohmer’s effacement of himself behind a pseudonym, mystification and a body of work. The objectivity of an external reality is made paramount and unassailable. Bazin identifies the components of the language that follow from this ‘effacement’ in the work of a number of directors who were also embraced by Rohmer. Not just Flaherty, Stroheim and Murnau, but also Marcel Carné whose ‘editing remains on the level of the reality he is analyzing. There is only one way of looking at it’, and so there is a refusal to use superimpositions or close-ups (Bazin 1967: 32). From Welles and Wyler, and particularly from Jean Renoir (Rohmer eulogises Renoir; Rohmer 1989: 173–99), Bazin takes the principle of deep focus, thanks to which ‘whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining motionless. Dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage were created out of the movements of actors within a fixed framework’ (Bazin 1967: 33). In this way, the event is put back into a dimension of time and reality. Renoir, in particular, discovered through deep focus and long scenes ‘a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them’ (Bazin 1967: 38). Exactly this point can be found in Rohmer’s reflections on his own work: ‘What am I interested in? I’m interested in the relationships of the characters to the surroundings. I like to show the surroundings, the décor in its entirety . . . to show the characters moving in the décor and being part of it. That’s why I don’t like long lenses, which take the characters away from the décor’ (Rohmer in Chase and Feiden 1972: 48). ‘Natural unity’ was taken by Bazin to be represented especially well in the Italian neo-realist cinema of Rossellini. One of the most significant qualities of a film like Rome, Open City is its use of what Bazin terms an amalgam of professional and amateur, untrained, actors. According to Bazin, this is important because it involves ‘the rejection of the star

10 Eric Rohmer

concept’ (Bazin 1973: 23) in such a way that the overall objectivity and realism of the film is increased. First, the audience is forced to engage with the film without preconceptions or distractions that are created as soon as a star appears and second, the actors are required to be more flexible and to subordinate themselves to the film (Bazin 1973: 24). Similar principles inform Rohmer’s use of amateur actors and, indeed, his use of professionals who are – or at least at the time of filming were – relatively unknown. He exploits the expertise of trained actors who can subordinate themselves to the plot (a good example of this is provided by Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud’s, 1969) and the honesty of amateur actors who lack artifice. This way of using amateur actors is shown very clearly in Love in the Afternoon (1972), where ‘real life’ husband and wife Bernard and Françoise Verley play the roles of a fictional husband and wife who are tempted to have affairs but in the end return to one another. Sometimes it also seems to be the case that professional actors are used precisely because of the overstatement that they can bring to a role, as implied by Arielle Dombasle’s performance as Marion in Pauline at the Beach (1983). These strategies are pursued in order to capture ‘what is natural . . . I’m very particular about this point’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). The general principle seems to be that either professional or amateur actors will be used depending on the reality that Rohmer seeks to explore. In this vein, Crisp proposes that the Comedies and Proverbs series uses amateur actors because their lack of expertise and confidence in front of the camera means that they possess a degree of naiveté that reflects the characters’ lack of self-consciousness (Crisp 1988: 88). The intention throughout is to make sure that those actors are used who will prevent the audience from reducing the character to a symbol or one-dimensionality. The concern is to use actors who will make the characters rounded human beings in specific surroundings, actors who will make the characters, in a word, real. The cinematic language that Bazin commends as that which is least likely to ‘forget that the world is’ (Bazin 1973: 21) is more or less identical with that which is employed by Eric Rohmer. To this extent Rohmer’s films can be identified as realist. Rohmer’s realism does seem to be of an especially naive sort. For instance, he says quite straightforwardly that ‘cinema is the description of man and his surroundings’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 92) – not an analysis, not an intervention, not a critique, just a description. Rohmer is following on from Bazin’s proposition that the Italian neo-realists ‘know better . . . than to treat this reality as a medium or a means to an end’ (Bazin 1973: 21). Reality is. In a comment which fits in well

Introduction 11

with his expressed contempt for ‘cinephile madness, cinephile culture’ (Rohmer 1989: 17), Rohmer wrote that ‘The modern audience . . . has been too long accustomed to interpreting visual signals, to understanding the reason for each image, to become suddenly interested in the reality of what they see. The cinematic spectacle is now presented more as something to decipher than as something to view’ (Rohmer 1989: 27–8). As with Bazin, this is an ontological argument. Rohmer is presuming that the cinematic image ought to be a means by which the audience is invited to become interested in, and more observant of, an external reality. From this point of view it is incumbent upon the filmmaker to use a language that makes the viewing of that external reality, that objective is, all the more immediate and, thereby, all the more compelling. Overly theoretical positions (presumably such as that which Godard developed) become abstractions that create mere boredom and, unsurprisingly for so faithful a follower of Bazin, montage is repudiated (for a hint of Rohmer’s attitude towards the Godard who emerged in the 1960s and through the 1970s, see Andrews 2002). Directors like Welles, Wyler and Hitchcock are commended for their ‘systematic use of the still shot’ (Rohmer 1989: 19). For Rohmer, the problem is that abstract understanding has got in the way of a more simple and immediate seeing of what is: ‘In learning how to understand, the modern moviegoer forgot how to see, and if film has succeeded in educating us visually, it did not do so by making us more sensitive to the pure signification of certain forms or movements’ (Rohmer 1989: 29). Moreover, in order to achieve that increased sensitivity, film has to carve a space for itself against commodified and commercialised culture: ‘I would not like to film the world as it is shown in fashion magazines, this modern, cheap vision of the modern world . . . What interests me is man in his setting, the human face, the human body, human gestures, human behavior’. He said that ‘If there is beauty, this is where I like to find it, even if it is not Greek beauty’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 93–4). This tension between the concern with the real quality of human presence (the setting, the face, the body, gestures and behaviour) and a critique of the empirically ‘cheap vision of the modern world’ is expressed very clearly in films such as Full Moon in Paris (1984) and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1987), where there is an implication that the commodification of the empirical human setting has had a disastrous impact on the real beauty of human being. It is noticeable that shopping is rarely an easy experience in Rohmer’s films, and it is usually a moment of deception and self-deception. For example, buying a shirt is a rather fraught experience in Love in the Afternoon, and an antique causes problems in

12 Eric Rohmer

A Good Marriage. Meanwhile there is a nice moment of mischief in The Aviator’s Wife when a character gloomily descends the steps into the Métro and goes beneath a bright advertisement for the C&A chain store. It is hard not to conclude that Rohmer is nudging the audience to think that mass consumerism is a gateway to Hell. (However, Rohmer explicitly denies that he has any sociological interest or competence [Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 39].) For Rohmer cinema is especially able to achieve the task of showing the world as it is because for him, the camera is nothing more than an instrument for the recording of what is put in front of it: ‘I know a great deal of effort has gone into devising a proof that the camera is not a simple recording instrument, that the world of the screen differs from perceived reality . . . And what a futile undertaking it is!’ But for Rohmer this does not demean the importance of cinema. To the contrary, it is precisely because cinema merely records that it is so immensely valuable: ‘the ability to reproduce exactly, simply, is the cinema’s surest privilege’ (Rohmer in Williams 1980: 55). After all, ‘Film . . . uses techniques that are instruments of reproduction or, one might say, of knowledge. In a sense, it possesses the truth right from the beginning and aims to make beauty its supreme end’ (Rohmer 1989: 75). He has said, ‘I don’t want to make profound films. Bazin used to say that there was a profundity of the superficial in American film, but I also think that there is a superficiality to profundity’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 64). Once again, the theme of self-effacement in the relationship with reality comes to the fore. What Rohmer is saying is that the objectivity of what is, and the unique ability of cinema to capture it, means that the filmmaker must refuse to make her or his own presence too overtly obvious. For instance, film has an advantage over art because it ‘cures the artist of his fatal narcissism . . . We are tempted to look at the world with our everyday lives, to keep the tree, the running water, the face distorted with happiness or anguish, to keep them just as they are, in spite of us’ (Rohmer 1989: 45).

Rohmer’s Theo-logia The world is, in spite of us. It is independent of our actions, designs and impositions. As such, it is our responsibility to be committed to the world and its beauty. At one level, this position has caused Rohmer to embrace environmentalism (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 92, and see also The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre), but at a somewhat more important level, Rohmer’s ontological position is an expression of his theological

Introduction 13

commitment and, specifically, his Catholicism. This becomes clear when Rohmer makes comments of the order that ‘not only is there a beauty and an order to the world, but there is also no beauty or order that are not of the world. Otherwise, how could art, a product of human effort, equal nature, a divine creation?’ He went on to state that ‘art is the revelation, in the universe, of the Creator’s hand. True enough, there can be no position more teleological or theological than mine’ (Rohmer in Williams 1980: 248–9). Indeed, according to Guy Bedouelle, writing in the orthodox Catholic journal Communio, Rohmer’s work is ‘a true theo-logia, a word about God’ because it is a step on the path along which cinema will discover its ‘spiritual destiny’ (Bedouelle 1979: 273). Rohmer’s realism means that his work has openness to ‘Christian reality’, which Bedouelle finds in the Moral Tales. He says that the films in that series emphasise the unplanned and accidental and thereby offer ‘a reflection on the part played in life by chance meetings and roundabout ways in which we are forced to look at ourselves and which give us a deeper understanding of our moral standards’. In this way, the Moral Tales are reflections on the preparedness to receive the accidental encounter that enables us to ‘learn how to give ourselves to God and to others’ (Bedouelle 1979: 276). The ‘word about God’ that Rohmer’s films express is, therefore, a word about grace and the receptiveness of men and women in the empirical world to the favours that God bestows, regardless of the human asking for them. It is in Rohmer’s enthusiastic essays on Rossellini that his Catholicism most obviously comes to the fore. For example, Stromboli is identified as a ‘grand Catholic film’ that is about God’s grace being given to a sinner, for reasons that are quite beyond empirical understanding. Talking about Ingrid Bergman’s character, Rohmer says that ‘God’s boundless mercy is shown by the absurdity of his pardon for her, just as the mystery of reprobation is shown by the incommensurability of the punishment with the crime’. Stromboli is a film that ‘exalts’ Christian grace, and Rohmer says that he cannot think of many other works ‘that, without rhetoric, simply by the evidence of what we are shown, proclaim more loudly man’s misery without God’ (Rohmer 1989: 124). It is a film of ‘religious grandeur’ (Rohmer 1989: 127). Another essay on Rossellini is slightly less gushing, but may well be all the more significant for that very reason. In a discussion of Journey to Italy, Rohmer detects a drama between a man and a woman that nevertheless has a third participant: God. He takes the heroine ‘along a spiritual path that leads from the platitudes of the ancients on the fragility of man to the Christian idea

14 Eric Rohmer

of immortality’. The film shows that Christian grace and redemption is ‘in the order of things whose order, in the end, depends on a miracle’ (Rohmer 1985a: 207) even though the miracle itself is always an unexpected form of appearance. Rossellini thereby points to a way in which Catholicism can be enriched and renewed by film, and Rohmer asks the rather rhetorical question: ‘Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle?’ (Rohmer 1985a: 208). Rohmer is speculating that Rossellini’s answer to that question is a definite ‘yes’. But in order to give that answer, cinema must be sufficiently focused on the human in its empirical surroundings to be able to identify signs of the grace of the appearance, recognition (or misrecognition) and acceptance of the irruptive ‘real’. Rohmer’s Catholicism (White 1996) is influenced by Blaise Pascal, and this is most obviously expressed by the character of the narrator in Trintignant’s My Night at Maud’s. The film is set in Clermont-Ferrand (Pascal’s home town), and when the narrator is browsing in a bookshop he picks up a copy of the Pensées. But the most obvious trace of the debt is in the film’s discussion of the Pascalian wager on God. According to Pascal it is a truth that ‘men are in darkness and estranged from God, that He has hidden Himself from their knowledge, that this is in fact the name which He gives Himself in the Scriptures, Deus absconditus’ (Pascal 1931: 53), and from this it follows that ‘If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since . . . He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is’ (Pascal 1931: 66). There is, and can be, no certainty, and consequently the commitment to the existence of God can only be decided on the basis of a wager. In short, the decision of whether or not to accept the existence of God, and everything that follows from it, is based on human free will. Through grace God gives signs to guide the choices that follow from free will, but those signs can be misread or ignored if the particular person is too distracted by the things of the empirical world. Consequently, the preparedness to see the signs requires a repudiation of the empirical, which becomes at once a hall of mirrors and fallen. Pascal’s argument thus leads to a situation in which the particular person is either attentive to the signs that God gives or is sinfully happy to enjoy the empirical. There is no halfway house between goodness and sin. This is the problem around which the tribulations of the narrator in My Night at Maud’s revolve: how can he be alert to the transcendentally real, when he is inextricably a part of the empirical? The problem of the film is how can Pascal’s absolutes sit with a man who is aware of his contradictions and

Introduction 15

accommodations but yet seeks something ‘real’: ‘Take me: with all my mediocrity, my careful middle-of-the-roadism, my lukewarmism – all of which God despises, I know – I can still attain a kind of . . . fulfillment’ (Rohmer 1980: 88–9). For the man who is aware of his empirical limits, grace becomes a gift that has to be looked for very hard – and maybe even tied to wishful thinking – because it will be necessarily compromised: ‘All I ask of grace is that it open up to me the possibility, however slight, of being touched by it’ (Rohmer 1980: 88). That final quotation, which is taken from the short-story version of My Night at Maud’s, raises the very Pascalian question of whether men who are comfortable in the empirical are too vain to be able to understand that the very things for which they crave appear regardless of their ambitions, and whether they are therefore fated to fall into the trap of trying to hurry the ‘real’ along. Indeed, the version of this little speech that appears in the film makes the narrator sound even more smug: ‘in my mediocrity, in my happy medium, in my tepidness, which God abhors, I know, I’ve been able to attain, if not plenitude, at least a certain righteousness, in the sense that the Gospel says, the Righteous’ (Showalter 1993: 70). The film wonders whether people like the narrator can be touched, whether they are fated to misread the signs, and if what they take to be the miracle might be a self-delusion. Meanwhile Sourian has identified Love in the Afternoon as a Pascalian narrative because it stresses the importance of avoiding the distractions of this world (Sourian 1973). The film tells the story of Fréderic, a young married businessman who becomes attracted by the seductive ploys of his old friend Chloe. His temptation has already been established through a narration in which he talks about the fantasies he has about the unknown women he meets on the streets of Paris (he is a kind of small-scale would-be flâneur, and all the more tragic for that very reason), and there is every indication that for Fréderic marriage has become a habit in which he and Hélène take one another for granted. Rohmer shows that Fréderic is one of those men of whom Pascal wrote: ‘We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine’ (Pascal 1931: 45). Fréderic and Chloe meet in the afternoons, during his extended lunch breaks. Their relationship leads to the dramatic moment when Fréderic is presented with the choice of spending an afternoon making love with Chloe (who reclines naked on her bed) or going home early to Hélène. He chooses the latter, even though there is little sign that the choice makes him happy. In this way, Sourian says, the film shows that Fréderic manages

16 Eric Rohmer

to avoid what Pascal would identify as an ‘inauthentic diversion’, and instead he commits himself to something deeper and more real. He perseveres, for an afternoon, anyway. It is the connection with Pascal that explains why Rohmer’s work is often linked to Jansenism (Crisp 1988; Davis 1971; Showalter 1993). Jansenism was a movement in seventeenth-century Catholicism which argued that original sin has so corrupted nature that everything empirical is evil. The only hope for redemption is through the grace that is the gift of the God who is hidden from the world except in the unasked-for moments of the miracle. Within the Jansenist perspective then, each person must persevere to achieve a preparedness to receive the gift of God, although whether or not that particular person has the grace to accept the gift is quite beyond comprehension (for more on Jansenism, see Goldmann 1964, 1972). However, the connection of Rohmer to Jansenism via Pascal is problematic, not least because, as Goldmann shows convincingly, Pascal’s own relationship to it changed and, moreover, Jansenism was not a single set of beliefs (Goldmann 1964). Indeed, Rohmer’s Pascal is a serious orthodox Catholic, not a Jansenist. (Rohmer’s views on Pascal can be deduced from a film that he made about the philosopher for French educational television in 1966, and which is available as an extra on the Criterion DVD release of My Night at Maud’s.) Perhaps this complexity means that it is best to avoid any too strong association of Rohmer with Jansenism and, instead, to make the slightly more modest contention that Rohmer’s films explore Pascalian themes. (Robert Bresson is a much better candidate for the label ‘Jansenist’ [Sontag 1969].) More specifically, it can be proposed that Rohmer’s films explore a Pascalian understanding of grace. They are explorations of how grace is embodied in the empirical social world, and how it transforms moments and appearances into something ‘real’. Rohmer’s films show how important it is for us to cultivate a way of seeing the world that is open to the miracle that irrupts unexpectedly. Grace is the help that God gives to humans to attend to His call. It is supernatural and cannot be asked for or hurried along by human action or intervention. The theological debate that arises is about the relationship between God’s grace and the free will that God gave to men and women. If grace is a sign given by God, can men and women choose on the basis of the free will that is also given by God (and which makes us morally responsible) to accept the help or deny it? Calvin argued that the human will cannot resist grace, whereas the Pascalian position – which derives from Augustine and Aquinas – is that the situation is rather more complicated. According to Pascal, through the gift of grace

Introduction 17

God makes men and women will to choose what He offers: ‘God changes man’s heart by a heavenly sweetness . . . which, surpassing fleshly delights, fills man . . . with a distaste for the delights of sin . . . and finding his greatest joy in the God who enchants him, he infallibly inclines towards him of his own accord by a movement at once wholly free, voluntary and full of love’. In this way it is possible for the human to refuse God on the basis of free will , but Pascal argues that this cannot be done in honesty. Writing of the human response to God’s grace, Pascal said, ‘Not that he is not always able to withdraw, and would in fact do so if he wanted to: but how could he want to, since the will invariably inclines towards what gives it greatest pleasure and nothing pleases it as much as this unique good’ (Pascal 1967: 282–3; see also the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2002). What Rohmer explores, through his focus on the world as it is and on men and women in their empirical surroundings, are the mistakes which mean that the moment of the infusion of the ‘heavenly sweetness’ is missed, the delusions through which men and women seek to hurry it along or find it even when it is absent, and, finally, the selfdeceptions and strategies in relation to others through which men and women justify to themselves their free choice to withdraw from grace. It is not so much that Rohmer seeks to understand this latter group; rather he seeks merely to show the processes of their (self-)deception. Rohmer’s films are examinations of how men and women freely respond to the irruption of God in the everyday, how they notice it (if they do), and whether and how that irruption implies preservation from temptation in self-understanding and the understanding of others.

Conclusion Lukács spoke of the importance of ‘a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths of empirical life: something disturbing and seductive, dangerous and surprising; the accident, the great moment, the miracle; an enrichment and a confusion’ (Lukács 1974: 153). Rohmer’s miracle is much less obvious than that, much more subtle and therefore much more demanding. What makes Rohmer’s films so questioning – and question provoking – is their refusal to present the miracle that can transform the empirical into the real as a magical moment that appears with thunder and lightning. Instead it is fragile, small and too easily misrecognised (hence the ‘misdirected attachments’ that feature in ‘Rohmer territory’, and hence also the panning shots of landscapes which invite the audience to look out for signs that may appear, or then again may not).

18 Eric Rohmer

It is to be seen in a chance meeting, the gesture of a hand or the shape of a knee, not a cataclysm. The miracle is an irruption of new possibilities and consequently a moment of new uncertainties, not a sentimental closure. Similarly, Rohmer’s films rarely end with a moment of closure. They tend to end with the intimation of a new beginning. The moment of irruption – the moment of the miracle – can be recognised only by those who are prepared to see it, and the question that the films explore is whether the characters – and by extension empirically real people ‘like us’ – will be able to persevere in trying to see, will be possessed of a disposition to continue to seek, even if the signs are missed or, indeed, never evident. Rohmer’s films are hopeful because they establish the possibility that even when they feel distant from the miracle of the ‘real’ that will infuse their lives with meaning, men and women can aspire to be open to more than the merely empirical, but this openness requires that attention always be paid to what surrounds and that it never be avoided. Grace comes, if it comes at all, in nature and in the human nature of sociability. In this way, empirical realism creates opportunities for the recognition of the irruption of the transcendentally real, and Rohmer’s films pose questions to their audiences: Is this film going to be a mere diversion or will you devote attention to seeing it? Is this film a distraction or will you be committed to try to see signs of grace? What is your disposition?

1 The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles

The vast majority of Rohmer’s films take place in the everyday present. They happen ‘now’. Of course, there are practical reasons for this. Using amateur actors, letting them wear their own clothes (or carefully made selections from their own wardrobes) and filming in the street is a remarkably cheap way of working. For example, Rohmer estimated that The Green Ray cost less than £100,000 to produce (Lennon 1992). Fortuitously – or not – the economic implications of this method were entirely compatible with the New Wave concern to work outside of the studio system, and according to the principle of the director as auteur rather than mass producer for a consumer industry. Indeed, Rohmer has implied that it is precisely the liberation of film-makers from the studio system that is the core of the appeal of French cinema. He has said that in France ‘Everyone works in his own way. That’s what makes French cinema interesting. There is no common line. There are very distinct individualities’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 224). In a conversation about The Aviator’s Wife, Rohmer turned cheapness of production into a definite virtue. He made a deliberate good out of the possibility of making movies without a large amount of money: ‘That’s important given the situation of the industry at this time. It is good to know how to make films with little money. You know that there’s no necessary relationship between the amount of money spent on a film and its quality’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). Elsewhere he linked questions of finance to questions of integrity: ‘I have taken a straight road . . . And it’s true that I have never made films for success at any price. I have been lucky enough to do the films I wanted to do. My films never required much money’ (Rohmer in Norman 2001). Rohmer identified The Aviator’s Wife as an example of what can be done with little finance because, he pointed out, he did not receive an 19

20 Eric Rohmer

advance from the state for the costs of its production or distribution (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). Indeed, according to one story Rohmer has not applied for state finance since applications were turned down for his first two films (Lennon 1992). The French state has provided financial support for its national film industry since shortly after the end of the Second World War, and in the 1950s, a system was introduced whereby producers were given state support in relation to the receipts of their previous film. The scheme was soon providing 17 per cent of all investment in cinema production in France. The more flexible, and for the state risky, system of loans as an advance against income was introduced in 1959, with its ideological justification being a concern to nurture a cinema that had educational rather than merely economic value (Forbes 1992) although, of course, French nationalistic interests were not at all insignificant in the decision-making process that led to the scheme. Rohmer evidently supports the finance system on that account: ‘I would prefer that there is a French sub-culture in France as opposed to an American one . . . Even if I admire American cinema enormously I think that each nation should guard its cultural hegemony, otherwise things could become dangerous’ (Rohmer in Grey 2001). Like his colleagues, Rohmer could work without having to take the market into overly great account. Even if he did not use it, nevertheless the network of state support for film-making was always there as a safety net. It meant that one set of issues did not have to be worried about overly much, and thus Rohmer could develop a concern to make films for a small audience that grows over time. In terms of intended audience, Rohmer’s films are more like depth charges with a long fuse than an instant bombardment of shock and awe. He has said that for ‘personal films [films d’auteur], films which must be recognised on the merit of the story they tell, we need a certain amount of time. Word of mouth must go out. It’s the only way’. The argument continued in a way that showed that Rohmer’s financial focus is not on the quick recovery of the costs of production. ‘It’s more advantageous to have 50,000 people in ten weeks than 50,000 in two weeks with the slim hope of getting two or three thousand more in the next two weeks . . . And for a filmmaker it’s totally different. 50,000 people in two weeks is a failure while the same number in ten weeks is a success’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). Important though, state funding has been for French cinema and, in particular, for the nurturance of individual film-makers who have been able to develop a style without too great a focus on box-office receipts, Rohmer has been able to have a measure of freedom because of his close

The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles 21

association with one specific production company. Since the twentyminute The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, the first of the Moral Tales, of 1962, Rohmer’s serial and occasional films have always been produced by the same company, Les Films du Losange, which had been set up by Barbet Schroeder in 1961. It was closely involved in helping to finance the New Wave, but the connection with Rohmer seems to have been much stronger than it was with other directors and, indeed, more personal. Schroeder played the main male character in The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, and scenes in the next Moral Tale, 1963’s Suzanne’s Career, were filmed in his family’s apartment. As a ‘thank you’ Rohmer gave both films to the company, and he was repaid with a share in it. Since these early days, Les Films du Losange has become one of France’s leading independent film-production outfits (Neupert 2002: 256). Through his close relationship with Les Films du Losange (all of the few interviews that Rohmer gives take place in his office at the company headquarters in Paris), Rohmer is also able to control the distribution of his films in France . He slowly builds an audience over weeks rather than days by releasing the films to a few cinemas at a time (Lennon 1992). But while Rohmer has remained resolutely French in his location and perspective on film-making, Schroeder has become a player in Hollywood. He directed a number of successful and exceptionally ‘unRohmeresque’ films such as Barfly (1987), Reversal of Fortune (1990) and Single White Female (1992). However, Rohmer has made a number of period films that have clearly been beyond the capacity of Les Films du Losange, and which have had to draw on the resources of a variety of co-producers or, indeed, other producers altogether. The Marquise of O (1975) was a Franco-German project in which Les Films du Losange collaborated with Gaumont and Janus Film Produktion of Frankfurt, while Perceval (1978) was funded by Les Films . . . along with Gaumont and a consortium of French and European television networks. In 2001, perhaps because of its technical complexity and therefore cost, The Lady and the Duke was financed by Pathé, while the critical and relative commercial success of that film was almost certainly one of the reasons why 2004’s Triple Agent could secure the support of a group of French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Russian finance sources. The consortium was headed by the French concern CER: Compagnie Eric Rohmer. It was when the finance package for The Lady and the Duke was being put together that Rohmer broke with his long-term production colleague Margaret Menegoz (McNab: 2001). 2007’s Romance of Astrée and Céladon secured money from the Council of Europe’s Eurimages fund; between

22 Eric Rohmer

its establishment in 1988 and the middle of 2006, this fund had supported 1081 European co-productions and given out some 314 million euros (Libération, 15 May 2006). The differences between the period films and Rohmer’s serial, and occasional studies set in the empirical everyday are quite remarkable. Whereas the latter films are entirely indebted to a committed realism, in the former aesthetic fantasies are given a much freer reign, although even then there is a measure of restraint. After all, historical periods do not come to the present in a pure form. Thanks to art and literature, the viewers of the present already have a preconception, however erroneous, about how, say, the late eighteenth century looked and how its people acted. Albeit through the prism of aesthetics, the past possesses a quality of the real, and therefore the case for realism can be recovered even when there is no obvious referent except that which is obviously artificial. In this way Rohmer’s period films are situated within an ontological ambiguity about the past. It can be represented in a highly aestheticised manner because it is no longer a real present, and yet that aestheticisation is constrained by other aesthetic representations of, and more significantly from, that period, since through them it remains a real presence. In this way Rohmer’s representation of the past might be identified as exemplifying the attitude of Walter Benjamin, a critic with whom he otherwise has little or nothing in common. Benjamin said that history is not an empty time, but rather that it is ‘time filled by the presence of the now’. His point was that the past is not out there waiting to be found, but that it is always read in terms of the concerns of the present, of the ‘now’: ‘Thus to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the “now” which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past’ (Benjamin 1992: 252–3). Similarly, the ontological premise that seems to inform Rohmer’s period films is that each period has to be ‘blasted’ out of the continuum of the past from the perspective of the capacities of the present, and that the films made today attempt to evoke the past, with the moment of evocation being explicitly of the present. But given that Rohmer’s work has no sympathy with the politics of Benjamin nor, indeed, with politics as such, the present can evoke the past only aesthetically. The French Revolution gestured to Rome to lend itself a weight that went beyond the contingencies of the ‘now’, and – much more modestly obviously – Rohmer’s period films draw upon art and literature to lend themselves a validity that ostensibly goes beyond

The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles 23

the artificiality of their creation of the past. In short, the period films rely on aesthetics to blast the past out of history and, ironically, to make it real to the present. This is particularly clear in The Lady and the Duke, for which Rohmer was nominated for the European Film Academy prize for Best European Director in 2001. The film is based on the diary of Grace Elliott, an English woman who was the mistress of the Duke of Orleans, and living in Paris during the Revolution. The diary explains the connections between Grace Elliott’s personal life and the public events of the Revolution, and thus in filming it Rohmer was presented with the problem of how to reconstruct revolutionary Paris: ‘I wanted to show a big city with big open spaces like Place Louis XIV (now Place de la Concorde), which was a focal point of the Revolution, and parts of town that Grace Elliott mentions in her memoir’ (Rohmer in Ferenzi 2001). Such a desire obviously creates problems. The Place de la Concorde has been very considerably altered since it was the Place Louis XIV, and it is too large to recreate as a physical space in a studio. The problem was resolved by the use of painted scenery. Revolutionary Paris has been lost as a physical space, but it can be recreated as a painted space, and moving characters can be technologically inserted into that artificial city. The city was recreated aesthetically and yet with reference to historical records, and so even as artifice it was real: ‘We worked from pictures and engravings, but also from street maps of the period . . . To me, this work was not just a matter of being meticulous; it was about striving for an authenticity that underpins the whole film’. As such, aesthetics can be lent to the services of realism, precisely to the extent that the past can only be made real artificially. Rohmer said that in terms of period films, ‘I don’t much care for photographic reality. In this film, I depict the Revolution as people would have seen it at the time’ (Rohmer in Ferenzi 2001). The situation is rather more complex than Rohmer allows. In The Lady and the Duke, revolutionary Paris is not at all depicted ‘as people would have seen it at the time’. After all, for ‘people at the time’ Paris was material not artistic, bricks not paint, and it was a lived presence not a digitally enhanced background. In other words, revolutionary Paris was a ‘now’ and it can only be recreated as a ‘now’ through techniques that blast it out of the past. Conventional strategies of going to a place that looks like revolutionary Paris would not work because that has become a cinematic cliché, and so Paris ‘as it would have been seen at the time’ can be seen by present day audiences only if they are forced to engage with it as something previously unseen. Revolutionary Paris can be to the extent that it is made to be in the present by means of a

24 Eric Rohmer

denial of what contemporary Paris is and a refusal of the pretence that it is possible to know what revolutionary Paris was. Similar paradoxes can be found in Rohmer’s other period films, the first of which was The Marquise of O in 1975. The film is based on a short story by Kleist, and the dialogue is in German, making it Rohmer’s only non-French-language film production although it is not his only Kleist adaptation. In 1979 he directed another piece by Kleist, Katherin von Heilbronn, for both the stage and French television. The reason for keeping the dialogue of The Marquise of O in German seems to have been Rohmer’s characteristic concern with realism. Quite simply, since Kleist wrote in German and since the film is based on Kleist’s story, then the film has to be in German. Rohmer has said that he worked, ‘book in hand, with no other script than the text itself, in an effort to maintain its integrity’ (Rohmer 1989: 89) and that he decided to keep the original sentence construction in the film because ‘Dividing up the sentences would have meant playing with the natural speech of two centuries ago’ (Rohmer 1989: 91). Indeed, it has been argued that it is precisely because Rohmer subordinated his directorial concerns to the story that the film is a success: ‘By remaining true to the text, Rohmer can hardly go wrong, since Kleist’s novella is in itself a masterpiece’ (Borchardt 1984: 133), and that what Rohmer has achieved is ‘the successful transformation of Kleist’s remarkable language into the medium of film’ (Herbst 1988: 201). The decision to use Kleist as the scriptwriter is consonant with Rohmer’s deliberate self-effacement, and it reflects the strategy of The Lady and the Duke, where Grace Elliott’s diary was used as if it had been a found script (Rohmer in Ferenzi 2001). But there is more to recreating the past than sticking closely to an original text. Given that Rohmer is a film-maker, it is also necessary that the image looks like a truthful recreation of the past. For at least one commentator this is the cause for suspicion about the honesty of Rohmer’s dealings with Kleist: ‘Whereas Kleist’s novella disrupts the stability and coherent understanding of reality . . . the idealistic realism of Rohmer’s mise en scène subscribes to a belief in the unique ability of film to capture reality’ (Rhiel 1991: 13). Once again, the situation is rather more complex than that. Rohmer might well possess a certain confidence about film and reality, but it all depends on the reality that is being filmed. And here The Marquise of O anticipates the way in which The Lady and the Duke recreated revolutionary Paris. The past is made into a ‘now’, and the past is made into a ‘now’ that is blasted out of history, in as far as it is filtered through the prism of the art by which the present knows of that past. In substantive terms, this means that

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it is relatively easy to spot visual references in The Marquise of O, which is set in the very late eighteenth century, to the contemporaneous art of Henry Fuseli, Jacques Louis David, Fragonard and Casper David Friedrich (see Dalle Vache 1996: 91, 94, 99), while the English heroine of The Lady and the Duke owes more than a little in terms of style and look to Thomas Gainsborough. A fleeting and unexpected humorous instance of this principle can be found in the last episode of the occasional film Rendezvous in Paris, when a woman sits in a chair in an artist’s studio in a pose that exactly mimics that of a woman sitting in a chair in a painting that has just been seen in the Musée Picasso. Angela Dalle Vache has explored the role of art in The Marquise of O. She makes it possible to see that when Rohmer uses art he does so in the service of realism and the past as a ‘now’ that had – and has – its own reality: ‘Excessive aestheticism occurs when painting is not subordinated to the staging of the world, and therefore, for Rohmer, cinema can benefit from painting as long as they meet in a shared sense of theatrical space – one based not on artificial display but linked to the world through the living presence of the actors’ (Dalle Vache 1996: 82). Consequently, even as Rohmer’s surfaces are highly aestheticised, they avoid the trap of aestheticism (and therefore a mythicisation of the past), because they are always conceived as surroundings for characters that move. 1978’s Perceval confronts the problem of blasting the world of medieval-Arthurian legend from out of history. Rohmer himself put Perceval alongside The Marquise of O as two films that break down the barrier between cinema and theatre by means of a focus on acting (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 221). In a very staged and theatrical manner, the film is based on Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfthcentury French romance of innocence, knightly valour and virtue. Put another way, whereas The Lady and the Duke and The Marquise of O dealt with periods that were historically ‘real’, Perceval confronts a period that was unreal and mythical even to Chrétien de Troyes himself. This film, then, has to deal with the problem of how to make a ‘now’ out of a time that never was. If Crisp is right, Rohmer dealt with this problem by deftly sidestepping it and by putting his realist commitments aside, for one film at least. Crisp says that in this film the ‘break with realist practice is . . . total’. He justifies this comment with the valid point that in Perceval, ‘Décors are heavily stylised, and gestures follow a formal tradition based on the mediaeval visual arts. The narrative line is episodic rather than dramatic, and totally lacking in that fluency, continuity and coherence usually sought after by realists’ (Crisp 1988: 82).

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The entire film was shot in a studio, with stylised forests and short wooden turrets for castles. As if to make the artificiality even more pronounced, each episode is introduced and commented upon by a chorus of medieval singers that at least one American critic found to be incomprehensible (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). Crisp quotes Rohmer in a way that implies that he too knew that Perceval meant a break with realism. It lacks ‘spatial realism’, and fake metal trees are preferred over real ones which would have been an ‘embarrassment’ and ‘too romantic’ (Rohmer quoted in Crisp 1988: 83). However, and as Crisp shows but appears not to notice, the point is that when Rohmer made those comments he was explaining why he was trying to avoid naturalism, not realism. And Rohmer wanted to avoid naturalism because he wanted to ensure, as Crisp puts it, ‘Fidelity to the text and to the period’ (Crisp 1988: 83). In other words, Rohmer’s Perceval tries to deal with a medieval romance according to the same principle of faithfulness to the text that was later to inform the faithfulness to a fiction in The Marquise of O and to a historical testimony in The Lady and the Duke. This explains why Perceval has the admittedly odd appearance that it does. As with The Marquise of O, so with Perceval. Art is drawn upon according to a need to create a theatrical or filmic space in which characters can move in surroundings that are of the ‘now’, and not according to an excessive aestheticism. But of course that ‘now’ is ontologically ambiguous. There is the ‘now’ of the time of the romance that has to be blasted from out of history, and there is the ‘now’ of the film production that sees the past, any past, through the prism of its artistic heritage. As such, Perceval draws on the style of medieval manuscripts, stained glass windows and painting in order to construct a space which surrounds the knights and ladies and which is able to establish ‘fidelity to the text and the period’. Indeed, given that the concern is to create ‘fidelity’ to a text, it is unsurprising that the space of the film is fairly limited and circular. These are characters that never escape the edges of the stage except to bring the story to a close, just as the words and pictures in a manuscript never seep beyond the page. In a discussion of Perceval, Tom Milne rightly said that ‘Watching the film is in fact rather like watching the animation of a medieval manuscript, with the text gravely read aloud while the images – cramped and crowded, coloured with jewelled brilliance, delighting the eye with bizarre perspectives – magnificently play the role traditionally assigned to marginal illuminations’ (Milne 1981: 194). The past is created as a space in which a legendary romance can be enacted in a way that is at once theatrical and

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yet real, and which is therefore thoroughly implicated in both moments of the ‘now’. The romance works cinematically because it creates the ‘now’ of Perceval in terms of how the present day ‘now’ sees that mythical past. Consequently it can be suggested that Crisp is right to identify Perceval as a film in which Rohmer breaks with naturalism, but the rupture does not at all represent a movement away from realism. Rather the break with naturalism bolsters the realism of a film set in an unreal past. The problem of the ‘now’ also influences the style of Triple Agent (2004). This film is based on the few known facts in the story of Fyodor Vorodin, a Tsarist General exiled in Paris, who was implicated in the kidnapping in September 1937 of the President of the Russian Army Veteran’s Federation. Vorodin was the head of intelligence for the Federation and therefore a key player in the covert politics of the time. He himself disappeared shortly after the kidnapping of his boss, leaving the question dangling in the air of whether he was a White Russian who got caught up in other people’s plots, an agent of Stalin trying to destroy the White Russian community or, alternatively, an agent of the Nazis, trying to destroy the formation of the Popular Front. In this film Rohmer deals with the problem of the realism of the 1930s by representing it as a ‘now’ that is distinct from the present and yet which looks like the 1930s past as imagined today. Consequently, the film is studded with newsreels from the 1930s that play on the current (the ‘now-adays’) convention that the recent past was monochrome, while the characters upon which Rohmer concentrates are filmed in full colour. They are at once surrounded by and yet distinct from the ‘now’ of the pre-war past and, indeed, the ‘now’ of the moment of the film’s production. The ontological ambivalence is highlighted by the style, wardrobe and language of the film too. For example, the make-up that is worn by the actresses looks thick and heavy, often leaving a waxy sheen just as we imagine cheap or mid-range 1930s face cream to have looked. Something comparable happens in Perceval. For instance, when the character of Blanchefleur first appears, she is made-up to recall a figure from a Flemish altarpiece by the likes of van der Groes. Vincendeau points out that in Triple Agent the characters’ knit-wear looks authentically home made and the language of the film is of a past ‘now’: ‘Even the way the French actors pronounce certain words – for instance “fascism” – is (correctly) different from today’s usage: language is thus a material component of the story, not just a vehicle; it is historical rather than a frivolous distraction from history’ (Vincendeau 2004: 38). The actors speak historically, and therefore in ways that present-day audiences expect people ‘then’ to have spoken. This way of

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using language runs through all Rohmer’s period films. The Marquise of O and The Lady and the Duke rely on contemporary texts to get the language historically ‘right’, and Perceval is spoken in couplets, like the romance that it is. Triple Agent contains moments when the characters talk about the contemporary art that surrounds them, such as Picasso’s newly exhibited Guernica. Even with Triple Agent then, a film which deals with a ‘now’ in Rohmer’s living memory (Andrew 2004; Jeffries 2004), the past is created aesthetically and through the use of art as a ‘now’ that is blasted out of time. Yet the period films are not just dry exercises in ontology, and neither are they merely aesthetic reveries; they are linked by theme. Rohmer himself has speculated that with The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent, ‘people might say I’ve begun another series: the series of tragedies from history’ (Rohmer 2004). Arguably, ‘people’ would be right to say just that and, moreover, they would also be right to expand the ‘series’ of tragedies from history to include The Marquise of O and Perceval. But it all depends on what is meant by the word tragedy.

Tragedy When he mentions how ‘people’ might regard the films as a series, Rohmer uses the word ‘tragedy’ in a fairly straightforward way to refer to sad endings brought about by social pressures. In the case of The Lady and the Duke, this tragedy consists in the destruction of the aristocracy during the French Revolution, and in Triple Agent it is the disappearance of all of the characters in the film in the moral and political morass of the pre-war years and, subsequently, the Nazi occupation of Paris. But it is possible to use the word ‘tragedy’ in another way that pulls together all of the period films, and makes them about something more than the fate that befalls characters because they are unlucky enough to live in one period as opposed to another. According to Lukács, from the point of view of empirical life, real life is always felt to be impossible, and as always ever so slightly out of reach, because of the fundamental contradictions of what the term ‘life’ means. Real life is a condition that is lived through to an end. It is something definite and clear-cut, and precisely because it is so definite, in real life men and women can be fulfilled. It is precisely the chance of fulfilment that makes it seem to be so real. But empirical life is much less clear: ‘nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends . . . Everything flows, everything merges into another thing . . . everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers

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into real life’. We struggle to live, to experience real life, in the context of a life that means that nothing stops long enough to be experienced as real. We cannot be fulfilled in empirical life because fulfilment requires an end point of satiety or a decisive end of the event, and empirical life never stops long enough to enable us to rest in that way or be certain whether any event has actually finished. The problem, in a nutshell, is that in order to experience real life we need first of all to live empirically, but empirical everyday life means that the real is always impossible. Lukács says that ‘To live is to live something through to the end: but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through to the end. Life is the most unreal and unloving of all conceivable existences’ (Lukács 1974: 153). This is why empirical life possesses an air of compromise and leads to a sense of dissatisfaction. More strongly yet, it might be said that everyday life can never be satisfying except in the most illusory and deceptive of ways. The point about the miracle is that because it is an event that can be lived through to its end, it points towards the fulfilment that is called real life. But, and this is the root of tragedy, that real life involves so intense a suffusion of meaning into the everyday that ‘no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at such heights – at the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live’ (Lukács 1974: 153). Yet how is that numbness endurable? If we cannot bear real life, how can we bear a dull empirical life? Lukács answers that in numbness there lies reassurance, and in reassurance there are possibilities of dreams. According to Lukács, it is indeed by means of illusions that men and women come to terms with the empirical world, even though it means that the real is always out of reach. He says of the denizens of numb empirical life (that is, he says of us) that ‘Gardens of Eden for idle dreams bloom for them behind every rock face whose sheerness they can never conquer. Life for them is longing and hoping, and what fate puts out of their reach is turned cheaply and easily into inner riches of the soul’ (Lukács 1974: 153). For these dreamers of the everyday, everything remains possible for the simple reason that they cannot survive having to recognise and confront any moment of the miracle in which everything will be fulfilled. Indeed, a number of Rohmer’s films can be interpreted as master classes in the analysis of these Gardens of Eden (as for that matter can many of the novels of one of Rohmer’s favourite writers, Balzac). For example, the second of the Comedies and Proverbs series, A Good Marriage (1982) revolves around an epigram which is attributed to

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La Fontaine: ‘Can any of us refrain from building castles in Spain?’ Crisp is right to call Sabine, the heroine who has decided to marry a man without asking him first, ‘a woman dominated by an idée fixe; her aim is to mould the world to her will, rejecting or ignoring those aspects of “reality” which are incompatible with her private obsession’ (Crisp 1988: 95). Her farcical quest to marry the man of her choice is nothing more than a Spanish castle or, to recall Lukács, a ‘Garden of Eden’. Sabine wants the heights that are offered by the perfect relationship, and because she is not prepared to take the chance that such a good marriage might never occur nor, indeed, be possible to endure, she lives in daydreams which mean that she misses the opportunity of a real life. At the very beginning and end of the film Rohmer makes it obvious that the love-object that Sabine desires is sitting more or less right beside her, on the train that she takes everyday, and that she would see him were she not so distracted by her illusory romance. A Garden of Eden also features in A Summer’s Tale, where a visit to the island of Ouessant off the coast of Brittany is longed for by all of the characters, although none of them ever actually gets there. Once again, the theme of longing for that which is out of reach and its transformation into cheap ‘inner riches of the soul’ is examined in the final story of the three interlinked episodes that make up Rendezvous in Paris. A male artist accompanies the female friend of a female friend to the Musée Picasso but he leaves his companion, only to return to the gallery following another woman. The artist and the other woman end up back in his studio but, despite the ambiguities of the virtual ballet that the characters perform as they move, she leaves without him getting what he obviously wants. The implication is that the artist longs for what the woman from the gallery promises, but his loss is easily come to terms with through the simple expedient of a return to work. As the artist says out loud, in the last line of the film and as he looks at the newest blob of paint on his rather banal canvas: ‘The day’s not a total loss’. What the artist will doubtless recall is this moment of the possible, this moment that will never be fulfilled precisely because it has gone and which was allowed to go because what it offered was too intense. He will recall in a mood of longing. What he will recall will be a Garden of Eden that will endure because it never became real, and he will be able to recall because, after all, the day was not a total loss. Like Sabine and the characters in A Summer’s Tale, the artist replaces lost fulfilment with an idée fixe. He replaces what could really be with what might have been. It is this world of empirical Gardens of Eden that the miracle transforms. Lukács says that ‘the miracle is fulfilment. It snatches from life

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all its deceptive veils, woven of gleaming moments and infinitely varied moods. Drawn in hard and ruthless outline, the soul stands naked before the face of life’ (Lukács 1974: 153). In the moment of the miracle men and women are revealed for what they truly are. They are shown to be dreamers, deluded and afraid of the reality that they seek. The miracle tears away the deceptions that are the foundations of the Gardens of Eden, and it reveals the secret of the real self to the empirical self: ‘the essence of these great moments’, Lukács says, ‘is the pure experience of self’ (Lukács 1974: 156). In the miracle then, the self is revealed to the world and indeed to self without the protection of the softening deceptions and disguises of ordinary empirical life, and what stands in front of the mirror and others is the essential person. In Perceval, the essence of the would-be valorous knight is an innocence that needs to be reclaimed from the pride of knightly virtue, and in The Marquise of O essence consists at least in part in a struggle between external codes of honour and inner disorder. The Lady and the Duke suggests that the essence of Grace Elliott was a certain ethical as opposed to social aristocracy that ultimately made her stand alone in the face of the tide of the Terror. Her aristocratic veneer is stripped away and what is revealed is a real self that upholds certain values in relation to others and regardless of personal cost (so that the miracle of her escape from the guillotine becomes as inexplicable as the miracle of her involvement in the French Revolution). Perhaps the most enigmatic reflection of the essential person, however, is revealed in Triple Agent, where there is the implication that absolute deception leads simply to the utter disappearance of the self. But in that case, which rather more reflects the present day ‘now’ than Perceval or The Lady and the Duke, can essences actually be revealed? Indeed, could it be that one of the messages of Triple Agent is that the present is post-tragic? (Rohmer has suggested that Triple Agent has contemporary relevance; see Andrew 2004). The theme of the revelation of the essential can also be related to the careful use of colour in Rohmer’s films. At one level Rohmer is quite clear that colour ought to be used in film only if it can help represent reality. In a critical review of John Huston’s movie of Moby Dick, Rohmer commented that ‘the filmmaker does not use color as a material but as fragments of reality itself . . . Color in cinema is useful only to make the objects’ reality more precise, more tangible’ (Rohmer 1989: 110). However elsewhere Rohmer made it clear that for him colour can be used in order not just to represent reality but, also, to impress its essence upon the audience. He identified Hichcock’s Rear Window as one of a small group of films in which ‘color is occasionally, but then

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unquestionably, in charge’. And when colour is ‘in charge’ what it manages to do is reveal that which is otherwise hidden: ‘It is not enough for a blue or a green to bolster the film’s expression; they bring with them new ideas, their presence at a specific moment evokes an emotion sui generis’ (Rohmer 1989: 68). By this argument then, colours have immanent meanings, and are symbolic. The principle of the symbolic use of colour to reveal essences can be identified as characteristic of Rohmer’s work. Characters tend to wear clothes, and live in spaces, that are defined by red, yellow, blue and green. Crisp has noticed that the deployment of this palette is almost certainly not accidental. For example, he points out that apart from one character at the beginning, no one in La Collectionneuse wears red (Crisp 1988: 45). But perhaps one of the clearest uses of colour to reveal an essence unknown even to the character is to be found in Love in the Afternoon. The film tells the story of a man who is tempted by sexual attraction to his friend Chloe to stray from quiet domesticity with his wife Hélène. Crisp observes that in the film there is a marked tendency for ‘Chloe to wear red . . . for Hélène to wear . . . blue-green shades . . . and for Frederick’s [sic] vacillations to be manifested externally in a constant modification of the colors he wears: blue initially, red later, as he discovers how “indispensable” Chloe is becoming’ (Crisp 1988: 72). In these films then, the characters wear specifically coloured clothing in order to reveal something of their essence without, however, being so crude as to express it in words (assuming that the characters are able to express their essence, that is; it might be so real that it is almost awful for them to glimpse, and that is certainly the conclusion to be drawn about Fréderic in Love in the Afternoon). Colour is also used very carefully in the period films, and particularly in The Marquise of O. Hildburg Herbst has argued that every character in that film is associated with a specific range of colours so that the essence of each is revealed to the audience, as it were ‘subconsciously’. The thesis is derived from an application of Max Luescher’s colour theory, according to which each colour has a particular and peculiar emotional resonance which is not necessarily intuited consciously, but which nevertheless influences perceptions and reactions. For example, it is noted that the Marquise’s mother invariably wears brown, and according to Luescher’s theory it is a colour that signifies roots and familial security. The mother wears a near-white gown when she declares her unconditional acceptance of her daughter’s innocence. She cannot wear pure white because that is the colour of virginity and, by definition, the Marquise’s mother is not virginal. Meanwhile, the father refuses to

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accept that his daughter is innocent of complicity in her pregnancy and he rages most greatly when wearing black, the colour of denial and negation, or a combination of black and green, which Luescher says reveals prejudice and self-righteousness. The examples could be multiplied, but Herbst is undoubtedly right to make the point that in The Marquise of O, ‘Consciously or intuitively handled, it is a matter of fact that at every turn of this film, color works on the subconscious of the viewer. Color intensifies the emotions in this highly emotional film that balances on the edge of chaos and disaster; and color lets the viewer grasp the psychological state of the principal figures, their confusions, denials, desperation, coming to terms with their problems, and their final redemption’ (Herbst 1988: 207). In short the colours reveal the essential. However, there is a more tantalising way of interpreting the essences that colours reveal and their symbolic value. There appear to be at least some continuities between colour in Rohmer’s films and colour in Christian symbolism, although this connection is strongest in the films that are set in the empirical ‘now’ of the present rather than in the period films. For example, red is often worn by characters who are either searching for love or who can be identified as charitable in as far as they evidently give of themselves without obvious desire for repayment. This ambiguity is represented well by the character of Margot in A Summer’s Tale, who sits on the beach wearing a red swimming costume; she seems to be on the look out for someone or other but does not appear to want to take the subsequent relationship beyond flirtatious friendship (although the end of the film implies that this was, in fact, a relationship that contained a chance of the fulfilment of true love, and against which all subsequent empirical love will be found to be wanting by the characters involved). But perhaps the most interesting – and extremely deliberate – use of colour to suggest essences is to be found in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, where two couples come together in coordinated green and blue clothing. In Christian symbolism, green is the colour of hope and joy, while blue signifies sincerity. The implication seems to be that love as a real relationship with another is the coming together of hope and honesty, and that without the one the other is empty. Without hope, honesty is sanctimonious, and without honesty, hope is wishful thinking. However, the empirical problem is that sooner or later the characters will have to change their clothes, and perhaps Blanche will put on her yellow vest, since yellow signifies (self-)deception (for a different approach to the pairings in this film, see Ennis 1993). If it is accepted that Rohmer’s work is intrinsically Catholic, then it is likely that the use of colour in the films can withstand a much more

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substantial investigation along these lines. To put the suggestion at its weakest, there does indeed seem to be a distinct possibility that colour is being used to reveal decidedly Christian essences. (Such an investigation might usefully begin by comparing Rohmer’s colours to their significance in Catholic liturgical practice; see Elliott 1995). It is revelation of the essential that turns the miracle into the principle of tragedy. Lukács contends that men and women survive empirical life – even as it is apprehended as always being a pale reflection of the longed-for real life – to the extent that it becomes like a ‘monotonous, reassuring lullaby’. Empirical life might not be essential, but it is comforting, and it comforts because men and women ‘hate and fear the unambiguous’. Yet the sleepiness of empirical life – never too real but never too troubling, always able to be turned into the source of cheap riches – is shattered by the miracle: ‘the miracle is what determines and is determined: it bursts incalculably into life, accidentally and out of context, and ruthlessly turns life into a clear, an unambiguous equation – which it then resolves’ (Lukács 1974: 153). In short, the miracle becomes a principle of tragedy because it reveals the unambiguous essences that men and women fear. Tragedy is the inescapability of living in the revelation to self and others of the real self and the real life that cannot be endured. Lukács says that in tragedy, ‘The soul, having become Self, measures its whole previous existence with a stranger’s eye. It finds that previous existence incomprehensible, inessential and lifeless; it can only dream that once it was different, for this new way of being is being’ (Lukács 1974: 155). Perceval the knight looks back askance at the naive Perceval the boy who left the farm and believed that a knight was God, and Grace Elliott is cut off from the demolished world of refined courtesy when she is thrown into a ‘now’ in which aristocracy is being annihilated, and where servants have accepted a different pay. But for both of them, this world in which the self has been stripped back to its essence (the soul) is real. And it is tragic precisely because the revelation without the chance of deception of the real self destroys the empirical self. The hero of tragedy, the tragic hero, ‘loses his selfhood at the moment of its truest exaltation’ (Lukács 1974: 160). This is the drama of Rohmer’s period films, and it is in this sense that they can all be classified as tragedies.

Forms of miracles It is all very well to discuss the miracle in abstract terms, as if it were identical from time to time and place to place. In terms of effect, that is

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indeed the case. Following Lukács, it can be argued that it is possible to talk about a group of phenomena under the heading of ‘the miracle’ because of the extent to which this unexpected event (and therefore this causally inexplicable event, or at least this event that cannot be explained by the phenomenon of the miracle itself) reveals essences, as it holds empirical life to account through a suffusion of the fulfilment that is real life. But in terms of the form of the miracle, the situation is much less clear-cut and, indeed, the identification of a category of the miracle becomes problematic. It falsely implies a unity about the unexpected, so that even though it might not be recognised or embraced by men and women, at least they are aware of what it is that they are refusing to accept. Rohmer’s films point quite firmly to the conclusion that the miracle ought not to be thought of in that way. Just as the moment of the irruption of the miracle is unexpected, so too is the form that it can take. The miracle might be a fellow commuter on the train, it might be a holiday romance that has long-term consequences, but equally the miracle can consist in the forces of the ‘now’ in which the characters are situated, and in which they move. Consequently it is sensible to identify two different forms of the infusion of the miracle in Rohmer’s films. Both identify the miracle with an event, and therefore as an occurrence in time, that can be narrated because it influences action. It is also the case that in each form the miracle is catastrophic in that the event is a moment of culmination or resolution which is now playing itself out in the affairs of men and women, absolutely beyond their own collective or personal powers of control. The event is catastrophic because it has taken on a life regardless of its originator and cannot be withdrawn like a mistaken chess move. By way of illustrating this definition it is worth turning to C.S. Lewis. He called the miracle of the Incarnation a ‘catastrophic historical event’ (Lewis 1940: 12). With that definition he was arguing that the Incarnation was a completely unexpected and unimagined occurrence in this-worldly time (that is to say, it was historical, situated in a temporal ‘now’), which brought the embodiment of Divine Revelation to a culmination that would be subsequently resolved. But this definition itself begs a question: for whom exactly is the event catastrophic? Of course, Lewis took the Incarnation, as Christianity takes it, to be catastrophic for the universal figure of Man. The Incarnation plays itself out for all men and all women, regardless of their presence at a certain time and place. It is always ‘now’. However, it would be silly to put that kind of universal weight on the foundations provided by Rohmer’s films. They are much more modest and possess none of the hubris that would make it reasonable to identify them as making

36 Eric Rohmer

huge claims in and of themselves (once again then, Rohmer’s selfeffacement takes on another facet; this time it is the very understandable self-effacement of refusing to believe that we can create on equal terms with God or make up for any purported deficiencies in His work). But in that the miracle issues into a tragic form, it does have great implications for the characters. They are made essential, and with the revelation of its essence, the self is reborn: ‘The tragic experience . . . is a beginning and an end at the same time. Everyone at such a moment is newly born, yet has been dead for a long time; and everyone’s life stands before the Last Judgement’ (Lukács 1974: 159). The position that can be taken from the period films as tragedies is that different forms of the miracle are catastrophic for different subjects. In this way it is possible to identify two different subjects of the catastrophe, and on that basis it is also possible to identify the two different forms of the infusion of the miracle. There is, firstly, the catastrophic political event and, secondly, the catastrophic personal event. The Lady and the Duke illustrates the first form of miracle, and The Marquise of O illustrates the second. Each film is about the revelation of the essential, and therefore each film is a study in rebirth and Last Judgement. The French Revolution is the catastrophic political event in terms of which the tragedy of The Lady and the Duke is played out. In this film, the Revolution is presented as a process of self-consuming violence in which the stability and refinement of the aristocracy is overturned. It is noticeable that the revolutionaries are invariably presented as grubby and ugly idiots who are only kept in check by the remnants of the military-officer class, which is itself just managing to remain above the abyss by its finger tips. It is not too surprising that Rohmer’s film was identified as an almost-reactionary attack on the Revolution. Albeit a little hyperbolically, Stuart Jeffries gets to the heart of the debate that surrounded the film when he says that ‘French critics hated it so much they suggested he ought to be guillotined. He had committed the sin of portraying French revolutionaries as brutal, drunken oafs, and the bouffanted aristos as noble agitators for justice’ (Jeffries 2004; the story of the condemnation of the film is also told in Lichfield 2001; McNab 2001). But it is also quite likely that such criticisms read political positions into Rohmer’s work that are actually absent from it. On the one hand it has to be remembered that The Lady and the Duke is based on a diary to which Rohmer sought to be faithful, and therefore the political positions that can be taken from the film might be identified as less his and more Grace Elliott’s. Of course, this does not avoid the problem of

The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles 37

why it was that Rohmer chose this particular diary to film, but to follow that line of enquiry is to get into an infinite regress. On the other hand, the only overt political reading that Rohmer’s films seem to sustain in and of themselves is environmentalism, of the kind that runs through The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, with its critique of architectural hubris and defence of organic expression. However, it must be noted that this film was made at a time when France’s socialist government was embarking on a number of massive – and ostentatious – building projects, and it was interpreted by critics and audiences at the time as a mockery of the pretensions of what was popularly dubbed the ‘caviare left’ (Allen-Mills 1993). However, even if it is problematic to read a political position into – or out of – the films, it is the case that The Lady and the Duke expresses an attitude towards politics as such. Rohmer argued that ‘the film’s not taking sides . . . It has no relevance to French politics today; it’s not a condemnation of the Republic, the Left, or any individuals; it’s against totalitarianism, fanaticism, intolerance’ (Rohmer in Andrew 2002). The French Revolution is presented through the prism of tragedy as a catastrophic event in which the characters are thrown out of their numb everyday lives and, instead, forced to come face to face with real life, essential life. It is the miracle as a catastrophe that is political because it sucks in any, and potentially every, man and woman, and thus unravels without regard to the person. For example, at the beginning of the film the Duke of Orleans is a hero of the Revolution and later votes for the execution of the King, but he is soon forced to understand that, as he says to Grace Elliott, ‘I am no longer master of my name or my person’. What happens in the course of the tragedy is that, just like the Duke, Grace Elliott is transformed from bystander into agent and, as the Revolution becomes a catastrophic event beyond the control of persons, she becomes an object waiting to be consumed. It is as an object, standing naked before forces that are absolutely beyond her subjective control, that she faces the Last Judgement of the shadow of the guillotine. Obviously, the existence of her diary of the Revolution shows that Grace escapes death (thanks to the accident of the timely fall of Robespierre), although the Duke does not. The Lady and the Duke is the story of Grace Elliott’s rebirth through the revelation of her essence. At the start of the film she is living in comfort as a friend of Marie Antoinette and the recent mistress of the Duke of Orleans. He brought her over to France from England, where she had been the mistress of the Prince of Wales. Their affair ended amicably, and they remain friends. At the beginning, Grace is little

38 Eric Rohmer

more than an observer of the events of the Revolution, and she is always located in interior spaces. However, in order to escape the growing Terror she flees to the country and, with movement through public places, she witnesses the death of her aristocratic friends and gets sucked into personal relationships that would have been impossible and incomprehensible before, and are dangerous now. In particular, she is asked to help the former Governor of the Tuilleries (a long-time enemy of the Duke of Orleans) escape the mob. Grace agrees to help and she hides the Governor in her bed when a troop of soldiers searches her house, having been tipped off that he is in hiding. He is not found, and this is the miraculous moment of Grace’s rebirth. The catastrophic miracle of the Revolution moves from the public into the personal sphere, transforming it. The event makes Grace Elliott’s empirical life real and she is forced to confront the essential. The accidents of living in France at a certain time, of being asked to help an aristocrat, of being in her bed when the search party arrives, all come together and make Grace a character in a tragedy: ‘Tragedy . . . begins at the moment when enigmatic forces have distilled the essence from a man, have forced him to become essential; and the progress of tragedy consists in his essential, true nature becoming more and more manifest’ (Lukács 1974: 155). When Rohmer depicts the reborn Grace, he does so through explicitly Christian imagery. The morning after the visit by the search party, she tends to the sick Governor while wearing a green gown (this is the only time in the whole film that this character wears green). What is interesting is that not only does green signify hope in the Christian tradition, in Catholic liturgical practice, it is also the colour that symbolises the victory of life over death and new life. In short, green is the colour of rebirth. Thereafter, Grace does seem to spend quite a lot of her time ill in bed, but the bed is now filmed quite differently. Before her rebirth whenever Grace is shown in bed the perspective is side on, but after her rebirth the bed is invariably presented from a bottom corner. This might seem to be a trivial point, but it means that after the rebirth into tragedy, it becomes possible to see what is on the wall above Grace’s head as she lies in bed. And what is there is a heavy gold crucifix. Meanwhile the Governor himself is reborn – or at least his illness abates quickly and for the purposes of the film decisively (he manages to escape to England) – as soon as Grace Elliott gives him some medicine. The drinking of the quinine becomes something like a Eucharistic event. After her rebirth then, Grace is often seen beneath a symbol of death and resurrection. It is difficult to avoid the implication that the essence

The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles 39

of Grace Elliott is martyrdom through a defence of the other in the face of impersonal political process. The circumstances of her action might be accidental, but its essence is nothing less than an imitation of Christ in the suffering that follows from opposition to the powers of evil (and in Rohmer’s scheme, politics is evil because it disregards persons by reducing them to abstract positions – aristocrat rather than daughter, Governor not father). This also explains why the end of the film shows Grace Elliott back in the personal sphere even as nearly everyone she has met has become a victim of the guillotine. She has faced the Last Judgement of trial by the Committee for Public Safety; she has endured a time of imprisonment, and has yet achieved a kind of secular resurrection, thanks to the timely overthrow of Robespierre. In the form of the miracle as catastrophic political event then, the essence of the person is inextricably linked with the tragedy of others. Persons are situated according to the definitions of others, and those definitions establish criteria of fulfilment that either destroy the character or act as principles of rebirth. Grace Elliott is reborn as martyr because she overcomes the limitations of being defined by self and others as an aristocratic woman, while the Duke of Orleans is destroyed because he never escapes the definitions of others; he is never fulfilled, except in the moment of death. In these terms it is her acceptance of the real life of suffering that reveals the essence of Grace to be Christian martyrdom. The tragedy that is told in The Marquise of O is rather less sombre, and of less ethical value, because it is determined by the miracle as catastrophic personal event. Whereas in the political event there are shared and agreed (even if not desired) definitions of the situation, in the catastrophic personal event, the definition of the situation is fractured. Consequently, the heaviness of a film like The Lady and the Duke is replaced with a pervasive sense of irony. At a couple of places in The Marquise of O, there is a chorus of doubters who are either sceptical or incredulous about the story that is unfolding before them; such a chorus never appears in The Lady and the Duke because the French Revolution made everything extremely lucid. Grace Elliott is always becoming clear to herself, and that is part of her tragedy, whereas in The Marquise of O there is an ‘energetic contrast between the way characters would like to see themselves, and the way we as viewers can objectively understand them’ (Gerlach 1980: 89). To some extent it is very hard not to conclude that The Marquise of O is a comedy and a fancy-dress instalment in the Comedies and Proverbs series that Rohmer started to make a few years later.

40 Eric Rohmer

The film shows that the miracle as catastrophic personal event is also the miracle as fractured meaning. The point is that the personal event is catastrophic for different characters in different ways, and there is no common definition of the situation that might enable them to come together. Their rebirth is of personal significance alone and, beyond the confines of the tragic story, means little else. The Marquise of O is populated with characters who ‘do not understand their motives . . . they are offering supernatural explanations of what are plainly natural facts’ (Gerlach 1980: 88). Not to put too fine a point on the matter, Grace Elliott is a character of tragic martyrdom, and the Marquise of O is just a fool. The problem is that like the other characters in the film, the Marquise of O is never a free agent. For all of the characters possibilities are circumscribed and the miracle is always open to misrecognition and misinterpretation, because the film explores the consequences of an action that has already become implicated in empirical life. Each character has to deal with the accidental and unexpected irruption of the real according to the dictates of an empirical world from which they have not managed to escape. It is on this basis that the definitions of the situation are fractured, and the implication seems to be that the miracle only leads to complete clarity when it is common and all-consuming, as in the case of the French Revolution. Without that clarity, the catastrophic personal event can also lead to delusion and therefore a pervading sense of irony. In The Marquise of O, Rohmer observes characters who are too wrapped up in their own empirical life to see what is really going on. It is a film about dealing with the miracle as personal fact (Sullivan 1977). That fact is the pregnancy of the Marquise. The film draws from Kleist’s story, and is set in the post-Revolutionary wars of late eighteenthcentury Europe. Russians, who eventually break in, besiege the town of O. The Marquise, the widowed daughter of the General in charge of the defence of the citadel, seeks to escape but is captured by a group of rough soldiers who attempt to rape her. She is rescued by the arrival of a Russian Count who appears in a white uniform shadowed by clouds of gun smoke refracting the fires of the battle; he jumps down to rescue the Marquise, with his white cape billowing behind him. Crisp rightly says that the Count first appears to the Marquise as ‘a Saviour, an angel of light descending from Heaven to rescue her from the brutal fleshly lusts of her assailants’ (Crisp 1988: 75). He takes the Marquise to a place of safety where she will be watched over by a servant, gives her a sleeping draft, and the scene shifts to a few months later. Now the Marquise is

The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles 41

pregnant and claiming that she does not know how. Her pregnancy ‘inevitably evokes the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth’ (Crisp 1988: 75). The Marquise puts an advertisement in the local newspaper saying that if the father makes himself known at a certain time, she will marry him. The Count reappears, but his return only makes the Marquise angry. She has convinced herself that her pregnancy is a second miraculous conception, and the arrival of the Count destroys her ‘Garden of Eden’. This is a miracle that reveals essences that the characters have sought through dreams to avoid. What then are those essences? In the case of the Marquise, the revealed essence is sexuality. Before the siege of the town, the Marquise had been a widow, living with her mother, father and brother in a web of relationships that made her childlike. Crisp identifies an air of incest about the relationship between the Marquise and her father (Crisp 1988: 79–80), but it can also be interpreted as paternalism and infantilisation. The Marquise’s empirical world is one that denies her essential sexual capacity (which is obvious because although a widow she is also a mother). Yet this is precisely what the pregnancy does reveal and so the Marquise is reborn from out of the wreckage of the destruction of her empirical life. Her father throws the Marquise out of the family home, and she isolates herself in a country mansion (and the surrounding nature is always shown to be abundant and fruitful; the symbolism of fertility is too obvious to ignore). The catastrophic personal event becomes miraculous and reveals to the Marquise an essence that involves her rebirth, out of relationships with parents, and into the relationships of being a mother. The Count’s essence is somewhat more complex. When he reappears it is a shock to the Marquise because he had been thought dead. In other words, from the point of view of the other characters the Russian Count has been reborn in an almost material sense. But from the point of view of the Count himself the rebirth is more moral. It is obvious that he raped the Marquise when she was drugged asleep, and therefore what the miracle of the event has revealed to him is his essence as a creature of uncontrolled animality that is only just kept caged by the restraints of duty with which he presents himself and which enable him to look in the mirror and see reflected a man of honour. The rape is only a rebirth for the Count because it is a revelation of an essence that is otherwise kept hidden away. When he reappears, and relentlessly wears down the Marquise until she agrees to marry him, he is reborn as a character who is responsible for the consequences of his actions. He is

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reborn less as a saviour and more as a sinner who must make reparation to those against whom he has sinned. In these ways, the two main characters of The Marquise of O can be identified as tragic (although they are also rather comic). They are confronted with the unambiguous fact of the pregnancy, and the film shows how that confrontation is mediated through self-deceptions until, ultimately, essences are revealed without mistake and without escape. ‘Their life is made up of words and gestures, but every word they speak and every gesture they make is more than gesture or word; all the manifestations of their life are mere ciphers for their ultimate relationships, their life merely a pale allegory of their own platonic ideas’ (Lukács 1974: 156). The problem is that this catastrophic personal event cannot reconcile the ‘platonic ideas’ of the characters, and so even as they are reconciled at the end, they only really come together on the basis of delusion. The Marquise only agrees to marry the Count after she has become convinced that he is the cause of her pregnancy because, she argues, she can only believe him to be an angel if she also knows him to be a devil, and the Russian Count never confronts the possibility that he might not be the only actor in this particular event. There is one great unspoken delusion that Rohmer reveals to the audience, if they are prepared to see it, but which the Count and the Marquise never glimpse, thanks to their determined focus on their own lives as opposed to the web of relationships that constitute their ‘now’. This is the delusion of the Count that he must be the father, and the delusion of the Marquise that only such a romantic figure can possibly have been her rapist. Indeed, the extant commentary on The Marquise of O agrees that the Count must be the father, but Rohmer actually undermines that confidence. He shows that the Count might well sincerely believe himself to be the cause of the pregnancy, but he is not at all the only rapist. The Marquise has been attacked twice: once by the Count, and once by the servant Leopardo. This unseen and unnoticed underling might actually be the father, and the final irony of the film is that the audience appreciates this possibility but none of the characters, except Leopardo himself, ever allow themselves to glimpse it. After all, Leonardo is only a servant and so the Count and Marquise simply do not take him into account. He is not a person as far as they are concerned. The evidence that Leopardo is the father, or at least the first rapist, is compelling. First, Leopardo is left alone with the Marquise when the Count leaves immediately after giving her the sleeping draught, and presumably he is present before the Count returns to carry out his rape. Second, when Leopardo is driving the Marquise and

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her mother in a carriage, he turns around angrily when they say that it would be humorous were someone like him to be the father. Although they remain ignorant that he is glaring at them, Rohmer makes sure that the audience can notice. Third, and as no commentator seems to have spotted, at the exact time when the Marquise has asked for the father to make himself known, only Leopardo is present before her. The Count comes a few minutes later. This is perhaps the final irony of the catastrophic personal event as the principle of the revelation of essences; dreams can too quickly get in the way if the tragic truth is too uncomfortable, and if real life would be unendurable.

Tragedy reduced Perceval and Triple Agent deal with the problem of the revelation of essence in different ways than The Lady and the Duke and The Marquise of O. Despite their differences, in the end Grace Elliott, the Marquise of O and the Russian Count can all be identified as ‘naked souls’ in that for all of them the essential has been revealed and has been found to be inescapable. For Grace that revelation leads to martyrdom, and for the Marquise and the Count it leads to delusion before a horrified moment of recognition that is quickly made empirical through marriage. Leopardo is just left knowing that he might be the father and his presence suggests that everything the audience has just witnessed is nothing more than vanity. For a moment at least, these are all selves that are defenceless against their destiny: ‘Naked souls conduct a dialogue here with naked destinies. Both have been stripped of everything that is not of their innermost essence; all the relationships of life have been suppressed so that the relationship with destiny may be created’. Indeed in this confrontation of naked self with naked destiny: ‘everything atmospheric between men and objects has vanished, in order that nothing should exist between them but the clear, harsh mountain air of ultimate questions and ultimate answers’ (Lukács 1974: 155). The catastrophic political event means that the ultimate, the essential, has to be confronted because the empirical has been upset, but the catastrophic personal event means that the empirical quickly hides ultimate questions away. The first is the tragedy as tragic, and the second, the tragedy as comedy. Perceval and Triple Agent are films in which the tragic dimension is reduced – although never absent – because they explore situations in which something ‘atmospheric between men and objects’ is palpably present. But that ‘something’ is quite different from one film to the

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other. In the case of Perceval it is a world of the miracle as the empirical. Perceval’s essence is revealed to be innocence, but neither his soul nor his destiny is ever naked in the way that Grace Elliott’s are, because they are always and inextricably suffused with meaning. The point is that nakedness is a relative state and Perceval is never really clothed, even when he is encumbered with armour. In Perceval, ultimate questions and ultimate answers are the only questions and answers. In an odd way, Perceval is so deeply and continuously a film of the miracle that the miracle disappears, and real life and empirical life become identical. Meanwhile Triple Agent is a film that is so atmospheric that no miracle could ever get through the fog. Nothing is clear, everything is bewildering and contradictory, and the great game is precisely to hide the ultimate away so that it looks completely irrelevant. The tragedy of the characters is that they quite lose sight of what those ultimate questions and answers are, and they become prisoners of the very atmospheric world that they try to create. For example, Vorodin’s wife Arsinoe is an artist who paints flat and vaguely sentimental empirical street scenes. She looks but is quite unable to see because she is too distracted by surfaces. Her art never glimpses the real or the ultimate. In the final instance, perhaps this is the decisive political meaning of Rohmer’s films. They are neither for nor against the detail of an event like the French Revolution, and neither are they for or against specific political strategies. They are neither for nor against because, in the end, the films are only concerned with the political to the extent that it consists in the totalitarian imposition of ideals that make it impossible to be respectful of persons. Ultimately, Rohmer’s politics is a condemnation of the human consequences of the political. In this way, Grace Elliott is the antidote to Fyodor Vorodin. She puts the person over and above the political, and he did precisely the opposite. Consequently, she was able to endure the catastrophic event in which it was her fate to live, while his ‘now’ gobbled Vorodin up. By this argument, Rohmer’s position might almost be called anti-political and entirely for the person. What comes leaping across from the period films is the realisation that persons, whether historical or contemporary, populate the ‘now’. These persons are infinitely valuable, and possess a unique, irreplaceable integrity. They take the cinematic form of the characters who move and speak and thereby ensure that the films always remain tragedies about humans and their destinies and never lapse into aesthetic follies. Indeed, the characters are persons like us, and not just characters in a book or painting and, just like us, they are treated unjustly if they are reduced to categories. It is perhaps in the ability to make historical and

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even fictional characters seem to be compelling as persons that the real art of Rohmer’s period films is to be found. Through the artistry and integrity of the films, it becomes clear that these persons are only misrecognised and destroyed if they are identified as nothing more than the bearers of abstractions or cardboard cut-outs of social status (like Leopardo, who is perhaps the real tragic hero of The Marquise of O). And given that these other persons are independent of the self and yet essential parts of the ‘now’ in which that self is situated, they must be treated with respect, responsibility and accorded a fundamental human dignity. Without them the self would not be able to stand naked before itself since without others a sense of self is impossible. Rohmer’s message is that this is what politics fails to appreciate, but what the miracle makes possible, if not demands. In as far as Rohmer’s work has an explicit moral and ethical dimension, that is where it is to be found, in a celebration of the glories and silliness of the person. These are persons who live in the atmospheric conditions of empirical life, or who seek to return to that world of lullabies and Gardens of Eden after they have endured the ‘harsh mountain air’ that is the breath of the suffusion of the miracle. Consequently, the person who calls to be defended and protected in the atmospheric world is a dreamer, a selfdeceiver and more likely to be guided by delusion than destiny. This is a person who will say one thing and do another precisely because she or he is never entirely clear to herself or himself; the essential self has never been revealed and has never had to be survived. This is the kind of person who is the hero of the period that is Rohmer’s dominant focus of interest: the period of the contemporary ‘now’, of the present, the period that is today. It is a period in which the relationships between persons and objects have been made thickly atmospheric, thanks to commerce and fashion, and in which empirical life is seen accordingly as the only kind of life that is available. That is why martyrs like Grace Elliott can only be presented in other period clothing; she is invoked by the present in the same way that, according to Benjamin, the French Revolution invoked Rome. Yet sometimes miracles can get through although they are always personal and therefore open to complete misapprehension. More often than not, resolution comes from escape rather than fulfilment. It is this atmospheric ‘now’, our ‘now’ that is the site of Rohmer’s most nuanced work. Even as the past is a series of tragic nows that can be blasted out of history, the present is a more comical and ironic ‘now’. It is also much more ambiguously human. That is the empirical reality in which Rohmer and the persons who constitute his audience live, and through which the real has to be sought.

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Conclusion In all, it can be proposed that the period films are significant and ontologically important, but they are not reference points within the morenormal contours of ‘Rohmer territory’. They are, in fact, more like historical romances that add one more layer of illusion to empirical life. If many of the heroines of Rohmer’s films can be approached as variations on the theme of Emma Bovary (and that is most certainly one way of reading the Comedies and Proverbs series), then the period films are his equivalent of the books that Emma read and which lead to her distraction. The period films enable empirical men and women to believe that they might breathe the ‘harsh mountain air of ultimate questions’ while never forgetting to ponder the very important matter of what colour dress they ought to wear tomorrow. And to be honest, that is a much more pressing question for Rohmer’s slowly accumulated audience. Living as they do in a thickly atmospheric world, they tend not to have to confront the kinds of problems of a Grace Elliott. To this extent, ‘Rohmer territory’ includes its audience in a way that the period films do not, and even cannot, thanks to their ontological ambiguity. The question of the contemporary ‘now’, of our present, is, then, about how the chance of fulfilment might be glimpsed in empirical life by persons who are dreamers, who tend to turn the ‘now’ that surrounds them into a Garden of Eden. The indigenous inhabitants of Rohmer territory are men and women who are like Emma Bovary, and who are like us, and who, like us, would drink coffee and not arsenic in a crisis.

2 The Occasional Films: Scenes of the Ordinary Miracle

Even the quickest of glances at their surface reveals that Rohmer’s period films were the result of a long and careful production process. For example, Crisp reports that ten years were needed to put together the funding for Perceval, and that although it took only seven weeks to shoot the whole film, there had been a year of rehearsals (Crisp 1988: 85). It is obvious that the deliberate pictorial references of The Marquise of O were the result of very long and detailed research. Meanwhile, the painted backgrounds of revolutionary Paris that feature in The Lady and the Duke took three years to prepare (Grey 2001), although the film evidently took considerably less time to shoot. The Lady and the Duke was released in 2001 but in early 1999 Rohmer was asking a British journalist for advice about which English actress he ought to approach for the role of Grace Elliott (Lennon 1999; Rohmer eventually chose the largely unknown Lucy Russell for the part). Such long periods of gestation and preparation are not at all unique in Rohmer’s work. For example, the scenery for Claire’s Knee was planned a year before shooting began, when Rohmer oversaw the planting of rose bushes which would be in flower at the right time the following year and be established, organic, parts of the garden (Crisp 1988: 61). Meanwhile, My Night at Maud’s begins on Christmas Eve, but the main actor, Jean-Louis Trintignant, was unavailable for the planned year and so filming was put off until the following Christmas (Almendros 1984: 91; Monaco 1976: 303). But even then filming went ahead only because circumstances fitted in with preparation. Nestor Almendros, Rohmer’s long-time cinematographer, recalled: ‘Some people think Rohmer is in league with the devil. Months before, he had scheduled the exact time for shooting the scene when it snows; that day, right on time, it snowed, and the snow lasted all day long, not just a few minutes’. As Almendros went on to comment: ‘it is not just a 47

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question of luck; the key lies in Rohmer’s detailed preparation, which he sometimes completes two years before shooting the film’ (Almendros 1984: 79). And the preparation can be so detailed for the simple reason that Rohmer knows exactly what it is that has to be prepared. What is clear is that Rohmer works according to a definite system in which the story comes first – ‘The story always comes first’ (Rohmer in Caister 1990) – the production is put into place, then actors are chosen for the roles, the script is finalised and shooting begins. It is precisely because of the careful preparation of the early stages of the process that the actual shooting takes up relatively little time. In this light it is unsurprising that Rohmer has always tended to stress the origins of his films in a literary text, and he contends that ‘film is nearer to the short story than to the novel’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 222). The way that Rohmer’s work has its roots in texts is clear in all of the period films, but it is also extremely evident in the series and, particularly, the Moral Tales. Those six films are all based on pre-existing stories that Rohmer himself wrote, ‘at a point when I did not yet know whether I was going to be a filmmaker’ (Rohmer 1980: v). Rohmer explained that the stories were important because no film can be made out of nothing: ‘I think it safe to say that it is easier to compose images starting with a story than it is to make up a story on the basis of a series of images shot more or less at random’ (Rohmer 1980: vi). The pre-existing stories are externalised and the objectivity that they consequently come to possess acts as both a break on invention and a guarantee of veracity. Rohmer said that ‘What is important is that your own text be foreign to you; otherwise you flounder, and the actors with you’ (Rohmer 1980: vi). Consequently, even as the films draw on a story that Rohmer knows full well to be his own creation, they can be realist. The stories ‘are things that I film, just like the landscapes, faces, behaviour, and gestures’ (Rohmer 1989: 80). One difference between the two forms – story and film – is how they deal with self-reflection by the characters. In stories this is a relatively easy issue to resolve. For example, in the stories that underpinned the Moral Tales, the male protagonist was also the narrator, and therefore selfreflection could be identical with the narration. In the films, the matter is dealt with by means of the protagonist giving a retrospective commentary. In this way it is possible for the inner life of at least one of the characters to come into focus (and therefore Rohmerian irony emerges in the gap between what the narrator says and what he actually does), but at the expense of the ‘now’-ness of the film (the narration is in the past tense, the images in the present). Rohmer reflected on the possibilities

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and problems of commentary when he pondered whether or not its use constituted a kind of cheating: ‘Yes, if it contained the main part of my subject matter, relegating the images to the role of illustrations. No, if from the confrontation of this conversation with the characters’ conversation and behaviour a kind of truth was discovered, a truth entirely different from that of the text or the behavior’ (Rohmer 1989: 82). Given these doubts, it is perhaps not too surprising that the narrator’s commentary disappears from Rohmer’s work after the Moral Tales. Now the audience is left to work in the ironic gap between what the protagonist says to other characters in the film and what he or she does with them. The relationship between the film and the audience changes more than a little. Instead of being things to be thought about, with the removal of the commentary the films become more complex, more dependent upon the audience itself and, therefore, they become things to be thought with. The role of the audience shifts from reader to interpreter. Rohmer has disavowed any authorial control over the meanings that the films come to possess: ‘I accept absolutely all interpretations. Anyway, it’s not for me to accept them or not: I make a film, and once it’s made, it gets away from me, it closes in on itself ... It’s for the public to get in however it chooses’ (Rohmer in Showalter 1993: 115). With this concern, the most successful films will therefore be the ones that have the most points of entry, but Crisp argues in an opposite way. According to him, the most successful of Rohmer’s films are those in which the commentary is emphasised (he mentions The Girl at the Monceau Bakery as a case in point), and he says that the films lack intensity when the protagonist’s commentary is abandoned. In particular, Crisp says, it is this, ‘which renders most of the Comedies and Proverbs a little disappointing’ (Crisp 1988: 107). But they are only disappointing if they are approached in terms of a presumption that they ought to be complete unto themselves. If the Comedies and Proverbs are identified instead as invitations towards interpretation on the part of the audience, then they actually become endlessly compelling. Perhaps this shift in the role of the audience, from reader to interpreter, explains one of the very odd qualities of the public reception of Rohmer’s body of work. It has been identified by Gilbert Adair, who points out that critics of Rohmer’s films tend to use exactly the same arguments that are relied upon by admirers, ‘that his dramatis personae are a bunch of feckless, knuckle-headed flibbertigibbets whose languid posturings and complete lack of self-knowledge are calculated to set the teeth on edge’ (Adair 1999). The point is however that since the removal of the commentary, Rohmer’s films have relied explicitly on

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the audience to do the work of interpretation of the meaning of these characters. They are indeed frequently ineffective and careless, proud of their knowledge yet remarkably lacking in self-awareness, but the question is what that means, and that is something which is left to the audience to work out for itself. ‘Spectators in the cinema should always be trying to read between the lines, and be aware that nothing deceives so much as words’ (Rohmer in Caister 1990). But there are also less prosaic ways of explaining the shifting role of the audience. First, perhaps Rohmer simply became more confident about his own skills as a storywriter and film-maker, such that the slightly dubious device of the commentary could be avoided, thanks to greater technical competence. Second, maybe the spectators were left to do the work of interpretation, and thus allowed to make the meaning of the film spin out from its creator, because Rohmer had come to be confident about their interpretive abilities and had learnt to trust his audience. He has spoken of ‘a faithful public’ to which he owes his commercial success (Rohmer in Grey 2001). It is certainly the case that Rohmer has a clear idea about for whom his films are made. When an interviewer put it to him that only a small number of people are capable of the kind of linguistic self-obsession that is typical of Rohmer’s characters and that there must be a problem of identification for the audience, Rohmer intimated that he did not see the situation in that way. He admitted that his characters only reflect sociologically a relatively small proportion of their audience, yet ‘young people do think and talk like that, at least lots of them have written to me to say that they identify with the characters in my films, particularly the young women’ (Rohmer in Caister 1990). Alexia Portal, who appeared in An Autumn Tale, remarked that Rohmer’s ‘vision of the Nineties generation is very accurate ... He doesn’t wear fashionable clothing, but that’s why many young people can recognise themselves through these characters’ (Portal quoted in Macnab 1999). Identification through speech reflects another dimension of Rohmer’s working practice. Although the story is written in advance and adhered to throughout the production process, the precise dialogue of the script is written after casting. Rohmer spends a lot of time in conversation with the cast so that the speech that he gives to each actor reflects their own style of talking (Monaco 1976: 303). In this way the character’s talk appears to be natural (it is written for them personally) and contemporary (it is written in line with their slang and syntax). Béatrice Romand, who has appeared in a number of the films, recalls that when she first worked with Rohmer on Claire’s Knee, he spent a long time talking with

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her before writing the final script (Romand in Lennon 1999). Rohmer has said, ‘I try to put familiar words in the mouths of the actors, words familiar to them personally. The text is very often made as a function of the actor’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 221). However, as soon as the dialogue is written down it becomes something that the actors have to learn; the written script becomes objective and improvisation is kept to a bare minimum if not, indeed, treated with a measure of suspicion. According to Crisp, Claire’s Knee reflects this working practice especially clearly. He shows that although the story of the film took around 20 years to evolve, the actual script only took a couple of weeks to write (Crisp 1988: 61). In this way the dialogue retains an air of immediacy, both in terms of the freshness of detail for the cast and, indeed, its ‘now’-ness. Almendros uses the example of Claire’s Knee to make the point that the final script is always treated as unalterable: ‘Rohmer is open to any kind of suggestion as long as it has nothing to do with content. On this, he is inflexible’ (Almendros 1984: 92). Meanwhile Marie Rivière, who like Romand has featured in a number of Rohmer’s films, most notably The Aviator’s Wife, The Green Ray and An Autumn Tale, has drawn on her experience to observe that ‘He writes the script and he doesn’t ask actors to improvise, not with words anyway. The text must be respected ... [T]he copious dialogue seems improvised. It is all written though’ (Rivière 1999). Similarly, Alexia Portal says of the final script that ‘every comma, every word is important. There is no improvisation’ (Portal quoted in Macnab 1999). But there are some exceptions; much of The Green Ray was improvised (and that is why Rivière got a co-scriptwriting credit) although only within the constraints of a pre-existing storyline and characterisation, and incidents in some of the other films were left deliberately vague so that the flow of the dialogue might be slightly incoherent and confused, just like a lot of the conversations and events of empirical life. Consequently, the films depend on the audience to do yet more work, in order to interpret the dramatic status of the scene. As Rohmer says, ‘What I try to do is write dialogue which is absolutely natural but prepared in advance. I like to shuffle the pack, so that what is unprepared has the air of being written, and what is written has the air of being improvised’ (Rohmer in Lennon 1999). That ‘air’ is thickened because the actors are given free rein when it comes to their gestures. Rivière comments that ‘Rohmer encourages his actors to use their own gestures. Another director might want me to explain or justify why I raised my arm a certain way; Rohmer lets me do what I feel is right’ (Rivière 1999). He has explained that the freedom of gesture is embraced because ‘When I see an actor make a gesture I like I

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never ask him to do it again. The beauty is in the spontaneity’ (Rohmer in Andrews 2002). The emphasis on preparation and planning is a recurrent theme in Nestor Almendros’s recollections of working with Rohmer. He remembers that La Collectionneuse was for the most part filmed in single takes because the actors were so well rehearsed and the camera angles so carefully worked out in advance. Indeed, the film was so efficiently shot that when the negatives were processed so little stock had been used that the laboratory workers thought that La Collectionneuse was a short (Almendros 1984: 56). My Night at Maud’s took only a week to edit because the film was meticulously worked out in advance, and everything was done for a purpose. Rohmer ‘never loses time selecting takes, and in fact refuses to film the same shot more than once’ (Almendros 1984: 79). Maybe there is a link between Rohmer’s incredibly efficient working method and his politics. Almendros says: ‘Rohmer’s obsession with economy has something to do with his personality, and also with his conception of film. It is almost an ecological question: he wants to save energy, to avoid waste’ (Almendros 1984: 226). The method is such that Rohmer is sometimes able to make films almost on a whim, as and when opportunity or desire presents itself. These are films that do not fit in with the series and which are occasional in that they appear once in a while and are infrequent. They are not planned far in advance and the story is often broken up into episodes which could go on ad infinitum but which stop after the overall film has reached a length of around 100 minutes. Although the architecture of the films has obviously been carefully worked out and the stories quite possibly taken off a shelf (and this explains why these occasional films can be made very quickly, almost anecdotally), the circumstances of their production means that they are often marked by a sense that spontaneity is trying to break out of the constraints that are created by the working method. Four of Rohmer’s films can be classified as occasional, although it has to be admitted that such classification applies to one of them only in retrospect, his first feature length production, The Sign of Leo. It is a difficult film to watch, not because of its shortcomings (although the story does sag pretty badly in the middle) but because, as Monaco rightly says, in many ways it is only interesting in as far as it is now known to be the beginning of Rohmer’s career in full-length filmmaking (Monaco 1976: 288). The Sign of Leo, which was made in 1959, is not one of Rohmer’s serial films and there is a great sense of the essay about it. There is a sense that Rohmer was exploring what it was possible

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for him to do in a film when given the opportunity. Therefore the film only becomes an essay as opposed to forgotten because of what retrospection makes it possible to know that it anticipated, the series of Moral Tales (although the box office failure of The Sign of Leo meant that the first Moral Tale, 1962’s The Girl at the Monceau Bakery was limited to a 26-minute running time). The Sign of Leo tells the story of Pierre Wesselrin (played by Jess Hahn), a good-living loafer in Paris who inherits a fortune when his aunt dies, and is thus saved from penury. But before he can get the money he is left alone in Paris in August, since all of his friends have gone away on work or holiday. The bulk of the film is made up of scenes of Wesselrin’s increasingly aimless wandering around the city from which he is now alienated by poverty (and in which he is surrounded by tourists who regard him as part of the local scenery, rather than friends who treat him as a human being). After a series of misadventures he is recognised busking outside the Café Deux Magots by a couple of friends who have just come back to Paris. They take him away and the audience is left to reach the conclusion that now Wesselrin’s life will come back together and he will receive his due inheritance. The other occasional films are more obviously the products of opportunities that arose for Rohmer while he was working on the different series. Moreover, the appearance of the occasional films in the 1980s and 1990s also implies that he could work on them because there was a certain degree of financial latitude that was lacking around the time of The Sign of Leo. Even though these films are obviously Rohmer’s work, it is also the case that in a couple of them he plays with genres that are quite absent from the series. For example, in 1986, Rohmer released Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, the nearest he has ever got to an outright comedy. Each episode explores a dimension of the relationship between two (typically Rohmerian) young women: a Parisian student, Mirabelle, and a self-taught artist living in the country, Reinette. Their adventures begin when Reinette helps Mirabelle repair a punctured bicycle tyre, and continue in Paris where they confront an arrogant waiter, a shoplifter and a selfobsessed art dealer. Rohmer made the film in a gap during the production of The Green Ray (Toumarkine 1989), and therefore it must have been made according to his usual working method. The comedic dimension of the Four Adventures is heightened because, along with The Green Ray, this is the film in which Rohmer most relies upon improvisation. As with The Green Ray, it appears that the story and characterisation of the Four Adventures was firmly established, and some improvisation was permitted within those constraints.

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The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre appeared in 1993, and was made when Rohmer’s main focus was on the series of Tales of the Four Seasons. This film explores the conflict between a nouveau-riche socialist mayor in the provinces who seeks to pull his backwater into the present by building a mediacentre and the local schoolteacher who opposes the plans because it would mean cutting down his favourite tree in the field beside the thirteenth-century church. One critic has called it ‘Rohmer’s only musical’ (White 1996: 17), and while this comment is correct, it all depends on what is meant by the word ‘musical’. It would be absolutely wrong to think that this film is anything like a Jacques Demy production, since Rohmer’s is a musical with only one song and a musical interlude between each episode in the story. However there is also a little bit of dancing while the song is sung, fairly badly by Pascal Greggory and Fabrice Luchini, with glee by Arielle Dombasle and rather seriously by what appears to be a choir of pensioners. (But it is worth noting that Rohmer has also flirted with a huge smile with the pop video; the French DVD release of the Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle includes as an extra, a little piece called Bois ton café in which two of Rohmer’s regular actors appear. In this pastiche pop video Pascal Greggory – who is the Mayor in The Tree, the Mayor ... tries to make sure that Rosette Queré gets ready for work in time by giving her a cup of coffee to drink as soon as she wakes up.) The reason why The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre stands as Rohmer’s musical is for the simple reason that he usually tends to avoid music in the films set in the contemporary empirical ‘now’, except where it is part of the ‘reality’ being filmed. Consequently, there is a scene with music in Pauline at the Beach because the young heroine plays a record, and what must be some of the worst dance music ever made can be heard in A Good Marriage and Full Moon in Paris during party scenes. Music is also very important in the narrative of A Summer’s Tale, and Arielle Dombasle sings an old Parisian song over the credits at the end of The Aviator’s Wife, to provide a kind of ironic commentary on the preceding events. The only films in which Rohmer uses music for overt dramatic effect are The Sign of Leo and The Green Ray, in both of which there is a simple purpose-written violin motif (which to the untrained ear sounds as if it might be the same piece, recycled). After all, empirical life is not lived with a soundtrack in the background, and so the use of music for dramatic effect would be both an affront to realist commitment and, moreover, an indictment of the ability of the storyteller. Almendros remarks that ‘Rohmer believes that underlining a moment of emotion with dramatic chords is a compromise, somehow a

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recognition by the filmmaker of his inability to communicate feelings by legitimate means: narration through images, words, and sounds’ (Almendros 1984: 80). So why add a song to The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre? The answer seems to be quite simple. Given that it was not an instalment in a series there were no formal constraints upon what it might contain and therefore there was no reason not to include a song. Moreover if it is right to suggest that the film is in part a pastiche of the pretensions of nouveau-riche socialists, then a song could be identified as an extremely appropriate way of commenting upon their sustained or lost illusions. If background music represents a failure to communicate deep emotion, perhaps foreground music is a very good way of communicating smug satisfaction. Music links The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre to the last occasional film, Rendezvous in Paris. Each of the three episodes in this 1995 film is introduced by a couple of traditional Parisian musicians, standing on a street corner in the Marais (where the film’s final episode takes place). As with music in The Tree, the Mayor... and at the end of The Aviator’s Wife, the song that the musicians sing is an ironic commentary on the stories in the film: ‘There are lots of stories. Some are failures. Some are glories’, or again, ‘There are sometimes misunderstandings and often surprises’. This is the film that will begin to unlock Rohmer territory for the new arrival. It is probably not far-fetched to see it as something approaching Rohmer’s masterpiece (White 1996) even though it is not one of the more obviously major works (if the word ‘major’ can be used of any Rohmer production). Rendezvous in Paris was made during a brief gap after completion of the first two of the Tales of the Four Seasons series. It was shot quickly with a hand-held camera on the streets of Paris and, for the most part, without official permission. Rohmer’s own comments make it clear that Rendezvous in Paris was made purely for pleasure, and indeed despite the sombre stories an air of lightness permeates the whole film. ‘Rendezvous in Paris was something of a rest ... But then again, all my films are quite restful.’ The restfulness was no doubt also due to the lack of economic constraint. The film was shot on stock that had been left over from other projects, and the actors agreed to be paid from profits rather than up-front. Rohmer said that with this film, ‘I just enjoyed myself’ (Rohmer in Bright 1996). Although these occasional films are different precisely because they are so obviously made for pleasure (except The Sign of Leo), and although they play around with genre and style, nevertheless they do have something in common. They are all marked by an exceptionally powerful sense of place. Martin Bright says that Rendezvous in Paris often appears

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to be ‘little more than an advert for the delights of the French capital ... We are taken, by turns, to the Latin Quarter, Beaubourg, the Marais and Montparnasse’ (Bright 1996; actually the point can be taken further because Rendezvous in Paris can be used as a good guidebook to Paris). The Sign of Leo is similar. Although it does not present Paris as delightful for Pierre Wesselrin, nevertheless it shows the Latin Quarter as a tourist space. Meanwhile the Paris of Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle can be located relatively easily in Montparnasse, and The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre contains a Paris centred around the Boulevard SaintGermain. The latter two of the occasional films also contain scenes set in a rural la France profonde that is traditional and quietly awesome, protected by small landowners but under threat because of the incursion of modernity in the form of technology or unsympathetic building, both of which represent a cosmopolitanism more at home in Paris. Throughout, there is an insistence upon that which is outside of the film, and thereby on a Creation that exists independently of human action. Consequently it is possible to use the occasional films as the prism to map a central opposition in ‘Rohmer territory’, between the city and the country. However, each of those spaces is approached by Rohmer as an environment, as a surrounding, which has a relationship with the men and women within it and what they do and dream. In other words, there is an avoidance of a kind of spatial determinism and indeed of an individual atomism. ‘Rohmer territory’ is about the interplay of space and people in a way that points to his debts to Balzac. Realism requires a setting, it requires a scene, and the occasional films are explorations of the two settings that have been established as almost polar opposites in Western culture.

The city: Paris Rohmer has said, ‘Paris has always interested me, inasmuch as I am not from the city and see it with an outsider’s eye’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). Yet it is evident from the films that Paris has done more than interest Rohmer; it has attracted him, and maybe he has even been seduced by a city that closer inspection reveals to be both more and less than it appears. The attraction to, if not seduction by, the city can be found in his contribution to the multi-director film Paris vu par... This film was put together by Barbet Schroeder, evidently as a way of publicising both Les Films du Losange and some emergent New Wave talent (Neupert 2002: 265).

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Originally released in 1965, it is made up of six short films concentrating on daily life in specific areas of Paris, and is therefore also a good example of the New Wave’s obsession with the city (Lazen 2004). Each contribution was filmed according to common principles. Apart from Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet and JeanDaniel Pollet directed the segments. Monaco suggests that ‘it is evident that the governing idea – stories of Parisians organised according to neighbourhood – is Rohmer’s’ (Monaco 1976: 290). Rohmer’s cinematographer was Nestor Almendros, and although he became sceptical about the technical quality of the film (from his perspective behind the camera, at least), it is worth noting that this was Rohmer’s first experience with colour (Almendros 1984: 50–3). When the film was released in the United States, at least one reviewer thought that it was uneven in quality, but that Rohmer and Chabrol has made the best contributions (Thomas 1968). Rohmer’s contribution was Place de l’Etoile and it tells the story of Jean-Marc, a fastidious and routine-obsessed bourgeois who works in a clothes shop and who thinks that he has accidentally murdered a passer-by on the Métro; it later turns out that he has not. Within this narrative, and in order to add emphasis to its drama, Parisian space was divided into three different trajectories around the Place de l’Etoile: one at walking pace (routine), one at high speed (the confusion of the accidental ‘murder’), and the third at a halting pace, as Jean-Marc fears arrest (Crisp 1988: 42). Furthermore, colour photography was exploited to emphasise red and green in a way that was both realist (the film was shot during a visit by the Italian President, and Paris was decked out accordingly, and red and green figure on traffic lights), and yet also seductive and seduced (the Ektachrome film stock accentuates reds and greens [Crisp 1988: 42]). Paris vu par... was shot in 16 mm. The idea was impeccably realist. The 16 mm was a way of exploiting documentary techniques in fiction, but for Almendros this meant that the film had to become incompatible with realist practice. He notes that the technical qualities of the film stock meant that scenes had to be over-illuminated (Almendros 1984: 52), but Rohmer appears to have been long happy to exploit this shortcoming of 16 mm. In 1982 he said that he stuck to 16 mm for filming Paris, precisely because of its limitations: ‘the present 35 mm cinematography in color is too beautiful, too smooth, too shiny. It has an almost hyperrealist side to it’. He continued: ‘That kind of 35 mm cinematography looks American and gives the Parisian environment a shine which doesn’t belong there. For me, that isn’t Paris. Paris has more muted colors’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). The contention is as plain as it

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is evidently contradictory: Paris can be made real through a reliance on the limitations of technology. The ‘catch’ of this strategy is a more engaged observation of the city. Precisely because the city does not look how it ‘ought’ to be (according to cinematographic expectation, it is worth comparing Rohmer’s Paris of subdued colour with the hyper-colours of, say, Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro), but looks instead how it is (according to realist principles), the spectator is forced to pay attention and required to enter into a relationship with what is seen. Paris is less of a spectacle, and more of a setting. This ‘catch’ is represented very well even in The Lady and the Duke, where the painted scenery reminds the viewer of the gap between historical and contemporary Paris, but it can also be found in an evidently simpler film such as The Aviator’s Wife of 1981. Rohmer said that one of his aims in that film – which is one of the series of Comedies and Proverbs – was ‘to show how in this nineteenth century city a modern way of life had installed itself: the appropriation of an old setting by young people who feel as comfortable in it as if it were something of their generation’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). The point then was to highlight the extent to which the ‘now’ that is the takenfor-granted backdrop to the empirical life of ‘young people’ is melded together from the raw material of environment and action. Rohmer identifies a process of the appropriation ‘of an architectural setting each time by a new generation’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66), and it is in this way that Paris is perpetually interesting. In these terms it becomes possible to explain one of the more curious aspects of Rohmer’s presentation of Paris. He often shows construction work. A good example of this tendency can be found in the first episode of Rendezvous in Paris. A young woman goes to close the window of her apartment because of the noise outside; the camera looks through the window to show that the sounds come from a building site. The scene is not commented upon by any of the characters and it is not in the least overtly important to the story. There are only two ways in which this moment can be explained. The first explanation is without doubt far too naive; the camera showed the construction work because that was what was happening outside (but in that case why choose to film in an apartment that it was known in advance would have problems with background noise?, and why not show other scenes outside?). This is pushing realism a little too far. The second explanation is more interesting, and recalls Rohmer’s comment that one of the things in which he is interested is how Paris is an architectural setting that is appropriated by each generation. If this comment is pursued, it

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becomes possible to suggest that Rohmer is wanting to link the moral confusions of the characters in the tale to the confusion of Paris itself; where there is no certain setting, neither can there be existential certainty; where there is a lack of a world in which it is possible to trust, there can be no trust. This is a possibility that is discovered and explored in a different way by Crisp, who contends that a dominant issue in Rohmer’s work since the mid-1970s has been the theme of a lack of moral centre, a lack which is signified by the problems with Paris that are experienced by the characters in the series of Comedies and Proverbs (Crisp 1988). The theme of an unsettled Paris leading to unsettled life reappears in A Winter’s Tale (1992), where the heroine loses contact with her holiday love (and father of her child) because she accidentally gives him the address of her old house in Paris, which has been demolished. The point seems to be that there is an interplay of setting and action that shapes the life of the people of Paris, and yet, nevertheless, there must be something definite about Paris – it must constitute some kind of definite setting – if that life is going to be anything other than utterly labyrinthine. Through this theme it also becomes possible to explain one of the other curious aspects of Rohmer’s Paris. The films show a sustained avoidance of Haussmann’s Paris, an avoidance that is so regular and so recurrent that it cannot possibly be accidental. It is almost as if Rohmer simply fails to notice the grand boulevards and ostentatious public buildings. Of course, Haussmann’s Paris is not entirely absent from the work, but it only features at the beginning of the feature films. It obviously offers the setting for Rohmer’s contribution to Paris vu par..., which is centred on the Place de l’Etoile (although it is worth noting that the Place has pre-Haussmann origins; it is from the time of Balzac, although the surrounding buildings are later), and before that Haussmann’s Paris had been shown in The Sign of Leo. But since then, apart from establishing shots like apartment blocks, it has been absent. Why? Two answers come to mind immediately. First, Haussmann’s Paris has become too familiar; indeed to a considerable extent it has become imaginatively identical with Paris so that no distance can be taken from it other than by means of systematic neglect. With Haussmann, ‘Paris’ is so overwhelming that it has to disappear if there is going to be engagement with Paris. Second, perhaps it is ignored because it is less a setting for action and more a denial of it, and therefore it is also utterly incompatible with – if not an assault on – Rohmer’s concerns. According to Richard Sennett, the underlying purpose of Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris was the promotion of mobility by individuals

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rather than political masses (Sennett 1994: 329–32). In other words, Haussmann’s Paris was shaped by a concern to deaden the possibilities of public space, except in as far as it could be turned to purely individual pursuits such as consumption or refreshment. These pursuits became escapes from enforced mobility precisely because they demanded restriction to a specific space. For example, Sennett comments that in the café, there was an expectation that one would be left alone, while a person who sat outdoors was expected to remain seated at one table and not move around (Sennett 1994: 346). Yet even though Rohmer’s characters do use cafés (for example in Suzanne’s Career; The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre; and, to considerable comic effect, in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle), what they more commonly do in Paris is move. A prime instance of this stress on movement is provided by the third episode of Rendezvous in Paris, where the characters engage in a meandering walk along the Marais’s narrow rue de Thorigny. This is a style of walking that suggests a game of flirtation and youth on the part of the woman, who leads the man where she will, from one side of the street to another, that would be absolutely impossible on one of Haussmann’s boulevards, where mobility is much more about a determined getting somewhere (and the danger of oncoming traffic). Rohmer’s walks are about the journey not the destination, and Haussmann’s mobility is the exact reverse. If Rohmer is interested in how Paris is appropriated by each generation, then Haussmann’s Paris is ignored because it appropriates them. Haussmann’s Paris expropriates. Furthermore, Haussmann’s Paris tends to reduce the differences of the city, except for a few pockets of winding streets, by subordinating them to geometrical precision, architectural similarity and a frequently overpowering monumentality. Haussmann’s Paris is at once everywhere and anywhere, but Rohmer’s films are marked by a greater interest in local contrasts. These contrasting places are the settings for action, and the actions will vary according to their interplay with the locale. Consequently, Crisp identifies a shift in how the films use their Parisian settings. He points out that in the early The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, the action is carefully located in order to add yet further layers of realism to the film. For example, street signs are shown, so that it becomes clear that this film really was made where it claims to have been made. However, Crisp says, the Parisian settings have become more deliberately chosen and as Rohmer’s work progresses they ‘begin to acquire a loaded metaphorical significance’ (Crisp 1988: 37). Crisp overstates his case a little since there is no point of definite rupture between real and metaphorical Paris. Careful representation of

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location does not cease; it is very easy to locate the café that features in the first episode of Rendezvous in Paris (the Dame Tartine at the Beaubourg’s Place Igor Stravinsky), and street signs make it possible to sit at the table where Reinette had an argument with a waiter who refused to let her pay for a coffee with a large denomination bank note (before letting another customer do precisely that). But it is indeed the case that something else happens too. The places become about more than their concrete, real, ‘here-ness’. The metaphorical loading is clear in the second part of Rendezvous in Paris. This episode is about the liaisons of a never-named man and woman in the parks and on the benches of Paris. He wants to take the relationship further, but she refuses until she leaves the boyfriend with whom she presently lives. In essence, the story is about how the woman uses the man’s desire to maintain her own sense of self, and Rohmer communicates the frustration of the man by means of the provocations of the Parisian setting. For example, during one liaison at the Luxembourg gardens, the man obviously wants to further the relationship, and his inability to do so is commented upon by the Fontaine de Médicis, in front of which the characters stand. The fountain has statues of the nude figures of Acis, Galatea and Cyclops: Acis was in love with Galatea and crushed to death with a rock by his rival Cyclops. The mythological story told by a fountain that is probably scarcely noticed – and certainly not understood – by most visitors to the Luxembourg gardens thus becomes a metaphor for the story in the film and a provocation to the characters in it. The man becomes Acis, the woman Galatea, and Cyclops the boyfriend who only appears at the end of the story, taking a lover to a hotel (which, in Rohmer’s spirit of careful location, can be very easily found in Montmartre, at the Place Emile-Goudeau). In this way, Ziolkowski is almost right when he says that there is something surrealist about Rohmer’s dealings with the city. Talking about The Aviator’s Wife, much of which is set in the Buttes Chaumont area (a favourite stamping ground of the surrealists), Ziolkowski speculates that the city is a character in the film (Ziolkowski 1982), but it might be added that surrealism also consisted in a conscious attempt to make the appropriated seem ever-new even as it was old. Surrealism was about the reappropriation of the otherwise all too easily taken for granted. This is precisely what Rohmer’s filming of Paris also seeks to achieve, albeit through the route of a rigorous realism. He makes Paris something that can be reappropriated precisely as he shows a city that is completely banal, and always-already appropriated. The city becomes a setting for adventures of the ordinary kind experienced by Reinette

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and Mirabelle (who do not just have adventures at a café; they also confront the unexpected at a supermarket, when dealing with conartists at a railway station, and when they give money to beggars). It becomes all the more seductive for precisely that reason. Yet there is a problem. Paris is not just a setting that is waiting to be appropriated or reappropriated. Paris is also a setting with a history, spaces and structures that have existed before the arrival of any new generation and, therefore, Paris is also a setting that can expropriate. This is a recurrent theme in Rendezvous in Paris, not just with the mocking provocation of the man’s desires by the fountain, but also with the places that these two lovers visit. They are the only visitors to the Villette science park, and the emptiness and pre-planned ennui of that setting has an impact on their talk, just as a visit to the botanical gardens promises earthly delights that soon lose their bloom. However, The Sign of Leo provides the most sustained exploration of Paris as a setting of expropriation as opposed to appropriation. It is no coincidence that the film is set in Haussmann’s Paris in August. Traditionally this is the month in which Parisians desert the city for their holidays, leaving it to be taken over by tourists. What this means is that the basis of relationships in Paris are subjected to a seasonal shift. The social density of friendship networks and enduring micro-social structures is replaced with the commodified density of tourism. August then is a month in which the comforts of social life are replaced with the brutal reality of commodified life. That at least is the message of Rohmer’s first full-length production, and the film sticks out in his work because it is the only one in which money (or more exactly, the lack of money) is presented as a problem with long-term implications as opposed to a temporary issue that can be resolved through the goodwill of others. Pierre Wesselrin, the main character in the film, cannot at all appropriate Paris when he has been left alone by his friends and before his legacy has come through, because material being means that his empirical life has been expropriated, and thrown back onto dull necessity. (The connection of the film to holiday Paris was rather confirmed in August 2005, when it was one of the open-air movies shown at Paris Plage; Agence France Presse 2005.) The Sign of Leo certainly presents Paris in a metaphorical and literal harsh light. The monochrome contrasts are washed out so that – unlike Rohmer’s other work – there is little about this film that is pleasant to look at. Then again, the story is not especially pleasant either. Only sympathy for the increasing misery of Wesselrin takes attention away from the fact that he rejoices in the death of a wealthy aunt, is incapable

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of coping by himself when left alone, and is only saved because a couple of friends are sitting at a café watching incompetent and offensive street entertainers. One of those entertainers is Wesselrin, but at the end of the film his friends take him to his fortune, leaving the partner who saved him from utter destitution to his own penury. In these terms it is perhaps quite unsurprising that this is the only film of Rohmer’s that shows his characters moving through the monumental spaces of Paris. It is usually the case that when Rohmer shows the obvious tourist attractions, they are appropriated by the story. For example, the first episode of Rendezvous in Paris has a shot of a character travelling on the RER to visit a friend; the Eiffel Tower is shown outside the train window, as if it were a pivot around which the character’s life revolves (and it may be significant that later in the episode this character says that she is a native Parisian). But in The Sign of Leo the spaces expropriate the action. Early on, Wesselrin and his friends drive through the Place de la Concorde, with a speed and efficiency that might well have been exactly what Haussmann had in mind when it was opened up. As the film develops, the harsh concrete of Haussmann’s Paris seems to reflect the harshness of the tourists who surround Wesselrin and yet give him absolutely no help. For Rohmer, the tourists have expropriated the city from its inhabitants, and the locals are no longer in control of their setting. In The Sign of Leo, the tourists’ speech is exaggerated so that their lack of sympathy with empirical Paris is emphasised. They speak every language except French, but Rohmer seems to have a special antipathy towards the Anglophone. This is a recurrent theme in his work. Whenever Englishmen appear, they are likely to be foppishly indifferent towards local demands (for example, an Englishman refuses to help Reinette when she needs money to get home from the Gare du Nord). Meanwhile Americans are both incredibly seedy and avaricious of people and things, or of people as things (witness the character of Sam in La Collectionneuse. He is a flabby middle-aged American porcelain collector, who also collects the bodies of attractive young women. Astonishingly, the part of Sam was played by a friend of Rohmer). Alternatively, Americans are shown as gentle visitors who nevertheless think that they know what is best (for example, the tourists who are asked to take a photograph in The Aviator’s Wife) or, simply, indifferent towards the locals except when they get in the way or provide the opportunity for a snapshot. Americans appear in The Sign of Leo in the latter guise. The only visitors to France who do secure any measure of sympathy in Rohmer’s world are young women from Scandinavia.

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In The Green Ray a young woman tries to help Delpine enjoy herself on holiday by picking up men, while in the third episode of Rendezvous in Paris, the male artist takes the young female Scandinavian friend of a friend to the Musée Picasso, but dumps her to follow someone else. However, the sympathy is tempered since both of these women are presented as being more than a little shallow. The question is: why doesn’t Rohmer like visitors to Paris? It seems to be the case that Rohmer’s disdain (and especially for American tourists) is cut of the same cloth as his avoidance of Haussmann’s Paris. Both tourism and Haussmannisation represent the expropriation of Paris as a setting that can be appropriated by new generations. To this extent, the dislike for American tourists is not directed towards them as individuals or as a cultural type; rather it is a repudiation of what they represent, the expropriation of the world (or at least Paris) by forces that are indifferent to the local. The tourists and Haussmann are both external forms of the reduction of the human to the commercial, and therefore to disdain one is a shorthand way of disdaining the other two. In The Sign of Leo, this happens through open mockery if not indeed contempt, and since that early film the scorn has taken the form of a steadfast refusal to acknowledge the tourists as anything more than the most transient of passers-by. In this respect, Rohmer is continuing in a tradition that is well represented in the literature of Joris-Karl Huysmans. In Against Nature, he railed against what he identified as Americanisation in the name of a defence of human verities that were under attack. Huysmans saw Haussmann’s Paris and its cultural pursuits as ‘the vast bagnio of America transported to the continent of Europe; this was the limitless, unfathomable, immeasurable scurviness of the financier and self-made man, beaming down like a shameful sun on the idolatrous city’ (Huysmans 1958: 218). Two years before publishing Against Nature in 1884, Huysmans had written the short story With the Flow, in which he said that ‘Paris is turning into a sinister Chicago’, and that therefore it was important, ‘to make the most of the time left to us before the New World finally takes over with all its crass vulgarity’ (Huysmans 2003: 26). Rohmer’s dealings with Paris can be understood as an attempt to stand against the tide. However, even as he has tried to ignore the external forms of the commercialisation that for Huysmans goes by the name of Americanisation, the ‘bagnio’ can never be kept out entirely. This is the weight that is borne by Rohmer’s treatment of the Parisian art market. He shows a world in which art is appropriated by the new generations of Parisians, but only because of what it does for their ego

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or pocket, not because of its ability to point to the ineffable. Art has been expropriated from aesthetics and given over to cash or prestige. For example, the artist in the third episode of Rendezvous in Paris only takes the Scandinavian visitor to see the Picasso paintings because it is a way of passing time without having to talk too much with her, before he spots another woman in front of Mother and Child (1907). When the second woman returns to his studio and looks at his paintings, the artist admits that he does not know what the canvases mean, but that no doubt the purchaser will tell him (for a discussion of these aspects of the film, see White 1996). Even Picasso – who is presumably used in this film as convenient shorthand for Western high culture – has been reduced to the commodity market of prostitution, and the gallery transformed into a kind of chaste brothel. Meanwhile Reinette and Mirabelle, in the last of their four adventures, try to sell one of the former’s paintings so that they can pay the rent on their apartment. They go to a commercial gallery where the owner makes a show of his benevolence in buying such an obviously worthless painting, before doubling his money when he sells it immediately Reinette and Mirabelle walk out the door. Admittedly, this adventure is played for comedy value (as is each of the adventures set in Paris), but once again the point is being made that art is expropriated from its producers as soon as the market appropriates it. But what makes Rohmer’s Paris so interesting is that it never entirely destroys the dreams and aspirations of its new inhabitants. Their illusions need never be entirely lost, so long as they know where to look for values that have not been – and maybe never can be – expropriated. The way out of the brothel is through the ‘Parisian popular’. According to Martin O’Shaughnessy, the Parisian popular featured in French films in the 1930s as an attempt to recover and restate values of community rooted in local traditions, against the encroachment of processes of modernisation. It took the form of a stress on popular Parisian cultural forms such as the café-concert and street singing as opposed to cosmopolitan forms such as nightclubs and casinos. O’Shaughnessy argues that this presentation of a Parisian popular was a flight from what was condemned as the uprooting tendencies of modernity, in the name of values that were rooted in specific places (O’Shaughnessy 2001). In these terms, the Parisian popular is inescapably present in Rohmer’s work. The condemnation of cosmopolitanism can be seen in the parodic use of electronic music in some of the films, and also in the lessthan flattering presentation of tourists in Paris. In Rohmer’s world, nightclubs are places of unrestrained passion and he clearly holds little

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affection for them. But street-singing and popular cultural forms are presented very differently. They are the way out of the modernised, prostituted (and prostituting) Paris, because they can never be appropriated except through direct encounter. In other words, the Parisian popular is there for those who know where to look, but it is necessary to know Paris at something more than a tourist-guidebook level if it is going to be found. Consequently, in Rendezvous in Paris, the backstreets of the Marais, which are not high on the cosmopolitan tourist checklist, contain traditional street singers, while in The Sign of Leo Pierre Wesselrin stumbles across the road to redemption when he is befriended and protected by an old clochard (who is promptly abandoned as soon as Wesselrin has money). Meanwhile in The Aviator’s Wife, a character whistles an old Parisian song (the one which is also sung over the end credits by Arielle Dombasle) and Rohmer has explained that ‘The song was to express ... nostalgia for a certain tradition. There is a musical tradition in Paris which is making a comeback in the streets. It seems to be superseding jazz ... in the twentieth century there has been an American imperialism: jazz etc.’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 66). The conflict in Rohmer’s Paris is around the struggle between ever-new generations that seek to appropriate Paris for themselves, and processes that can be pulled together under the umbrella of ‘Americanisation’ which seek instead to expropriate the city from its new characters. The hint from Rohmer is that hope only lies with those who are prepared to give themselves to the city that endures despite Haussmann and who might thereby be able to connect with its hidden and yet always alive popular culture (to this extent Rohmer has an ally in Tati). The point is for the outsider to become an insider, but without losing the sense of wondrous illusion about Paris that only the outsider can appreciate and only the insider can access.

The country But it is noticeable that one kind of hope is very absent from Rohmer’s Paris: the Church. Churches puncture the streets and skyline of Paris, and yet just like Haussmann’s buildings they seem never to appear in Rohmer’s dealings with the city. For example, it is almost as if Les Deux Magots in The Sign of Leo and the street outside the Brasserie Lipp in The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre are very deliberately filmed so that the church of St-Germain-des-Près never comes into full view. Similarly, Rohmer’s Marais and Montmartre do not have churches, while panoramic shots of Paris centre on the Eiffel Tower rather than,

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say, the Sacré Coeur. Yet when the films move outside of the city churches and cathedrals are almost everywhere. They dominate provincial cities and towns. Clermont-Ferrand, Le Mans, Nevers, all have cathedrals that play important parts in My Night at Maud’s, A Good Marriage and A Winter’s Tale respectively. Meanwhile one of Rohmer’s common establishing shots is of a character driving towards a town, the skyline of which is dominated by the spire of a cathedral (usually counterbalanced in the space of the frame by a chimney or other piece of industrial architecture). Good examples of such shots can be found in My Night at Maud’s and An Autumn Tale. A church also appears very frequently in Rohmer’s most ‘rural’ full-length film, The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre. If this tendency is read through the filter of Rohmer’s Paris, then it would seem to be the case that a point is being made that is at once a condemnation of a Godless Paris, given over to Mamon and lust, and a celebration of a spiritually deep unity of God and land that survives in la France profonde. But that kind of explanation would make it impossible to explain the obvious seduction by Paris that runs through Rohmer’s films, as well as the sympathy with which most of the young Parisian characters are treated. On the one hand, Rohmer’s work might well communicate disgust with some aspects of Paris, but it is also possessed of a considerable love for the city while, on the other hand, the young Parisians are often infuriating and irritating, but for that reason they are all the more human, all the more engaging. Rohmer’s work does not flee Paris to find something better, and neither is it dominated by a nostalgic temper. Instead, the contrasts between the city and the country are more Balzacian than that; the concern is to establish the territory of different settings for different action. The concern is to show that the city and the country are distinct, and their interaction leads to lovable farce when provincials come into the city (Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle), or hubris spurred by boredom when Parisians come to the country (The Tree, The Mayor and the Mediacentre). Whereas Rohmer’s work consistently makes the point that Paris can be appropriated by its new generations, no such claim is made for the countryside. New generations need to fit in with it. This is one of the intimations of the first of Reinette and Mirabelle’s adventures. It must be said that the story starts in an unpromising vein that almost hints that Rohmer is playing a game with his audience, in order to see how far he can go in showing very little, or then again perhaps he is showing absolutely everything. That is the question that the audience needs to ponder. In this first adventure, Mirabelle cycles along a country

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road, gets a puncture and Reinette helps her repair the inner-tube because astute city-girl Mirabelle does not know how. The incident is narrated in such detail that it could almost be shown as a tutorial on how to repair a bicycle tyre (in the 1960s, Rohmer made films for French educational television; maybe the pedagogic spirit has never entirely left him). Admittedly, the adventure develops, but only from this incredibly banal beginning. Mirabelle has taken the cycle ride to glory in nature, but nature shows that it is not a spectacle alone. It has an impact regardless of human designs. Indeed, in its very first frames, the film raises a question about quite how deep an appreciation Mirabelle has of the country. Shortly before her tyre punctures, as she cycles towards the camera, she is surrounded by the sounds of bird song, although Mirabelle knows absolutely nothing of this because she is wearing headphones and listening to music. Perhaps it is in this way, as opposed to her dress sense and ability to teach Reinette the latest dance moves that Mirabelle proves herself to be most deeply and inescapably Parisian; nature is beautiful but it can get a little boring if you do not bring your own entertainment with you. This is a point that becomes clear as the first adventure progresses and Reinette introduces Mirabelle to country life. They visit a farm, where Mirabelle shows herself to be as informed about rural working life as any young city woman. She asks the farmer endless questions, and it is clear that although Mirabelle appreciates what she learns, it is unlikely to have any deep impact upon her. The visit to the farm would probably be recalled in later years as a good day on vacation, as opposed to a lifechanging event (it is an experience that is had as opposed to lived). John Fawell is right to observe that Mirabelle ‘seems appreciative of the countryside that surrounds Reinette’s home but also a little flummoxed by it’, and he continues to argue that her confusions are emphasised by how she is placed in the camera shot. Mirabelle is never sheltered or entirely at home in the country. She is often shown exposed to the elements, and when she plods across a field, Mirabelle is surrounded by tall grass and evidently in danger of being engulfed by it (Fawell 1993: 783). The problems of walking through the country recur in Rohmer’s work. Delphine in The Green Ray is always shown exhausted or upset, and a walk through a vineyard in An Autumn Tale results in the characters frequently getting entangled in hedgerows. What Mirabelle wants the country to be is of no consequence to what the country is, and it quite resists appropriation. However, neither does the country expropriate. To say that the country and nature expropriates possibilities from men and women would be to impute to it an active process and agency. It would be to make nature

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an opponent to human desires. Rohmer presents the matter in a quite different way. The hint is that the country does not expropriate from the human for the simple reason that it is a blank indifference. The countryside might mean something to the men and women who visit it, but from that it does not at all follow that those men and women mean anything to nature. This is the clue to understanding another of the oddities of Rohmer’s films. When he moves to the country he has a remarkable tendency to show trees blowing in the wind. These shots are never really explained, and like the construction sites in Paris they do not obviously feature in the story. But, nevertheless, these trees are loaded with meaning. In one important respect, they are the signification of the indifference of nature and, larger even than that, of the silence of the universe. In this regard, Rohmer’s trees are realist, metaphorical and theological all at the same time. For example, a couple of times in The Green Ray there are shots of trees in the wind, against a dark sky. Similar shots appear in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, when our heroines are exploring the land owned by the farmer. The trees seem to be tall and even over-powering because the shot is taken from relatively low down, looking up, and the strength of the wind is amplified by the leaves and branches. It is valid to say that ‘Rohmer’s trees are ... troubling’ (Fawell 1993: 785), but that begs the question of exactly what the trouble is that the trees cause. Fawell suggests that what these trees do is cut the characters off from their environment; putting this point into different terminology it can be said that the trees deny the chance of appropriation. Yet even more powerfully than this, the trees are utterly indifferent. They do not even expropriate, they do nothing other than ignore the characters who are near them. Fawell says that in these scenes, ‘nature seems to be staring back at the characters, not so much consoling them as mocking them – not even mocking them as much as withholding its beauty from them’ (Fawell 1993: 786). He is thinking of the trees in The Green Ray and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend when he makes that comment, and in both cases the heroine starts to cry as the wind roars through the branches, making them bend and bow. In that respect the trouble with the trees in those films is that they are significations of the loneliness of humanity in the face of universal uncertainty. The point is not so much that the trees mean this or that. The point is that their meaning always escapes any attempt to appropriate them for human ends. That is their theological loading. They are Pascalian trees which cause the heroines to cry because their mute indifference shows them how they yearn for a certainty that is humanly impossible.

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The wind booms through the trees and makes Delphine in The Green Ray and Blanche in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend realise their littleness: ‘Too much sound deafens us’. The trees tell them that Pascal was right when he said that ‘We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end ... Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses’ (Pascal 1931: 19–20). Delphine and Blanche seek to build their towers on the ground of love, and the question mark that Rohmer leaves dangling at the end of those films is whether the earth will crack for them. Of course, if Pascal’s argument is accepted then, yes, Delphine and Blanche will soon be trying to build another tower for themselves, and their search for the ‘right man’ who will signify real life will never cease. Consequently these trees convey the theological message that the infinite will crush Delphine, Blanche and everyone like them, all the time that they seek this-worldly certainty. Yet the trees themselves will not care either way. The trees in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle are just as indifferent as those in The Green Ray and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, but the trouble that they cause is rather different. The wind does not boom through them, so much as the breeze rustles the leaves and thereby instead of uncertainty they might be interpreted as pointing to a certainty, so long as attention is paid to them. By this argument, there might well be something to be heard and apprehended in the rustling of the leaves. The Old Testament Book of Kings contains the story of Elijah, who fled to Horeb, ‘the mountain of God’, to escape Jezebel. Elijah was so afraid that he hid in a cave, but he received a message to go and stand on the mountain before God. The story says that Elijah refused to go, so he was sent divine encouragement. There was a ‘mighty wind’, an earthquake and a fire, but Elijah did not find God in any of these earth-shattering events and so did not leave his cave: ‘And after the fire there came the sound of a gentle breeze. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave’ (1 Kings 9: 12–13; This is the translation from the authorised Catholic Jerusalem Bible; the Revised Standard Version translates ‘gentle breeze’ as ‘still small voice’). Admittedly, this is a somewhat large claim to imply and, moreover, it is built on somewhat shallow foundations, but if it is accepted that the key to unlocking Rohmer’s work is its Catholicism, then the contention that the rustling might well have a theological weight is at least worth

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thinking through. However, the point is once again made that Reinette and Mirabelle cannot appropriate the trees themselves in their walks through the countryside. This is because the trees are wholly independent of them and indifferent towards them. But neither then do the trees expropriate experiences and possibilities from Reinette and Mirabelle. The most the trees can do is insinuate; their indifference makes anything else quite impossible. From all of this it follows that there can only be two rightful relationships to and with nature. Both of them emphasise a kind of friendship as opposed to use or expectation. Both mean working with nature rather than against it, nor turning it to ends that it does not contain within itself. The first attitude is awe. Reinette and Mirabelle are filled with awe in the face of nature when together they experience the ‘Blue Hour’ (the title of their first adventure). This is the brief moment of absolute silence just before dawn, when the nocturnal birds have gone to sleep and before those of the day have woken. They experience this moment only because they get up early and are prepared to receive it (that is, they give themselves to the Blue Hour, without asking anything of it, other than that it be itself). There is, then, a development in the character of Mirabelle. When she first appears she has cut herself off from the sound of the countryside with her headphones, but thanks to her relationship with Reinette, she gives herself to those sounds. The Blue Hour’s impact upon them is magical and transforming: ‘the two heterosexual girls search for each other in a garden at night, in the dark, feeling their way through the unpredictable world, searching for whatever in the future awaits them: madness, solidarity’ (White 1996: 17), or a deep friendship that arises from out of the most accidental of encounters (Mirabelle’s bicycle getting a puncture as Reinette walks home). In these terms it is worth thinking back to the possibility that there is a symbolic use of colour in Rohmer’s work. Actually the blue hour is not blue (it is black), but blue is a colour that signifies hope and sincerity, two aspects of the friendship that Reinette and Mirabelle construct and grapple with in the course of their adventures. A similar kind of awe features in The Green Ray. This is the last ray of the setting sun, and legend says that those who see it will understand the feelings of themselves and others, without a word having to be said (Rohmer took this idea from a story by Jules Verne). At the end of the film, Delphine sits besides the man she has just met and waits for the ray. She gestures that she sees it, and the film ends with the intimation that now Delphine’s troubles with love will be over, and that at last she

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has found her own life. Nature has opened up the real. That, at least, is the explicit reading of the end of the film, the one that is implied by the characters. There is another reading, however, because to a viewer of the film the green ray that Delphine implies that she sees is not at all obvious, and so the possibility emerges that she has deluded herself once again. Once again the symbolism of the colour green might be worth thinking about; it is the colour of faith and gladness. Consequently, did Delphine see the ray, or did she have faith that should see the ray? (There is also the possibility that Delphine is looking in the wrong direction when she gazes at the setting sun for the green ray; she does not notice that she is sitting very close to a tacky souvenir stall called Le Rayon Vert). The second attitude towards nature that Rohmer’s work embraces is that of respectful work. This is the significance of the farmer in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. His farm is respectful of the countryside. His activity is small scale, family based, and he is knowledgeable about everything that is the fruit of his labour (although his weatherforecasting abilities are a little dubious; he tells Reinette and Mirabelle that it will not rain, and in the next scene they are running for shelter). Rohmer does not shy away from showing that the order of the farm is entirely due to labour. For example, there are frequent shots of the farmer’s son clearing hedges or collecting brushwood. But all the time it is perfectly clear that this farmer is not seeking to appropriate nature for his own ends and neither is nature expropriating from him. Hard work ensures the latter, and deep respectful knowledge ensures the former. The presentation of farm labour in this film draws directly on a 13- minute short that Rohmer made for French educational television in the 1960s, Fermière à Montfaucon (Montfaucon is a village in the Aisne). The short covers some months in the life of a woman farmer. She is shown milking the cows, selling produce, helping with the harvest and attending a meeting of the local Chamber of Agriculture. Throughout, the message is that this woman works incredibly hard and in cooperation with nature. There is no pretence that rural life is idyllic, but there is a theme about connection with the environment (and therefore perhaps this is the most explicitly political piece that Rohmer has made). The traces of the woman farmer from the 1960s reappear in 1998 in An Autumn Tale, where one of the main characters, Magali, is proud of her scruffy but impeccably organic vineyard in the Rhône. She explains that an industrial approach would increase yields but reduce quality and, furthermore, be out of sympathy with the well-being of the countryside. The idea is clear; nature is not to be appropriated, and

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neither does it expropriate. Rather, nature gives all the time it is treated with care. What Rohmer is implying is that awe and work come together in terms of a gift relationship with nature. As Marcel Mauss showed, a gift relationship exists where a donor gives something to a recipient, who feels a reciprocal debt to give something back to the original donor. For Mauss, gift relationships are about more than the things involved, and their real significance resides in the extent to which they ritualise, codify and cement moral and social solidarity between the partners (Mauss 1990). This is the basis of the right relationship between humans and nature that comes across from Rohmer’s work. It is saying that humans rightly give to nature the gift of their attention and respect, and nature makes repayment through either a validation of deeper sensibilities or a literal and metaphorical fruitfulness that will endure over time, so long as the right relationship is not upset. There is nothing in this relationship about appropriation and expropriation, but there is everything about solidarity. Indeed, Mauss argued that a refusal to participate in the reciprocity of a gift relationship is ‘tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality. Also, one gives because one is compelled to do so, because the recipient possesses some kind of right of property over anything that belongs to the donor’ (Mauss 1990: 13). Reinette, Mirabelle and Rohmer’s farmers, all give something to nature and thus enter into commonality with it. They are all shown by Rohmer to appreciate that the country has a ‘right of property’ over what they possess. The friendship of Reinette and Mirabelle is sealed in the Blue Hour, and the farmers all prosper because they know that what they have has been given to them through the medium of their endeavour. None of them ‘declare war’ on nature, and therefore all of them are shown to get something back in return. The countryside reciprocates the gifts that are given to it. The problem however is that the two dimensions of this gift relationship with countryside involve quite different practical relationships with it, and they are not necessarily compatible with one another. Awe is aesthetic and work is pragmatic. The conflict is reflected in Reinette and Mirabelle’s adventures with the Blue Hour. They only succeed in receiving the silence at the second attempt because a tractor drowned out the silence the first time they tried (presumably a tractor from the farm they later visit). Moreover, the right relationship is also unsettled when cosmopolitan values are imposed upon the countryside. This is the message of The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre. The mayor has failed in his attempt to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the

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Socialist Party, and so alongside his ostentatiously chic wife, he decides to play the role of country squire (and dresses appropriately, in a stereotypically English-country fashion; he is all tweed and flat caps). He and his wife make a great scene out of drinking the new vintage with the local farmers, but all their ambitions are directed towards Paris. This latter-day Candide gets bored in his own garden, and decides to import the city to the countryside in the form of the gift of a mediacentre with swimming pool. The local community has not asked for this and the local schoolteacher – who is introduced to the viewer fastidiously teaching correct French grammar – leads the opposition. The mayor can be interpreted as a donor in a gift relationship, but there is a breakdown in social solidarity because the local community does not recognise an obligation to reciprocate by accepting the mediacentre. Consequently, the countryside becomes a site of conflict and it is appropriated by political positions, rather than being a setting to be treated rightfully. The conflict only comes to an end through the typically Rohmerian device of friendship. The daughters of the mayor and the schoolteacher become friends, and through them a new solidarity is established. The plan to build the mediacentre is abandoned and, given that this is Rohmer’s ‘musical’, at the end all of the characters sing off the same song sheet. For Rohmer then, the countryside is the setting for a drama of solidarity: solidarity of characters with one another and of the human with the natural. The organic unity of these partners only gets upset if rightful relationships are replaced with attempts at appropriation on the part of new generations. Appropriation is an attitude for the city, not the country, and if it moves beyond the city walls it only causes dispute and disagreement. As soon as men and women seek to turn the country to their own ends, they lose sight of communion with it and, thereby, loose the chance of learning something about themselves and the people around them, or of experiencing the indifferent universe as full of grace rather than full of fear. Maybe this is why Rohmer’s country churches invariably remain shut. The sacrament is all around, so long as a rightful relationship leads to eyes that can see, ears that can hear, or hands that can nurture. Consequently, perhaps he is suggesting that the sacrament is worshipped all the time that a gift relationship exists between humans and nature. The relationship is the worship. But the very presence of the churches suggests that this is not pantheism, blood and soil nationalism or wishful thinking. It is a distinctly Catholic worship.

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Conclusion Rohmer once said that ‘everything is a miracle’ (Rohmer in Williams 1980: 249). This is the theme that runs through the occasional films. The countryside is not just a miracle of itself, in as far as it is part of Creation, but it is also the setting for unexpected irruptions and epiphanies of grace. Such is the friendship between Reinette and Mirabelle, as is the friendship between the mayor’s and the schoolteacher’s daughters. Such also is the work of the farmers. Rohmer’s countryside is a setting that is actually suffused with the possibility of the miracle. The situation is different in the city. There the miracle consists in the ability of each new generation – and specifically the young men and women who constitute that generation – to appropriate the city for themselves, and make it appear ever fresh and ever-alluring. The miracle in the city is precisely that the labyrinth can become a place of replenished hope and anticipation regardless of the lessons of the past. The miracle of the city consists in the fact that its inhabitants do not know what, or more exactly who, is waiting for them around the next corner, and that despite bitter experience they remain happy to turn it. However, there are dangers. The countryside can be invaded by an illicit cosmopolitanism, and the city can expropriate possibilities from its inhabitants. This is where Rohmer’s own films come into play. The message of the occasional films is that if sufficient attention is paid even to that which is banal or expropriated, something unexpected might well appear, and therefore it might be possible to enter into a gift relationship with everything that surrounds. But perhaps in order to achieve all of that, it is first of all necessary to get out of the city occasionally.

3 Moral Tales: Grace and Circumstance

During the course of the 1960s, Rohmer’s career followed a path that was at once circuitous and yet also incredibly focused. The deviations were in no small part due to the commercial and critical failure of The Sign of Leo, which had secured neither revenue nor an audience, and the situation was exacerbated in 1963 when Rohmer rather acrimoniously left the staff of Cahiers du cinéma, having been co-editor of the journal since 1958. He was pushed aside by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (who controlled the money for the journal) in order to make way for a younger and more theoretically self-conscious group of critics who had been seduced by structuralism. From their point of view, Rohmer was becoming an anachronism because of his refusal to follow new avenues in cultural thought and criticism, as well as his steadfast avoidance of overt politics. Neupert gives a flavour of the depth of the dispute when he reports that Rohmer, ‘while trying to stop his inevitable ouster . . . actually began sleeping in his office at Cahiers to defend his position by physically occupying the premises’ (Neupert 2002: 251; see also Bickerton 2006). In place of the journal, which was now closed to him, Rohmer did a lot of work for French educational television in the mid-1960s, but evidently in a very independent spirit: ‘I learned a great deal and I was free to do what I wanted. I was on my own, I wrote the scripts as well as filming them. It was a very interesting experience’ (Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 39). Some of these films focused on French writers such as Pascal, La Bruyère and Mallarmé, others on authors like Cervantes and Poe, while the period piece Perceval was anticipated in a documentary on the romance, and other films explored such themes as changes in the industrial landscape of France and urban architecture. It is precisely this very independent working method that explains how Rohmer was able to 76

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take diversions while also striding towards a definite destination both despite and in spite of The Sign of Leo. Where many film-makers might have retired to lick their wounds after the failure of their first feature, Rohmer rather did the opposite. The lack of public and commercial expectations seems to have given him a great sense of freedom. Rohmer has recalled that after The Sign of Leo, ‘I decided to go on filming, no matter what, and instead of looking for a subject that might be attractive to the public or a producer, I decided that I would find a subject that I liked and that a producer would refuse’. Rohmer went on to make a comment that is, perhaps, the clue to his working method and philosophy: ‘So here you have someone doing exactly what he wants to’ (Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 36). What Rohmer ‘wanted to do’ was make the series of Moral Tales. This was the focus of his attention, and his main concern, through the 1960s and into the 1970s and, indeed, the series is the body of work that made him a lot more than someone confined to the footnotes of the history of French cinema. The series was commenced in 1962 with The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, and continued with Suzanne’s Career (1963), La Collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972). The films were made sequentially, except that My Night at Maud’s is the third Moral Tale and La Collectionneuse the fourth; these two films were shot in reverse order because of the unavailability of Jean-Louis Trintignant on the date when the shooting of My Night at Maud’s was originally planned. In terms of their number in the series, the first three films are in black and white, and the last three in colour. The series also gave Rohmer his first film awards. La Collectionneuse won a Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967 and Claire’s Knee was awarded a Golden Seashell at the 1971 San Sebastian Film Festival. Claire’s Knee was also awarded the 1971 Prix Louis-Delluc, which is given to what the prize committee judges to have been the best French film of the year. However, in these terms, My Night at Maud’s was by far the most successful of the Moral Tales. It was given the prize for Best Screenplay by the New York Film Critic’s Circle in 1970 and the same award in the same year by the American National Society of Film Critics. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 1971 Academy Awards. But it would be wrong to think that this relative success went to Rohmer’s head and encouraged him to break out into new ways of making movies. Quite the contrary, there is almost a sense in which the very unexpectedness of the acclaim that came to surround the Moral Tales was taken by Rohmer to be a sign (of grace?) that he had been

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working in the right way all along, despite early setbacks. In 1970 he gave an interview to Cahiers du cinéma, and he was asked whether success would change the structure of the series. The reply betrays grace, confidence or arrogance: ‘One tells oneself that success will come at one time or another. Has it changed my intentions in any way? No. I have always known that I would make the last moral tales with more resources than the first ones, because the subjects required it’ (Rohmer in Showalter 1993: 113). Crisp says that the idea for the series emerged in 1960, and each contribution was envisaged as a variation on the same theme (Crisp 1988: 32), which was taken from a series of short stories that Rohmer had at least partly written (and most certainly devised) before he became active in the world of film: ‘I had plots for all six before I started making the first’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 86). The project became viable, thanks to Rohmer’s relationship with Barbet Schroeder, and also because of money that was raised when one of Rohmer’s very first short films, 1951’s Présentation, was sold to French television a decade after being completed (Davis 1971: 86). This film lasted 12 minutes, and it is quite probable that the link with Rohmer was fortuitous rather than deliberate from the point of view of its purchase. The cast included Jean-Luc Godard (who had paid for the film-stock) and in 1960 the sound was post-synchronised by Godard, along with Anna Karina and Stéphane Audran (Crisp 1988: 21). There can be little doubt that when it bought Présentation, French television purchased an early piece by Godard as opposed to one by Rohmer. The narrative (Rohmer wrote the script) does however anticipate his later work, in that the film tells the story of Walter who is torn between Clara and Alice. At the beginning of the film Walter introduces the two women to one another, and after Clara leaves he follows Alice to her apartment. He has time on his hands before meeting Clara later on. Alice tries to tempt Walter by cooking him a steak. Walter refuses and trudges off into the snow, presumably to meet with Clara. When the film reappeared after Godard had become well known, Alice had become Charlotte and the piece itself was renamed Charlotte and Her Steak (Crisp 1988: 20). It became one of the three instalments of Charlotte and Veronique (Showalter 1993: 31). Some of the seeds of the Moral Tales can be found in this early piece. In a nice image, Rohmer once said that the stories told in the Moral Tales ‘are rather like someone who while walking gets lost, indulges in an escapade, takes a detour and then returns to the road’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 94). Rohmer identifies the connection that links each of the six Moral Tales as ‘the idea of showing a man attracted to a woman at the

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very moment when he is about to marry another’ (Rohmer 1989: 81). Again: ‘a man looking for one woman meets another who does not in the least resemble the first one’ (Rohmer in Davis 1971: 87), before returning to the first. The lack of resemblance between the two women is usually conveyed by their different hair colour, taste in fashion or, more subtly, the places in which they are encountered in the film. This is all reflected in The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, in which the unnamed male protagonist makes a date with Sylvie. However she does not turn up, and in his boredom the man goes to a baker, where Jacqueline serves him. After repeated visits to the baker and some flirting, he asks Jacqueline on a date but, on his way to see her, meets Sylvie once again. She explains that she disappeared because of a badly sprained ankle, and she and the man go for dinner together. The retrospective narration tells the audience that the man and Sylvie married six months later and Jacqueline left the baker to work elsewhere. In this film, Sylvie is tall and blonde, Jacqueline shorter and dark-haired. Furthermore, Sylvie is encountered on the street and Jacqueline invariably behind the counter of the shop, serving customers. Meanwhile, in La Collectionneuse, Adrien combines business with a holiday near St Tropez while he waits for his fiancée to return from a trip to London. When Adrien is deserted by Mijanou, he convinces himself that Haydée’s indifference is a mask for her attraction to him, but rather despite himself Adrien avoids temptation and escapes from what he is convinced is Haydée’s trap. Claire’s Knee tells the story of Jérôme, who becomes obsessed with the knee of the eponymous Claire, a sixteen-year-old girl who barely notices his existence – and who certainly does not notice when Jérôme caresses her knee – while he holidays at Lake Annecy shortly before returning to Sweden to marry his fiancée, Lucinde. What saves the series from repetition and reiteration, even as the narrative of each film is more or less the same, is the skill with which Rohmer varies the theme. Indeed, he has explicitly compared his directorial domination over the series with the role of a musician: ‘Like a musician I vary the initial motif, I slow it down or speed it up, stretch it or shrink it, add to it or purify it’ (Rohmer 1989: 81). The variations are deduced from the human relationships in the films. In some the man is about the same age as the distracting woman (Suzanne’s Career, My Night at Maud’s, Love in the Afternoon), in others older (The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, La Collectionneuse) or indeed very much older (Claire’s Knee). The settings of the films also change: Paris is a place of secrets (Monceau Bakery), café’s (Suzanne’s Career), bourgeois consumerism (Love in the Afternoon), while adventures also take place on holiday on the

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Côte d’Azur (La Collectionneuse), the Alps (Claire’s Knee), or while living in the provinces (My Night at Maud’s). Variations are also provided by the palpable sense of season that each film conveys. For example, the snowy and wrapped up world of My Night at Maud’s is quite different to the sun-drenched beaches of La Collectionneuse and its more bodily obsessed and exhibiting drama. Somewhat emotively – and perhaps somewhat pompously – Rohmer has identified the series with a ‘puritanical plan, which is the original basic structure of the novels of the Middle Ages . . . There is the temptation and the woman who is the devil, yes’. He went on to draw a characteristic distinction between the film-maker’s work and the film-maker himself: ‘The idea of woman as temptress does not come out of my personal experience – it’s more a literary idea. My idea was to place that (literary conceit) within the context of modern life and the modern world’ (Rohmer in Chase and Fieden 1972: 20). The comment was made during an interview about Love in Afternoon, and consequently Rohmer’s Moral Tales can be understood as a concern to explore fundamental aspects of what it means to be human in the world with others, in the context of the surrounding ‘now’: ‘the events of the film could have taken place in Ancient Greece, for things haven’t changed all that much. For me what is interesting in mankind is what is permanent and eternal and doesn’t change, rather than what changes, and that’s what I’m interested in showing’ (Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 39). To this extent, it is tempting to identify Rohmer’s work as the only contemporary understanding of the challenge of Baudelaire’s definition of the relationship of art and modernity: ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (Baudelaire 1992: 403). Now, the problem with that definition is the way that it tends to be read. The focus on modernity as the contingent and transient often leads to dealings with the present that are too easily and readily seduced by the fashionable. Specifically, there is a tendency for art to become more or less imitative of the contingent either in terms of its content or its seduction by monetary systems of value. Yet Baudelaire stressed that the contingent and the transient (in a word, the circumstantial ) is only one half of art. The other half consists in precisely what is eternal, and it is this other half that gives art its inner core so long as it can be made a property of the ‘now’. The modern and the eternal are neither absolute nor in necessary contradiction. They are relational, and art without the one or the other will be a failure. The modern without the eternal is facile, and the eternal without the modern is incomprehensible. Baudelaire illustrates

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the point when he discusses beauty. He says that beauty is made up of two parts, the first of which is ‘eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult’, while the second part is ‘a relatively circumstantial element, which we may like to call . . . contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion’. Baudelaire went on: ‘Without this second element, which is like the amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature’ (Baudelaire 1992: 392). This is exactly the principle that runs through Rohmer’s films and which first became very apparent in the series of Moral Tales. Like Baudelaire, Rohmer is proposing that there are eternal truths that can be found in the human world, but that they are played out in circumstantial, contingent forms. The argument connects to the theological principle that the miracle of grace irrupts into the world in a way that is always contemporary, and also that attention to the ‘now’ ought not to blind sight from the possibility that it might contain intimations of the eternal. Perhaps it is pertinent to open even wider the aperture provided by Baudelaire and to propose that Rohmer ‘is the painter of the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal’ (Baudelaire 1992: 394). Although there is a distinctly Catholic dimension to Rohmer’s dealings with the eternal, there is a narrative sense about it too. After all: ‘When you scratch the surface a little, you see that there are really very few original scenarios: those that claim originality derive more or less openly from a novel or a dramatic work’ (Rohmer 1980: ix). If that is the case it leads to a very obvious question: what then are the novelistic and dramatic sources from which Rohmer’s work derives its inspiration? Rohmer has frequently commented on his literary debts. For example, when discussing the Moral Tales, on one occasion he said, ‘I never stop rereading Balzac, Dostoyevski, Meredith, or Proust: rich, prolix, involved writers. They present me with a world living its own life’ (Rohmer 1989: 81). On another occasion he told an interviewer that he knew Jules Verne ‘by heart’, liked the Comtesse de Ségur ‘a lot’ and ‘I love the great Russians, with maybe the exception of Tolstoy . . . Outside of Proust, I really don’t know any twentieth-century French authors well’. Among English authors, he mentioned Thackeray, George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson (Rohmer in Chase and Fieden 1972: 20). Again: ‘my authors are Balzac and Victor Hugo’ (Rohmer 1989: 18). Of these writers, perhaps the least well known is the Comtesse de Ségur: born in 1797, she was a popular French Catholic writer of short stories for children, before her death in 1874. As for the Moral Tales themselves, James Monaco

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argues that their literary roots can be traced back to medieval Provence and in particular to troubadour stories of courtly love, with their emphasis on the inner sufferings of love as obsession. Monaco asks rhetorically: ‘what better description could there be for Jérôme’s obsession with Claire’s knee, Fréderic’s fascination with Chloe, or Adrien’s anger at Haydée?’. According to Monaco, what Rohmer manages to do in the Moral Tales is take the ‘moribund’ form of courtly love and insert it into the present (Monaco 1976: 294). In the light of this connection, it might be said that the ‘moribund’ form is used at once to revive its memory and to provide a counterpoint, an ‘eternal counterpoint’ maybe, to an exclusive focus on what is contemporary and fashionable. Indeed, even as La Collectionneuse is the variation on the theme of the moral tale that is the most obviously seduced by the fashionable and contemporary, it is perhaps also the instalment in the series that most reveals its literary antecedents. Rohmer has said that La Collectionneuse has ‘a fairly marked “fashion” side’ to it, ‘but I managed not to be its slave, but to dominate it . . . Inserting my characters into time has never been a problem; it’s a matter of course’ (Rohmer in Showalter 1993: 118). In other words, the characters themselves are conceived ‘out of time’. They represent what Rohmer believes to be inter-human truths that do not change too much, and that are therefore eternal, even though they are always embodied, practiced and wrapped in the ‘now’. This exploration of the eternal and the transient is possible because the roots of the Moral Tales, and the characters that dramatise them, are to be found to a considerable extent in pre-Revolutionary literature. Showalter points out that the genre of the moral tale was introduced to French literature in the middle of the eighteenth century by JeanFrançois Marmontel, (between 1758 and 1760 Marmontel published as separate stories the pieces that were collected in 1761 as his volume of Moral Tales) and he says that ‘It is characteristic of Rohmer to ally himself with tradition – in fact, with an archaic tradition; he is a classicist, following the stylistic principle that one says less to say more, and seeking always the permanent and universal elements rather than the fashionable and ephemeral’ (Showalter 1993: 6). Somewhat traditional literary references do indeed run through Rohmer’s Moral Tales, although Marmontel himself is never directly cited, and Rohmer has claimed that he has never read him (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 219). For example, My Night at Maud’s revolves around a debate with Pascal, while Crisp identifies connections between Claire’s Knee and Rousseau’s Confessions (Crisp 1988: 63), and Hanna Charney points the same film in the direction of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Hélöise (Charney 1973).

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Fréderic in Love in the Afternoon reads Bougainville’s Voyage around the World during his commute into Paris, and this film also betrays traces of Diderot and Flaubert (Showalter 1993: 6; Charney 1973: 107). Debts to classical literature are not confined to the series of Moral Tales. As its very title implies, the series of Comedies and Proverbs, to which Rohmer devoted attention in the 1980s, also contains a glance to tradition, this time to Musset, although the Comtesse de Ségur is credited by Rohmer with having written ‘the little book that I always loved when I was small, called . . . Comedies and Proverbs’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 219). According to Raymond Durgnat, Rohmer is nothing less than the ‘last gleaming’ of the Enlightenment, who has followed its dramatic forms by transposing seventeenth-and eighteenth-century courtly love and culture to the bourgeoisie (Durgnat 1990). However, Rohmer does not merely quote these Enlightenment and courtly texts, and neither does he use them merely as ironic devices (although that does happen to some extent, and at once comically and wistfully, in Love in the Afternoon, with its image of a commuter reading about global exploration). James Monaco gets it right when he says that what Rohmer takes from the classic tradition to which the films refer is a mood, an allusion: ‘light touches, washes that subtly color the milieux of the films’ (Monaco 1976: 300). The debt that Rohmer owes to eighteenth-century French literature is not just of narrative importance, however. It also explains the precise meaning of the word ‘moral’ for the series of Moral Tales. In English the word ‘moral’ refers to the distinctions between right and wrong. By this definition it could be presumed that Rohmer’s series consists in studies of how a group of characters conduct themselves in terms of those standards. By this definition then, moral tales would be moralising. But that is not at all the genealogy of the word upon which the series relies. Rohmer draws on a French tradition of the moraliste that has nothing to do with moralising. He says that ‘a moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man. He’s concerned with states of mind and feelings’. In order to illustrate this tradition, Rohmer gave a list of names that almost catalogues the by now ‘usual suspects’: ‘in the eighteenth century Pascal was a moraliste, and a moraliste is a particularly French kind of writer like La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, and you could also describe Stendhal as a moraliste because he describes what people think and feel’. In these terms, the Moral Tales are moral to the extent that they focus on characters who think and talk about their actions and feelings, and who are often so wrapped up in themselves that they miss what is glaring out around them.

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The Moral Tales are about ‘people who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open, they try to analyze, they are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behaviour, rather than the behaviour itself’ (Rohmer in Petrie 1971: 38–9). Thus defined, Rohmer’s take on the moral tale connects with the genre of character writing that was popular in England and France in the seventeenth century, and practised by the likes of La Bruyère. This genre involved the development of character sketches that had been originally written by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus. Each sketch defined a trait (such as vanity) and then described the speech and actions of a character that illustrated it. Behind the garb of fashion, Rohmer’s Moral Tales fit in with this particular tradition very well, and perhaps it is not far-fetched to suggest that it is from it that the films derive the unchanging character types that feature in them. For example, Rohmer’s male characters are often versions of the character type that is defined by its petty pride. Adrien and Jérôme in different ways are both possessed of ‘a vulgar appetite for distinction’. The man of petty pride is ‘of a kind that when he is invited out to dine must needs find place to dine next to the host’ (Theophrastus 1929: 93), and it is indeed noticeable that Jérôme in Claire’s Knee is always a little too careful about where he sits and always a little too pleased to be sitting next to his companion at dinner. Meanwhile, Adrien, the antique dealer who tries to use Haydée to help seal a deal with the odious American Sam in La Collectionneuse is a perfect illustration of Theophrastus’s maxim that the pettily proud man ‘does no buying for himself, but aids foreigners in exporting goods abroad . . . and when he does so, lets the world know it’ (Theophrastus 1929: 95). If Rohmer’s work were entirely sociological, or indeed political, it would not draw so obviously on these literary roots, but neither would it be able to explore the relationship of the eternal and transient, the circumstantial. If Rohmer were to focus entirely on the sociological or political then, from its own point of view at least, the work would lose sight of the eternal and unchanging and become nothing more than mimetic with the ‘now’. In short, the work would become as fashionable and superficial as the appearance that it represented. Yet it is precisely because of their sustained debt to pre-Revolutionary literature and because of their avoidance of the sociological and political that the Moral Tales have come in for criticism. David Thomson has linked Rohmer’s debts to his single-mindedness: ‘Sometimes I wonder if, after the destruction of the rest of the world, Rohmer might not still be

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making his fourth six-part series, on love at different times of the day, with holograms of yet more slender, lovely girls, torrents of witty dialogue, and contrivances of misunderstanding’ (Thomson 2002: 755). An Italian critic argued that the Moral Tales are all circular and conservative narratives about living in the past because the present and future are too confusing (Davis 1971: 94). Indeed, this criticism could be used to cast light on the shifting geography of the series. Until 1966 Rohmer always filmed in Paris. The break was made when he went to the south of France for La Collectionneuse. He did not return to Paris until Love in the Afternoon in 1972, but even then it is an ambivalent Paris because, for the first time, his characters are not straightforward inhabitants of the city. Now they are commuters from the suburbs or people just passing through. Furthermore, Paris now becomes a city of exploitative and confusing consumerism and work where it was once a place of artisan shops, cafés and students. It was not really until the 1990s, and particularly Rendezvous in Paris, that Rohmer seems to have become entirely at ease with the city once again (although early glimpses of relaxation can be found in The Aviator’s Wife). Not to put too fine a point on the matter, in the mid-1960s Paris disappears for some while. Why? At one level the answer could be considered to be very simple. Perhaps Rohmer temporarily moved away from Paris in the mid-1960s because the series of Moral Tales demanded that he film elsewhere. But it is also possible to argue that this shift of geographical focus involved politics. Quite simply, Rohmer’s work misses out the events of May 1968. It is noticeable that when Rohmer films students in the mid-1960s (such as Haydée), they are entirely concerned with personal pleasure and never give any obvious thought to political events. Of course, the defence of Rohmer is that from his point of view May 1968 was little more than a passing distraction, but this could also be interpreted as a failure of realism. Perhaps it is valid to charge the Moral Tales with a replacement of politics by aesthetics, of class with conscience and monopoly capitalism with morality. Norman King implies such a charge against My Night at Maud’s: ‘The world we are confronted with is patently provincial France of the late 1960s. It looks and sounds tremendously convincing. Yet the political, that unavoidable issue in 1960s France, has apparently been removed and the moral centred’ (King 2000: 210). Joan Mellen contends that the Moral Tales in the end are little more than justifications of bourgeois stolidity. After all, in each of the films, the man avoids temptation and returns to his duty: ‘What counts, Rohmer concludes, is what we have come to need, since we are members of the bourgeoisie

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all – stability, permanence and resignation to what we have been rather than commitment to what we might be’ (Mellen 1974: 178). According to Mellen then, the Moral Tales emphasise a safe past over an uncertain and yet open future. But in these respects, of a turn away from Paris and a focus on the bourgeoisie, Rohmer was not unique. As John Orr points out, in the mid-1960s Claude Chabrol’s attention also moved from Paris and into the provinces. According to Orr, this was not just an escape from turmoil on the part of two of the older figures of the New Wave. He says that it was instead a means by which they could deal with the challenge of politics in a way that remained compatible with their film-making concerns. Contrary to those who might see the escape from Paris as tantamount to a flight from the present and the future, Orr says of Chabrol and Rohmer: ‘both directors did find inspiration in the turbulence of the time – Rohmer in his encounters with ideology and the younger generation, Chabrol with his deconstructions of bourgeois life-style and the bourgeois family’ (Orr 2005: 132). The problem with a connection of Rohmer’s work to the absence or however indirect presence of an awareness of May 1968 is that it imports into the discussion criteria and values that are not terribly insightful in this case. Certainly, it is possible to contend, and indeed to contend with some validity, that the avoidance of overt political statement is itself a political statement, but the point with Rohmer’s work is that it operates according to a set of concerns and values that is incompatible with – maybe even absolutely blind to – politics. This is even the case in Rohmer’s most obviously ‘political’ film, The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre. One does not have to scratch the surface story about nouveau riche socialists too much to find lurking beneath a very traditional, if not indeed classical, comedy revolving around the country and the city. The concern that runs through Rohmer’s work is that of the relationship of the eternal and the transient, and the values are derived from Catholicism. Rohmer is not a political film-maker, but he is most certainly a Catholic film-maker. But even then, he is a Catholic filmmaker of a particular sort. He does not indulge in apologetics or propaganda (remember, Rohmer is a moraliste, not a moraliser), because the films are most concerned to explore a Catholic understanding of how the eternal issues into the transient and circumstantial, how the transient and circumstantial might allow for the recognition or misrecognition of the eternal, and how the two inter-relate to shape the human dilemmas of the ‘now’. They take for granted what apologetics and propaganda would seek to justify. Indeed, it is fitting to apply to

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Rohmer a comment that he and Chabrol made about Hitchcock: ‘he refuses . . . to sermonize, to proselytise – so much so that audiences were quickly to forget the essentially Catholic nature of his work’ (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979: 25). The series of Moral Tales is a sustained and rigorous investigation of Catholic concerns and values, and it revolves around two issues: first, the question of grace and hard-heartedness, and second, the matter of the circumstantial and its denial. In other words, the series of Moral Tales is Rohmer’s variation on themes from Pascal’s theology. A discussion of the Moral Tales through the prism of Pascal also casts light, albeit light of a speculative sort, on the matter of Rohmer’s self-effacement; is he consciously avoiding the traps of vanity and pride?

Grace and hard-heartedness In 1953 Rohmer wrote that there is only one ‘great theme’ of cinema as an art: ‘the opposition of two orders – one natural, the other human; one material, the other spiritual; one mechanical the other free; one of the appetite, the other of heroism or grace’ (Rohmer 1989: 64). These might also be identified with the ‘orders’ of the empirically real and the really real, or as the Baudelarian ‘orders’ of the fleeting and the eternal. Yet the argument that they are in opposition is overstating the case. Were Rohmer actually to hold that view he would also be required to hold to two positions that would gut his work of any integrity of its own. First, if the ‘orders’ were opposed to one another and therefore radically distinct, separate and distinctive, then cinematic realism would be able only to depict an objective ‘out there’. There would and could be no resonance to the cinematic image itself, and only an indifferent and undiscriminating strategy of point and shoot would be appropriate. Indeed properly speaking neither could the image be considered to be superficial or profound because it would be all that there could possibly be. In this way, cinema could only be naively mimetic. It could not possibly be an art. Second, to talk of distinct ‘orders’ in opposition is also to imply that they cannot be brought together. The logic of this position is that any theologia (that is, any word about God) would be quite impossible. If God were always and eternally in opposition to the natural or material, He would not even be absent. Such a God would actually be an irrelevance, and that is a status that no theology can accord to the theos about which, by definition, it seeks to speak. Pascal pointed out that ‘If there never had been any appearance of God, this eternal deprivation . . . might have as well corresponded with the

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absence of all divinity’. Yet God has appeared and, ‘If He appeared once, He exists always’ (Pascal 1931: 155). Consequently, even (perhaps it is better to say especially) the absent God raises questions to be addressed. By this argument then, the concern is not to fall silent in the face of the usual absence of God. Instead it is to pay attention so as not to miss the miracle of His appearance. It is in this light that it becomes possible to understand Pascal’s contention that ‘Grace will always be in the world, and nature also’ (Pascal 1931: 142). Pascal is saying that grace irrupts into the empirical world and can only be found there, and he is also arguing that despite empirical evidence that might indicate His absence, God nevertheless is always actually or potentially present in every moment, just like nature (although it would be wrong to confuse God with nature; they are distinct). Moreover it is through Pascal’s contention that it also becomes possible to appreciate that actually Rohmer’s concern is not at all to examine two fundamentally opposed ‘orders’. Rather what Rohmer’s work seeks to do is carry out and facilitate a work of observation through which the appearance of grace in the world might be noticed. Consequently the work’s concern is to examine the inter-relationship of the material and the spiritual, of the empirical and the real, the fleeting and the eternal. As a Catholic film-maker Rohmer takes the reality of the second ‘order’ as given, but since he is not a Catholic propagandist he does not try to prove it. As with his moralism, Rohmer’s Catholicism is not at all didactic. Instead, the point is to help the audience to observe, to encourage the audience to look to see what might otherwise remain unseen. The point is to encourage the audience to engage. Their observation has to be extremely attentive since grace appears unexpectedly and rarely with a crash of thunder. Yet the close and committed attention will be rewarded precisely because the deus absconditus is also pervasive. Pascal saw that the deity who appeared once exists eternally, and so even as He is absent God is immanent or, as Andrew Greeley rather nicely puts it, lurking (Greeley 2000: 7). This is also the status of God and of the spiritual in Rohmer’s work; pervasive in absence, absent but immanent; lurking. Where then is this lurking divinity to be found? If grace is always in the world, where in the world is it appropriate to start looking? It is obviously appropriate to look to nature as Creation (as Rohmer implies in such films as Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle), but that is not the only place to seek the miracle of grace. With his expressed interest in humans in their surroundings, Rohmer intimates that it is primarily necessary to look at men and women and their interactions in the world that they have made or been given (the world which they appropriate

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or which expropriates). This is an orthodox Catholic anthropology. The human is identified as the pinnacle of empirical Creation, and to be human is to be in the world with others (in short, to be human is to be social). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: ‘The divine image is present in every man. It shines forth in the communion of persons’ (paragraph 1702). For example, Pascal repeated the argument of St Augustine that God acts both on and through men and women. God does not just give grace to an individual as a direct gift. He also makes it available to the individual through relationships with others (Moriarty 2003: 155), even though the gift therefore might be missed if the other is treated inappropriately and with a lack of regard to the ‘divine image’ that they possess. Consequently, it is necessary to pay exceptionally close attention to these relationships, to see what they might disclose. Yet there can be no guarantee that the looking, however attentive it might be, will indeed disclose an appearance of the spiritual, real or eternal. The point is precisely that God lurks, and reveals Himself as and when He wills. God is absent but still immanent, as opposed to eternally absent or obviously present, and as such Rohmer’s films are curiously suspenseful. John Orr says that the suspense in Rohmer’s work revolves around ‘the outcome of relationships, the end-point of intimacy’ (Orr 2005:147), and that is right. There is suspense about whether Claire’s knee will be caressed or whether Fréderic will go to bed with Chloe, yet there is much more to the matter than this kind of erotic suspense alone. There is also suspense for the audience as to whether the characters in the film, or indeed the members of the audience themselves, have spotted a hesitant moment of the irruption of grace into the world (and whether in fact there has been any such irruption). It can be easily missed because what Orr calls the ‘clinching detail’ is always to be found in the empirical and the ordinary (Orr 2005: 148); and so the discussion returns to Pascal’s claim that grace is always in the world. However the world can be only seen if it is turned into a question mark, and if it is taken as less than entirely given. If the audience is going to be encouraged and engaged to look for signs of the lurking God, and indeed if the characters are going to be in a story as opposed to a simple documentary, then the ordinary and empirical has to be given an opening to immanent grace. This creates a problem for so strict and fundamental a realist as Rohmer. Quite simply, any use of non-realist devices is immediately inadmissible. To this extent it is useful to compare Rohmer with Kieslowski. For instance, in films like The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours: Blue, Kieslowski intimated

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immanence through devices such as light reflecting on a wall and on Juliette Binoche’s face, respectively. The Double Life of Veronique includes a scene in which Veronique is in her apartment shortly after the death of Veronika, and a golden light plays around the room. Veronique goes to the window and sees a boy holding a mirror out of a window opposite. The suggestion is that he is the source of the reflection. But he is shown to go back inside, and the golden light continues to move around the walls. The implication clearly is that the light’s only possible source is spiritual and that it will only be seen for what it is (that is, as much more than an irritating reflection on a sunny afternoon) by those who are sensitive enough to see it. The heavy hint is that the light is in some way the spirit of Veronika irrupting into the world of Veronique. In Three Colours: Blue the immanent aspect of the reflection is made extremely obvious to the audience because it shines up on Julie’s face (from a non-material source) and happens seconds before Olivier arrives, the man through whom she eventually manages to reconnect with the world of human emotions after the death of her husband and daughter in a car crash. This time the intimation is that the reflection signals and anticipates the act of grace that is Olivier’s appearance, but it must be said that Kieslowski makes the point with a bombast that is absolutely alien to Rohmer territory. Rohmer’s realism means that an anticipation of the Kieslowskian sort is impossible. Rohmer’s work has to be considerably subtler. Kieslowski brings the immanent to the empirical from outside and rather ostentatiously, whereas Rohmer is required by his realism to attempt the far more difficult task of blasting out of the empirical the space of a ‘now’ in which the lurking God might be glimpsed. Rohmer’s problem in a nutshell is that close attentive looking and seeing is only possible if the empirically real is juxtaposed with the really real (that is, if the eye is encouraged to look for the unseen), and yet realism demands that the really real can never be admitted as such, precisely because it is not empirically real. The resolution of this problem is found in the narrative of each of the instalments in the series of Moral Tales. Each one of these films revolves around possibilities that emerge as soon as the main character diverges from the routines of ordinary empirical life and is situated in a unique ‘now’. For example, The Girl at the Monceau Bakery tells a story that commences when a male student has to find somewhere to have lunch after the university dining hall is closed, and Suzanne’s Career also requires the flexible time of student life. Meanwhile as the male characters in the films get older and therefore more deeply embedded in the routines of

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everyday life (such as careers), their divergences from the norms become tied to specific times as opposed to a general lifestyle. Consequently La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee similarly emphasise holidays, My Night at Maud’s takes place around Christmas, and Love in the Afternoon’s Fréderic has so much spare time when others are working because he has nurtured a predilection for late lunches: ‘I hang on until two, to avoid the lunchtime crowds. Anyway, I generally don’t eat a big lunch, but go down between two and three . . . I generally avoid business lunches’ (Rohmer 1980: 213). The narrative reliance on non-routine time is too consistent to be accidental, and Crisp argues that Rohmer is implying that there is a ‘danger of any digression from the accepted social time-schedules. A process of metonymy equates such deviations with other “unnatural acts”’. Indeed, for Fréderic, ‘the afternoon becomes, within the context of this film, a sign of all that is negative and unnatural, of all his anguish and uncertainty’ (Crisp 1988: 69). If Crisp’s argument is accepted, it is worth wondering whether there is indeed some validity to the charge that Rohmer’s films are a defence of bourgeois stolidity. After all, if the simple act of taking a late lunch is ‘tantamount to a pact with the devil’ (Crisp 1988: 69), then it could be argued that there is a very clear message that redemption lies in utter and absolute predictability and in the acceptance of social norms. That kind of predictability would signify a measure of success in controlling the passions and in subordinating desire to external demands. But is that actually the charge of the disordered time that does indeed run through the series of Moral Tales? A different interpretation is possible, one that draws on Pascal. The Pensées contain the comment: ‘The spirit of grace; the hardness of the heart; external circumstances’ (Pascal 1931: 139). Admittedly, such a pithy remark is open to a variety of readings, but if it is broken down into its constituent parts, Pascal’s sentence provides a way into understanding Rohmer’s Moral Tales. The most obvious aspect of the remark is that it draws a distinction between the spirit of grace and the hardness of the human heart. For Pascal, grace is not given to a man or woman once and for all. The logical corollary of this position is that grace can be lost or withdrawn, and that the believer ought never to presume that he or she has been definitely saved. Predestination is only known for sure by God, and in this world a rededication and recommitment of the self is always required and necessary. There is no rest from the struggle to deserve God’s continued favour, and grace has to be earned again and again. For Pascal the true believer will be she or he who is riddled with anxiety, not

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she or he who is certain: ‘It is not enough to ask today, even with a pure heart, for the gift of continence tomorrow. We must go on asking if we are to go on receiving . . .: we cannot project our moral and spiritual state into the future’ (Moriarty 2003: 152–3). The hardness of the heart to which Pascal refers consists in the refusal to go on asking because of seduction by the distractions of the empirical world. The distractions are diversions that harden the heart against the important questions that emerge in all their starkness as soon as they are confronted headon: ‘then they would see themselves: they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go’, yet because those issues are too overwhelming for men and women, ‘we cannot employ and divert them too much’ (Pascal 1931: 44). This was the reason why Pascal condemned pride and vanity (invariably the men in the Moral Tales are remarkably vain and proud), and disdained theatre, games and hunting. In a sentence that bristles with despair and not a little contempt, Pascal wrote that ‘man, born to know the universe, to judge all causes, to govern a whole state, is altogether occupied and taken up with the business of catching a hare’ (Pascal 1931: 43; is this the Pascalian nub of Rohmer’s refusal to put himself before his work?). Precisely that ‘business of catching a hare’ is the theme of the Moral Tales. Each film in the series concentrates on a man who is committed either emotionally, or through engagement or marriage, and yet in each case he is distracted by the possibilities of the pursuit of another. So, in The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, there is commitment to Sylvie and distraction by Jacqueline, Suzanne’s Career is less clear, but the object of commitment is probably Suzanne and distraction is Sophie, while extreme clarity returns in My Night at Maud’s, where commitment is to Françoise and the distraction is Maud. In La Collectionneuse, Adrien is committed to his fiancée, Mijanou, and distraction is Haydée; in Claire’s Knee, it is Lucinde and the knee; and in Love in the Afternoon, it is Hélène and Chloe. The films emphasise the distraction that is offered by this second set of women, or at least the films raise questions about precisely what kind of attention is going to be paid to them (are these women going to be regarded as purely material, as purely fleeting, or will they be seen as intimations of an eternal?) through a tendency, which becomes more pronounced as the series progresses, to fetishise their bodies. Tendencies towards fetishisation can be seen as early as The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, where there is an occasional focus on Jacqueline’s neck, but they are most obvious at the beginning of La Collectionneuse and, of course, in Claire’s Knee. La Collectionneuse begins with bikini-clad

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Haydée strolling along a sandy beach. The camera moves up and down her body, lingering on specific parts such as her neck, stomach, legs: ‘it is a technique that sections her body, focusing on details without relating them to the whole’ (Crisp 1988: 43). As for Claire’s Knee, Chris Wiegand contends that it is in this film that the New Wave’s ‘objectification of the female body’ reaches ‘its peak’ (Wiegand 2001: 79), while Margot’s knee is quietly significant in Rohmer’s later A Summer’s Tale. But the films themselves rather subvert any chance of total fetishisation. The fetishisation is only ever proposed. It is never enforced, and consequently a question is being asked of the audience itself. In many ways the bodies of Jacqueline, Haydée and Claire are reduced to pieces precisely so that the audience itself is given at least an opportunity to ask a reflexive question about whether this is an appropriate way of seeing another human. Is Haydée a young woman with her own integrity, or is she going to be reduced – as the camera and the men in the film reduce her – to toffeed limbs, and is Claire a woman with her own volition or is she merely a creamy knee? Put another way, is Claire’s knee simply the knee that it appears to be or does it represent ‘moral peril’? ( Jones 1981: 4), or then again is it an irruption of grace into the world? These are questions that are raised by the largely ironic fetishisation of women in Rohmer’s work (it is ironic because in as far as it raises questions it subverts its own statement). In this way the films are opened up to, if not in fact require, a variety of readings. They only ‘work’ if they are seen as texts that demand interpretation, and to some extent even completion, by their audience. Rohmer’s point is not that Haydée ought to be reduced to her fetishised body, but rather he is forcing the audience to reflect upon how they see a young woman in a bikini. If the seeing is carried out with a hard heart that accepts and revels in the diversions of the empirical world, then she is indeed likely to be seen as little more than alluring. But if she is seen instead as a constituent part of the world into which grace issues, then she is likely to be seen more attentively and carefully. She will be much less of a diversion or distraction and more by way of an incitement or provocation. There is a choice to be made, for the audience every bit as much as for the men in the film. Indeed, the question of choice runs all the way through the Moral Tales. There is the choice between his fiancée or wife and distraction that confronts the man in the film, and there is also the choice that the audience is required to make as to how to regard the characters in the film. The matter of choice is woven into the whole fabric of any Pascalian position since, if God is hidden or, at most, lurking, it is

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ultimately necessary to make the decision for or against Him on the basis of a wager. Pascal famously argued that according to reason the wager can only be made in favour of God: ‘If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is’ (Pascal 1931: 67). My Night at Maud’s includes a cut to this precise passage and it is quoted during the nocturnal conversation that contains the themes of the film (Ennis 1996). Pascal appreciated that this choice could not of itself lead to faith, and therefore he contended that after the wager it is necessary to ‘convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by abatement of your passions’ (Pascal 1931: 68). In other words, the wager is understood by Pascal to lead necessarily to certain dispositions and commitments of the self. It is not an abstract intellectual exercise alone, but ought to lead to a relentless control of the passionate self such that the moment of grace might be noticed when and if it irrupts and so that, if it is given once, grace might never be retracted in the future. As such the condemnation of digression from conventional time-routines that runs as a thread through the Moral Tales is much less a defence of bourgeois predictability than it is an argument about the rightful disposition for attentiveness to grace. Rohmer is not saying that life needs to be orderly if it is going to be stable, or predictable if it is going to be moral. He is saying instead, like Pascal, that empirical everyday passions need to be controlled if real life is going to be glimpsed at all. It is a statement about disposition, not the timekeeping skills of bourgeois professionals. (To this extent the narrowness of the sociological terrain that is mapped in the Moral Tales, and for that matter in all of Rohmer’s work, is quite besides any significant point.) This argument explains an exchange in My Night at Maud’s about a bottle of Chanturge wine. The narrator explains that he finds the wine excellent (in other words it signifies a kind of passion, it is a diversion of the senses) and that consequently he chooses to refuse to give it up in the pursuit of self-control. As he rather proudly says: ‘Why give it up? In the name of what? No, what I don’t like in the wager is the idea of giving in exchange, of buying a ticket like a lottery’ (in Showalter 1993: 59). The narrator wants to be given a gift of grace but refuses to give anything in return, not even a glass of wine. Yet as Pascal saw, if nothing is given in exchange for the acceptance of the wager then the heart is too hard to be open to the irruptions of grace. What the narrator is refusing to do is ‘lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks’ (Pascal 1931: 68). The narrator has also reduced the wager in favour of God to empirical self-interest. Admittedly, this is an inherent problem with the Pascalian position. It is possible to read the wager as saying

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nothing more than that it is one’s rational self-interest to believe. But there is more to the matter than that. The point that Pascal was trying to make is that the self-interest that is satisfied by the wager in favour of the existence of God is of a higher order than the appetitive, empirical and diverting self-interest that is satisfied by something like a glass of wine. As such, the narrator of My Night at Maud’s has actually misunderstood Pascal’s point or, if he has understood it, he has refused to accept it. The narrator’s wager on Pascal is little more than a proud diversion from the stark questions. In this way the narrator of My Night at Maud’s is not making an ultimate choice, and this is almost certainly the nub of the somewhat vain Catholicism that he wears like a badge of honour. As he tells a work mate: ‘I’m Catholic. My family was Catholic, and I’ve stayed Catholic’ (in Showalter 1993: 45). Of course, what this proud announcement misses is the Pascalian point that being a Catholic requires rather more of the individual than staying the Catholic one has always been. Catholicism is a journey not a destination. This is what the narrator fails to see, and thus there is a question about whether he might in fact have reduced Catholicism itself to the status of a diversion, just like a fine wine. This is a possibility that is rather reinforced by his behaviour at Mass in the cathedral, when he first notices Françoise, whom he decides to marry, and then attempts to follow home. The hint is that the narrator once again shows that he has completely misunderstood Pascal. In The Provincial Letters, Pascal mentioned the question of looking lustfully at women at Mass. He quoted the casuist position that it is certainly ‘wicked’ to lust after women at Mass, but nevertheless at least the obligation to attend Mass has been fulfilled and so the ‘wickedness’ might not be too important. The point is that Pascal mentioned this argument in order to condemn it by satire, irony and mockery. But it rather seems that the narrator has read this part of Pascal without imagination and taken the words at face value. He has read the words and quite missed the spirit in which Pascal wrote them (Pascal 1967: 145). The narrator does not realise that in this way, and maybe in many others too, he is an exemplar of everything that Pascal identified as the problem to be overcome. But in all fairness it must be said that it is certainly the case that the narrator of My Night at Maud’s is capable of controlling his empirical emotions. After all, he refuses to ‘sleep’ with Maud despite sharing a bed with her during the fateful night. Nevertheless he remains a character to be criticised from a Pascalian point of view. His faith possesses none of the desperate charge of the wager, nor recognition that God

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can at any moment withdraw any gifts that He has given. The narrator has convinced himself that he simply ‘is’ a Catholic and consequently he is able to choose to enjoy Chanturge if he pleases. Similarly, his Catholicism is of an order that does not prevent him from looking at young women during Mass. Rohmer adds a nicely subtle critique of the narrator’s distraction by Françoise when he has him notice her at the moment when the priest and congregation recite together: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ (in Showalter 1993: 40). As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Françoise is not the innocent virgin that the narrator believed his future wife to be, since she is rather on the rebound from an affair with Maud’s husband. Consequently, the audience is required to do a lot of interpretation and to try to work out for itself, without moralising guidance from Rohmer himself, whether Françoise is indeed the personification of grace that the narrator believes her to be, or whether grace might in fact have appeared in the narrator’s world in the guise of Maud. Or perhaps there was no irruption of grace, and perhaps the whole film is about selfdelusion and deception. Rohmer does not answer those questions, which reappear in one form or another through the series of Moral Tales, because to do so would be hubris of the worst sort and a vain and proud intimation that it is possible to know the mind of God. From the first glimpse of her at Mass, the narrator of My Night at Maud’s comes to believe that he is fated to marry Françoise (just as the narrator in The Girl at the Monceau Bakery professes that it was fate that he marry Sylvie). Yet to talk about fate and about an empirical predestination that can be confidently known in this-worldly terms is actually to fly in a direction that is absolutely contrary to that advocated by Pascal. To talk about fate and empirical predestination is to suggest that material life is possessed of an almost guaranteed continuity and indeed teleology that it is possible to know in advance. This is a vain and proud confidence that is explicitly denied however by Pascal’s position that grace is not given once and for all, but can be withdrawn. Pascal’s thesis on grace means that he understands empirical existence to be ‘radically contingent: one moment gives no certainty, or even probability, of the nature of the next’ (Moriarty 2003: 153). This is what the narrator of My Life at Maud’s seeks to deny through the subordination of everything to a sense of predestined fate. Consequently, it is possible to launch a Pascalian critique of this man who has rejected Pascal’s Pensées on the rather hard-hearted and vain grounds that ‘I find it rather empty. To the degree that I am Catholic, or at least I try to be, it doesn’t go at

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all in the direction of my present Catholicism. It is precisely because I am a Christian that I object to this rigidity’ (in Showalter 1993: 48). The narrator has failed to see that the ‘rigidity’ of Pascal is actually about the control of the passions to gain benefits so much greater than wine can offer: ‘Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? . . . [Y]ou will see such great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered on something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing’ (Pascal 1931: 68). How then ought the narrator of My Night at Maud’s, and by extension the men at the centre of each of the Moral Tales, to have regarded himself? If their lives are not determined by a fate that can be known in advance, then what does determine them? Pascal’s answer would be that the path towards real life might only be pursued if attention is paid to the possibility of the irruption of grace in the empirical (such that the irruption transforms the moment into a ‘now’ that is open to the immanent), but that such possibilities can only be seen in as far as there is the cultivation of a disposition to be susceptible to the circumstantial. That disposition can only emerge if the passions are controlled and if there is a refusal of pride, vanity and the diversions of any kind of hare-chase. (Once again Rohmer’s own self-effacement comes to mind.)

Circumstance There is deep irony at the centre of each of the Moral Tales. One of the themes that the films explore is the paradox that routine is necessary for the development and nurturance of the disposition to see any irruption of grace into the world, and yet those very routines are also dangerous in that they can lead to hard-heartedness. It is possible to be diverted by the this-worldly pleasures that the routines of ordered time provide, and thus entirely to miss the more subtle possibilities that might be presented in the ‘now’. Whereas Pascal developed a position which steadfastly refused to accept the legitimacy of diversion, Rohmer’s work adopts an attitude towards men and women that is at once more sanguine and perhaps also considerably more devastatingly realistic. Pascal believed that ‘One must open one’s mind to the proofs and confirm oneself in belief by custom (i.e., self-conditioning), but also lay oneself open to inspirations’ (Moriarty 2003: 157). Rohmer’s Moral Tales wonder how and if that can happen. The Moral Tales know that men and women are inextricably and necessarily both in and of the empirical world, and that empirical life is only possible on that basis

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(the Pascalian solution of disengagement is not viable for ordinary people, and ascetics never appear in Rohmer’s work). For Rohmer then the question to explore is how characters – who are very much like the members of his audience – that are wrapped up in their own ambitions, dreams and frustrations, encounter the world (and others) around them. What Rohmer’s work examines is how men and women in social situations confront the two orders of the empirical and the real, and how the ability to flourish in the former almost inevitably leads to a blindness to the latter. Rohmer shows that this-worldly sophistication can too easily go hand in hand with utter blindness. Yet his non-didactic modesty means that Rohmer is never arrogant enough to pretend that he knows a solution to this paradox. It is presented and not resolved, for the simple reason that for empirical men and women there probably is no resolution without faith and the theological virtue of hope. Rohmer leaves his audience pondering a paradox in which they themselves (we ourselves) are also trapped. The lever that Rohmer uses to establish a critical irony towards the characters, and indeed the lever that is used to open up an everyday space for the possibility of the appearance of the miracle of grace, is the circumstantial. It is worth recalling that Pascal connected ‘external circumstances’ to the spirit of grace and to hard-heartedness. Rohmer’s work takes up this connection to examine how the circumstantial might well offer the chance of a non-routine, yet nevertheless ordinary space for grace, and it also deals with how characters that are too hardhearted to accept or embrace what is before them can explain that possibility away. The circumstantial can be defined as chance and the incidental. It is something approaching the pure ‘now’, in that it stands as the irruption into the everyday of an unexpected and unpredicted real. It is a ‘now’ that blasts the moment out of the quotidian, and which reflects back on the everyday as a question, challenge and provocation. The circumstantial is a ‘now’ that contains the possibility of an inspired regard towards the empirical. Consequently it can be argued that the inspiration to attend to the possibility of grace is contained within the circumstantial ‘now’, since it puts a question mark against the routines of empirical life. But the hard-heartedness that is required and promoted by routine militates against the recognition of the possible irruption of grace for what it is. In the specific terms of Rohmer’s work, what this means is that it is in the incidental that the most important – what Orr calls the ‘clinching’ – detail might be found; and also disastrously or comically missed. Furthermore, while the possible irruption of grace is sometimes linked to natural phenomena (such as

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the green ray, the blue hour or trees blowing in the wind), in the Moral Tales it is consistently and exclusively connected to circumstantial social encounters. Here then Rohmer is recalling Pascal’s point that grace can be given through others. Rohmer is also taking on board the Catholic anthropology of the social-ness and sociality of human being in the world. Circumstantial encounters run through the meetings that are at the centre of the Moral Tales. It is not at all inappropriate to say that these are all films about characters that just happen to bump into one another as they go about their business. To be sure, it could be suggested that these circumstantial meetings are not at all accidental and are, instead, guided by divine providence and predestination. But to develop that argument would be once again to fall into the hubristic trap of presuming that it is possible to know the mind of God. And since the God of Pascal is beyond human understanding, that can never be admitted. The most that can be said is that the meetings in the Moral Tales might be instances of providence, although it is more appropriate to be modest and to say simply that within the films themselves these encounters are socially accidental. This modest proposition nevertheless has the distinct advantage that it returns the work of the interpretation of the circumstantial to the audience, and therefore the films again require a close attentive engagement and reading. (With this argument I am not at all saying that the films do not deal with divine providence; my point is rather that for us there is absolutely no way of knowing if the relationships in the Moral Tales are predetermined or not.) But what are the key circumstantial meetings? During his Huysmanesque wanderings for lunch (compare Huysmans 2003), the narrator of The Girl at the Monceau Bakery at first merely happens to see Sylvie and, when she disappears, happens to buy cakes from the shop in which Jacqueline temporarily works. Suzanne’s Career begins with a random meeting at a café. The story of My Night at Maud’s initially is about circumstantial encounters with an old friend and a young woman at Mass, while that of La Collectionneuse is dominated by the chance encounters of Adrien and Haydée. Meanwhile, Claire’s Knee opens with a shot of Jérôme driving his rather too smart little red speedboat under a bridge upon which his old friend Aurora happens to stand, and somehow he hears her rather quiet call to him over the sound of the boat’s engine. Finally, Love in the Afternoon’s drama is perhaps a little less circumstantial since Chloe one day simply drops in at Fréderic’s office; they are old friends and she has recently arrived back in Paris. All of these more or less circumstantial encounters have the ability to upset

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the hard-hearted selfish possession of the men, and thus they all set into train a series of relationships and events in and through which a better-sighted and more-inspired man might be able to glimpse what is otherwise unseen. These encounters create a ‘now’ that is missed by the man to whom it is evidently given. What makes the men at the centre of the Moral Tales at once intriguing and embarrassing is that they totally miss everything that is before them. They consistently look for an irruption of the real through the chases of empirical diversion, and they seem to learn little or nothing from the circumstances in which they have been involved. The circumstantial opens up a possibility of a gift of grace, but the hardheartedness of the men rebounds on them so that they miss the very meaning and meaningfulness that they seem to crave. What the men try to do is explain the circumstantial away and subordinate it to the hard-hearted knowledge that they are proud of vainly showing off. Characters like the narrator of The Girl at the Monceau Bakery evidently find it impossible to believe that a life such as theirs can be tossed around by the winds of the incidental and contingent. That also means of course that they evidently find it hard to appreciate that they are responsible for their empirical actions, and they go to considerable lengths to deny their culpability. The Moral Tales identify four different strategies of the denial of the circumstantial, and therefore of the hard-hearted inability or refusal to glimpse any possibility of grace. Each can be identified with one of the dominant men in the series, and so it is possible to talk about the narrator’s, Adrien’s, Jérôme’s and Fréderic’s strategies of denial. The narrator’s strategy appears in My Night at Maud’s. At the beginning of the Pensées Pascal distinguishes between the mathematical and the intuitive mind. He says that the mathematical mind is excellent at knowing the principles that structure things, but that this is knowledge ‘removed from ordinary use’. Pascal went on to contend that mathematicians are so focused on principles that they scarcely notice ‘what is before them’ (Pascal 1931: 1), and in all: ‘Mathematicians who are only mathematicians have exact minds, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and axioms; otherwise they are inaccurate and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear’ (Pascal 1931: 2). The narrator is almost a case study of the mathematical mind. He reduces everything to principles and probabilities. For example, he decides to marry Françoise because he takes her on principle to be the good blonde Catholic virgin that she probably isn’t. The narrator evidently applies the principle that a young woman who

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attends Mass alone must be devout and available for marriage, almost irrespective of her own desires. He applies principles with an insufferable smugness, which means that he fails to see what is before him until the very last shots of the film (which reveal Françoise’s affair with Maud’s husband), when it is too late. Moreover he is an engineer whose hobby is mathematics: ‘At the moment I do mathematics endlessly’ (in Showalter 1993: 47). Towards the beginning of the film the narrator is in a bookshop and before leafing through a copy of the Pensées he passes his hand over a volume on the calculation of probabilities. However, the point is not that he is disinterested in that branch of mathematics; rather it is that he simply does not need a book about it. For example, when the narrator meets his old friend Vidal in a café, the latter expresses surprise at their chance encounter. But the narrator takes the meeting in his stride, thanks to the application of mathematical, indeed geometrical, principles: ‘Our ordinary paths never cross . . . so it’s in the extraordinary that our points of intersection are situated. Inevitably!’ (in Showalter 1993: 47). It is also through a mathematical mind that the narrator discusses the Pascalian wager (in Showalter 1993: 49), thus entirely missing the anxiety and existential dread that runs through this way of coming to terms with the immanence of the absent God. What the narrator consistently does is use mathematical principles to misrepresent the circumstantial as probable if not in fact inevitable. Put another way, what the narrator does is close his mind to the possibility (and not at all the probability) of the irruption of grace in the circumstantial ‘now’. His mathematical mind has resulted in a hardheartedness that actually serves as a way of avoiding any personal and existentially compelling engagement in human relationships. When, some years after their marriage, he discovers the truth about Françoise’s pre-marital affair due to a quite accidental meeting with Maud at a beach, the narrator of My Night at Maud’s takes Françoise and their son by the hand and runs towards the sea with them both. At that moment his mathematical hard-heartedness has allowed him either a further twist of self-delusion or a kind of heroism. Rohmer leaves the audience with that dangling question, and does not resolve the issue. But there is much less space for any sympathy in the case of Adrien’s strategy of the denial of the circumstantial. In La Collectionneuse, Adrien sees his break on the Côte d’Azur as a chance to do a little business (he is an antique dealer) and to relax while his fiancée Mijanou is in London. But Adrien’s confessed plans are disrupted by the appearance of Haydée at the holiday villa, and Crisp is right when he says that ‘The overall trend of the main body of the film

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will be to show Adrien becoming more and more involved in Haydée’s universe’ (Crisp 1988: 46). Initially Adrien tries to escape that world by pushing Haydée towards his holiday companion Daniel or his client Sam. However by the end of the film Adrien is driving Haydée back to the villa where they will spend the night alone together. Their journey is interrupted when their car passes some friends of Haydée. She gets out of the car to talk to them, and after waiting a little while Adrien simply drives off, leaving Haydée to fend for herself. Adrien seizes ‘on a “random” conjunction of circumstances, to opt . . . for London, Mijanou and security’ (Crisp 1988: 46). This is an accurate summary of the surface narrative of the film, and what it makes clear is that Adrien thinks only of himself, with everything being filtered through his own vain sense of self-importance. One of the key points about Haydée that is clear to the audience but never even glimpsed by self-obsessed Adrien is that she is more or less indifferent about him and only gets into his car at the end of the film because there is no one else left. Adrien’s strategy of avoiding the circumstantial is quite simple; he ignores it when it does not fit in with a self-satisfied narrative of his own vanity, or he turns it into a parable of his own moral rectitude when a circumstance does so fit. He makes the world and its incidents fit in with his pre-existing conceits. Adrien sees his final rejection of Haydée as a noble and serious demonstration of commitment to Mijanou, but Crisp is much closer to the mark when he identifies it as ‘yet another somewhat selfish desertion of a person-treated-as-object who has served her purpose in his precious moral progress’ (Crisp 1988: 48). Adrien is insufficiently ‘sensitive to other people’s reality’ to be able to grasp the possibilities that they might contain within themselves or, indeed, the ways in which they might change him. In short, Adrien’s strategy of the avoidance of the circumstantial is to turn away from the chance of the irruption of grace in and through relationships with others, by means of the simple expedient of turning those others into means to his ends. He is a user of objects and people as things, and refuses to accept that people are not merely opportunities for his self-edification and vanity. Adrien is an exemplar of diversion and of utter hard-heartedness (his type reappears in the form of the artist in the final instalment of Rendezvous in Paris). Jérôme in Claire’s Knee is the exemplary figure of the third way of avoiding the circumstantial. In the Introduction to the short story versions of the Moral Tales, Rohmer said, ‘My heroes, somewhat like Don Quixote, think of themselves as characters in a novel’ (Rohmer 1989: viii). This theme runs all the way through Claire’s Knee. Aurora, the old friend who calls to Jérôme from the bridge, is a novelist, and when the

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two are talking, she outlines a story in which an older man becomes sexually attracted to a much younger girl. She asks Jérôme to explore the possibilities of this narrative in his emerging relationship with school-girl Laura, although he subsequently modifies the story so that the attraction is towards the knee of Claire, Laura’s sixteen-year-old stepsister. To this extent Jérôme is able to excuse his actions on the grounds that he is nothing more than a character in a story that is being written by Aurora. He is something like Aurora’s puppet, allegedly without any free will and capable of no action except that which is permitted within the confines of the narrative. ‘All his acts, he protests, were undertaken as narrative experiments, to please Aurora’ (Crisp 1988: 65). In this way Jérôme vainly attributes to himself the lack of sight – and probably no small part of the charming heroism – of Don Quixote, who is pictured blindfolded in a mural on the wall of his villa. Rohmer has remarked of Claire’s Knee that ‘One can see the blindfolded Don Quixote as an allegory for the film’s central subject. Jérôme will be misguided to the end’ (Rohmer in Crisp 1988: 65). At the end of the film Jérôme has stroked Claire’s knee, and he leaves fully convinced that he has managed to separate Claire from her boyfriend Gilles. Jérôme has found it difficult to understand why Claire finds him less attractive than she finds the less-obviously refined Gilles, and he spitefully decides to try to split them up. But as he motorboats away he does not notice that Gilles arrives almost immediately, and that he and Claire are reconciled. Jérôme departs from his holiday at once self-confident, vain, believing himself to be absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing, and also entirely misguided about almost everything. Jérôme simply ignores the circumstantial by denying responsibility. After all, he is merely a character in a story and not the agent of his own actions. Indeed, he is actually able to convince himself that he is a good man precisely because he has put himself entirely at the service of Aurora, and has done nothing for himself. The final strategy for avoiding the circumstantial is the one carried out by Fréderic in Love in the Afternoon. Towards the end of the film he makes an afternoon visit to Chloe’s flat. They have been flirting for some considerable time and it is no surprise that when Chloe appears she has just come from a bath. She is naked and asks Fréderic to dry her. He does so and takes the opportunity to kiss her freckled stomach. Chloe goes to her bed and lies upon it while Fréderic starts to remove his clothes. Through all of this process, and through the long relationship leading up to this moment, Fréderic has been a perfectly willing participant in the flirtation and he has neither been coerced nor hurried

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by Chloe. It might be said that she presents Fréderic with circumstantial opportunities, but that it is entirely his responsibility as to whether he accepts or declines the offer. As he takes off his pullover Fréderic looks in the mirror, sees himself pulling a face that he had earlier made when playing with his young son, and he departs quietly, leaving Chloe without telling her. He returns home to make desolately passionate love with his wife (who, it is subtly suggested, has to change her own arrangements for love in the afternoon because of her husband’s unexpected arrival). Fréderic is a man who seeks an escape form the bourgeois stolidity of marriage through an embrace of the possibilities that are provided by Chloe’s circumstantial reappearance into his life, and yet he makes this incidental situation into another kind of trap from which he can in turn only escape by means of flight back to the dullness of domestic convention. Fréderic is ‘drawn into this trap which has the appearance of an escape but which he in turn must learn to escape’ (Crisp 1988: 71). As such there is a difference between Fréderic, the narrator of My Night at Maud’s, Adrien and Jérôme. The latter three, all dealt with the circumstantial with the certainties of a hard-heart bolstered with pride and vanity. They barely glimpsed the ‘now’. Fréderic is quite different. He tries to deal with the circumstantial simply by running away from it, by running back to soul-destroying comfort. He sees the ‘now’ and is terrified of it. In this way Fréderic is almost certainly the most realistically human of all the men in the Moral Tales, although whether he is either the fool or the true hero of the series is rather more difficult to decide. But the question that remains is why are these strategies of the avoidance of the impact of the circumstantial so attractive to the narrator and Adrien, Jérôme and Fréderic? Other questions follow. Why do they seek to bolster the empirical, and most importantly their own sense of self? What is the problem with the ‘now’? What is meant to be the benefit of this degree of hard-heartedness? After all, the narrator of My Night at Maud’s is a hero to his own mathematical smugness, Adrien uses other people and refuses to relate to them, and Jérôme is so blind that he cannot see that he is not so much a character in a story about Laura and Claire as, quite possibly, of absolutely no long term interest to them whatsoever. Fréderic ends up imprisoned in duty by a panic that he will elevate to the status of conscience. As Rohmer says, his characters see themselves as Don Quixote in a novel, ‘but perhaps there isn’t any novel’ (Rohmer 1980: viii). That is a modesty that none of these men can possibly admit. But why can’t they?

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Quite simply, were they to admit that they are open to influence by the circumstantial, each of these men would also be required to concede that they are not sufficient unto themselves, and that the empirical is not sufficient for them. They would all have to allow the ‘now’ to puncture their hard-hearted vanity and pride, and thus experience the threat of humiliation that follows on from an admission of dependency. All of them have attempted to subordinate the circumstantial to their own self as either a mathematician, paragon of virtue, character in a story or escapee from the bourgeoisie, and they all depart with some measure of confidence that they have been successful in off-loading responsibility for what they themselves have done unto others (due to the alleged certainties of the laws of probability, indifference, the story written by another, flight masquerading as conscience). But in this way they are missing out on the chance that they might glimpse an irruption of grace. According to Pascal, ‘when our individual will is thwarted, our self-love wounded, and our ordinary complacent relationship with ourselves shattered, we are most open to the irruption of God’s otherness – that is, to grace’ (Moriarty 2003: 157). The men who feature so strongly in the Moral Tales have neither capacity nor desire to open themselves up to the chance of grace because ultimately they fail to see beyond their own hard-heart’s desire for diversion. Only Fréderic might gain the slightest glimpse, but he runs away from it in fear (but what is he running away from, and to what does he run? Hélène or Chloe?). For the most part it is indeed in diversion that the characters seek the real, and thus they ignore Pascal’s claim that ‘It is not from yourselves that you should expect grace; but, on the contrary, it is in expecting nothing from yourselves, that you must hope for it’ (Pascal 1931: 141). In the end then, and despite all their hard-heartedness, because they refuse to accept the possibilities of the circumstantial ‘now’ the heroes of the Moral Tales are all similarly without hope. Perhaps Fréderic is quite literally the most hopeless of them all. Yet only the audience can see this. Once again the point is that Rohmer’s work requires engagement and an effort of interpretation rather than passive watching or abstract philosophising. The audience is required to think through the implications of the inability of the characters in the films to see the possibilities that might or might not be within the circumstantial. This also means that the audience is required to interpret the meaning of these characters. Are they cautionary studies of hard-heartedness or just warnings to those who might be inclined towards vanity and self-satisfaction? Maybe that is the hermeneutic question that is put before the audience of the Moral Tales,

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but there is a deeper and considerably more devastating question to be considered too. Even though the suspense is of a very different order and kind, Rohmer’s Moral Tales deal with much the same paradox as he and Chabrol identified in Hitchcock. The nub of the matter is that all of the men in the Moral Tales are able to return to the original woman to whom they were allegedly committed. They have all enjoyed the thrill of a kind of ‘hare chase’ and, it would appear, got away with it (Fréderic excepted perhaps). This is the Hitchcockian moment, in that all of these men consequently ‘profit from evil’. The characters themselves are too hard-hearted to see this, and so it is left to the audience to deal with the task of glimpsing the awful chance that even when we might think that we are good, nevertheless just like Fréderic, ‘it is evil from which we profit’ (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979: 78). Consequently, the ultimate question that is posed by the Moral Tales is far beyond the series itself. Indeed it is far beyond cinema and goes to the heart of ethics and theology. The question with which Rohmer leaves the audience is one about how we all need to deal with the problem that we can be saved from humiliation if we close ourselves in routine and deliberately misrepresent the circumstantial, and if we can off-load responsibility for our own actions. Ultimately the question is about what we do with the knowledge that we might all profit – and have been profiteers – from evil.

Conclusion Of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Rohmer and Chabrol (but it was probably just Rohmer) wrote: ‘Each gesture, each thought, each material or moral being, is the depository of a secret capable of explaining everything: and this light dispenses as much fear as comfort’ (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979: 112). The narrative of each instalment in the series of Moral Tales concentrates on the fear that emerges as soon as this possibility is glimpsed and, moreover, as soon as it is appreciated that the gestures, thoughts and material or moral beings to which Rohmer and Chabrol refer might well be encountered only circumstantially, or at least not according to any guiding thread that can be known in the empirical world or guaranteed by it. What the men in the films seek to do is hide their fear away through resort to a strategy that rescues their self-confidence, selfsatisfaction, or in the case of Fréderic dream-destroying duty, from the threat of being humiliated by the circumstantial. The profit of this approach is that it defends the hard-heart and protects empirical pride

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and vanity, and yet its cost is a blindness to the unseen but potentially visible. In the end these are all men who are trapped within themselves and who will probably never refuse the diversions of a ‘hare chase’; after all, according to their own lights, why ought they to give up a potential pleasure? Meanwhile the audience is engaged to do the work of identifying and recovering from ignorance those gestures, thoughts and material and moral beings that might provide comfort and which might instantiate the immanent unseen. The audience consequently becomes not just the interpreter of the film but also something like its main protagonist. Precisely because the male characters in the films are so blind, the audience is encouraged to carry out a work of interpretation that is guided by the possibility that while grace is certainly in the world, the disposition to see it might be refined by attention to its potential irruption in an impeccably realist film. The audience is enjoined to begin to see.

4 Comedies and Proverbs: Dislocation and Love

Pascal wrote: ‘Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier’s servant, a cook, a porter brags, and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them’ (Pascal 1931: 46). Many film-makers want to have admirers too, and by the time Rohmer had come to the conclusion of the series of Moral Tales, he was lauded and applauded by those who knew his work. He had his admirers. The audiences for the films were becoming larger and prize committees at film festivals were beginning to take note of Rohmer. The temptation towards vanity must have been considerable, yet given his deliberate and systematic hiding of the body of the film-maker behind the body of the work, it is perhaps unsurprising that Rohmer evidently went to great lengths to do precisely the opposite of what his new-found admirers would have expected. The Moral Tales were all similar, thanks to their narrative structure, frequently their visual appearance and their location in the empirical everyday. It would not have been unreasonable to identify Rohmer as a film-maker with only one theme that could be varied in many ways until boredom became overwhelming for either him or his audience. Judging by the Moral Tales at least, Rohmer was a rather narrow film-maker ploughing a single furrow for all that it could give. His skill was that the ploughing produced such a rich crop. To continue to plough the same field would have been the way to success, but also to the temptation of vanity. It would have been predictable. So, riding the wave of the success of the Moral Tales, Rohmer spent the nine years after the release of Love in the Afternoon in 1972 doing more or less the opposite of what most people probably presumed and perhaps even wanted of him. During this period he made only two full-length features, and in their own ways they were both a little peculiar: The Marquise of O in 1975 with its almost canvas-like mise en scène and 108

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1979’s Perceval, with it metal trees, skewed perspectives and extremely mannered acting style. It is also worth noting that The Marquise of O remains as one of the two of his films in which Rohmer appears as a character (he is a bemused army officer); the other is Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, in which Rohmer appears as a man in a supermarket. Alongside these two period pieces Rohmer made a couple of four-part series for French television in the middle of the 1970s: one on the history of French cinema and the other on architecture, but through the course of the decade his emergent interest was the theatre. In 1979 he directed an adaptation of Kleist’s Katherin von Heilbronn for the stage in Nanterre, but as with Rohmer’s early films and, indeed, Perceval, the play was a commercial disaster (Crisp 1988: 88). Crisp comments that when he was working on Perceval, ‘Rohmer had haunted the theatres ... and emphasizes the pleasure which he experienced in coming to appreciate the techniques of acting and of staging in the theatre’. Crisp notes that the pleasures of the theatre are rather a long way from the guiding principles that the New Wave upheld and with which it had become associated (Crisp 1988: 87–8). Yet this was the direction in which Rohmer, the arch-realist, seemed to be moving. It is not at all fanciful to suggest that there is something Pascalian about Rohmer breaking out from the kind of work for which he was best known. But when he looked back at the 1970s his own explanation for the move away from the sort of work typified by the Moral Tales was very straightforward. The hint is that he turned to theatre, and by extension to the period film, precisely because he had become aware of the limitations associated with the strictures of cinematic realism, or at least with how those strictures were becoming established in the styles and methods of others. Rohmer said, ‘My interest in the theatre came from a certain lack of enthusiasm for the raw documentary. A certain type of film-making like that of the New Wave went to the limits and has found its logical continuation in television’. Realist ontology in the cinema had, for the time being at least, become constraining and, in fact, an obstacle in the way of film being an invitation to pay close attention to the world ‘out there’. Realism was almost becoming an end in itself, not a means to an end, as it had always been for Rohmer. He continued with a comment that might be read as a critique of Robert Bresson: ‘We are no longer impressed by someone who speaks as they would in real life because, at one point, actors thought they had to act’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). The distance that Rohmer sought to establish between himself and Bresson was made even clearer when he remarked that the period films ‘and my recent experience with the

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theater have given me a taste for acting. I think that the kind of barrier that has been put up between theater and cinema (and that some people, like Bresson, persist in maintaining) hasn’t any meaning anymore’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 221). This is an interesting comment and, at first glance, one that is hard to reconcile with Rohmer’s professed realism. Part of the point of theatre – however realist any given production might possibly be – is that it is an artifice and always known to be so by its audience. To this extent, it could even be argued that theatre is susceptible to exactly the same attack that Pascal made against art. He said that painting was useless because it merely distracts the viewer from the splendour of that which it represents, and this was a position that Rohmer had supported in an article that was published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1951 under the name of Maurice Scherer: ‘Art does not change nature ... Such vanity is painting, which has given up telling the world to exist according to its laws. But the truth is that things are as they are, regardless of how we see them’ (Rohmer 1989: 44; compare Pascal 1931: 38). How then can the turn to theatre be reconciled with Rohmer’s realism? The answer is to be found in his development of Pascal’s dictum on art. For Pascal, art takes the audience away from Creation, but for Rohmer: ‘Art’s task is not to enclose us in a sealed world. Born of the world, it brings us back to it’ (Rohmer 1989: 44). If this argument is extended, it leads to the conclusion that Rohmer could reconcile theatre and realism on the grounds that however obviously an artifice it might be, theatre can take the audience back to the world from and in which it is born, so that the external ‘out there’ might be seen more clearly. By this argument, the task of theatre as a stage and performance is nothing less than to explode the walls of the theatre as a building and institution. That explosion does not lead to an embrace of street theatre (although films like The Sign of Leo and Rendezvous in Paris do have an attraction towards the street entertainers of the Parisian popular), but rather it implies a new attention towards others and a revaluation of personal being in the world. This is precisely what happens to Félicie in Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale (1992) when she watches a performance of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and, surprised, remarks that on the stage, ‘I saw my thoughts’. Such is the aesthetic and ontological premise that almost certainly underpins Rohmer’s contention that there is no barrier between theatre and cinema and, also, his view that there is a cultural expectation that actors act. Theatrical acting might involve overstatement and declamatory speech of a kind that is completely out of sympathy with

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the dramaturgical realism of the Moral Tales, but that presents no insurmountable problem whatsoever. After all, if overstatement on the stage leads the audience back to the real world of men and women in their material surroundings, or as in the case of Félicie to a better understanding of themselves, then it has been hyperbole in the service of realism. It has also been hyperbole in the service of Creation in that it will encourage the audience to begin to look and see. (To this extent it is significant that Félicie comments that on the stage she saw her thoughts.) Consequently, whereas cinematic realism is taken by Rohmer to consist in the possibility of showing the external world as it is (a possibility that is due to, but not determined by, the technological possibilities of cameras and film stock in that they can show the world and also achieve what no other art can; they are able to show the event in the dimension of time), the theatre is a valid form to the extent that it aims ‘not to imitate but to signify’ (Rohmer 1989: 46). In this way, theatrical style is defensible because it gestures firmly beyond its own signifying practices and strategies, and inescapably points instead towards the signified that is always ‘out there’. Put another way, theatrical style is valid to the extent that it explodes the theatre. This is a dialectical position then, in which the theatre is necessary precisely to the extent that it can point beyond itself. Consequently, without theatre as performance and style it would be all the harder to see what it signifies. It is clear from interviews that Rohmer’s dealings with the theatre operated in more or less exactly this way, since they took him back to a concern with the real. One commentator has spoken about a concern on Rohmer’s part to ‘reconcile theatre and film through realist means’ (Schilling 2005: 342). As such it is possible to explain an otherwise contradictory remark of Rohmer’s. He once said that the attraction of the theatre emerged because, by contrast to the ‘real’ speech of realist cinema, ‘I was drawn by something a little more stylised, a kind of expression not as close to the platitude of everyday life. At the same time, I never left the natural element in my theatrical experience. I’ve always refused theatrical oratory’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). It is worth noting that the critique of Bresson reappears in this remark, but more important things are happening too. On the one hand then, theatre offered Rohmer a way of working around the constraints of the cinematic ontology to which he had been always committed, but was now beginning to wonder if it might be better suited to television (Ziolkowski 1982: 64). Meanwhile, on the other hand, it was possible to be both theatrical and naturalistic because of the expectation that actors act and, moreover, act in a certain way.

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Acting has become a cultural reality, but the situation for Rohmer is that the acting has to be ‘real’. This is almost certainly the reason why Rohmer continued – and continues – to use less experienced and even amateur actors in his films. They act but they are also real. Indeed it is possible very clearly to see the difference between an experienced actor and inexperienced acting, if Rohmer’s Rendezvous in Paris (1995) is compared with Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset of 2004. The films are also worth comparing because they both centre on the conversations of characters wandering around Paris. Rohmer’s inexperienced actors have an immediacy and hesitance that lends them veracity, whereas in Linklater’s film Julie Delpy almost appears as if she is acting the part of an actress in a Rohmer film. Her way of speaking is ever so slightly too precise and oratorical even as it intends to be relaxed, her mannerisms are ever so slightly too forced, her performance deliberate in such a way that it is impossible ever to forget that she is a major actress. In Linklater’s movie one is always watching Julie Delpy, in a way that one is not even in as artificial a film as Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White, in which she plays the part of Dominique (a hairdresser, just like Félicie in A Winter’s Tale. Charlotte Véry, who also appears in Three Colours: Blue, plays the role of Félicie with exquisite tentativeness). For this reason, Rohmer’s characters are ones with whom it is possible to enter into a relationship, and Linklater’s are simply to be watched and maybe admired for the quality of the performance. The problem in Linklater’s film is that the obvious style of acting is little more than a signifier of stardom, and in Rohmer’s movie the discrete and tentative style of acting signifies the signified of men and women in their surroundings outside of filmic space, in the ‘real’ world ‘out there’. Rohmer’s interest in theatrical acting clearly feeds into The Marquise of O and Perceval (and probably it is the basis of no small part of the oddity of both of those films; theatrical acting does not always translate too well to cinema). But given Rohmer’s understanding of theatre as a signifier that gestures back to the signified, it is not surprising that these experiences enabled him to return to his cinematic conventions: ‘After this experience in the theater I wanted once again to show people as they speak every day’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). And the return to cinema was also a move by a refreshed director because ‘The Marquise of O, Perceval and my recent experience with the theater have given me a taste for acting’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 221). With what then did Rohmer return to the cinema? It was with a series that at once combined the kind of realism that is familiar from the Moral Tales, with an acting style that is frequently more theatrical but

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which never seems to be too overwhelming (except deliberately). Between 1981 and 1987 Rohmer released his six-part series of Comedies and Proverbs, with one film appearing every year during this period. The series title itself betrays a theatrical debt. The Comtesse de Ségur had used the phrase Comedies and Proverbs as the title for a collection of stories, but Alfred de Musset had also used it for a series of plays. Indeed, Rohmer’s allusion to Musset was not the first time that the nineteenthcentury writer had been taken up in the world of French film. Musset’s play Les Caprices de Marianne was the inspiration for La Règle du jeu by Jean Renoir, a director whom Rohmer has always rated incredibly highly (Rohmer 1989: 173–99). However, the exact debt that Rohmer owed to Musset is unclear or, at least, made deliberately unclear by Rohmer himself. When he was asked whether there was a link between his and Musset’s Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer replied: ‘Yes, there is. That is, just as you have Moral Tales as a title that already existed ... you have Proverbs that are a traditional genre’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 219). Rohmer locates his own work in the tradition of French literature, but at the same time presents his own contribution as original. Rohmer’s six-film series opened with The Aviator’s Wife in 1981, and continued with A Good Marriage (1982), Pauline at the Beach (1983), Full Moon in Paris (1984), and The Green Ray (1986). It concluded with My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend in 1987. The opening titles for each film gives the proverb that the ensuing story will either take apart or have as a warning sign hanging above the characters, even though they remain blithely ignorant of it. It is worth quoting each proverb, because in that way it is also possible to provide a summary of the films’ stories. The Aviator’s Wife is based on the proverb (that might well be made up by Rohmer, but which also points to an everyday Descartes) that ‘One can’t think of nothing’. The film focuses on the relationship of Anne, a moody twenty-something, and François, her rather puppyish younger lover. He knows that she once had a relationship with an airline pilot, and early one morning he sees the pilot leave Anne’s flat. François follows the pilot, who meets another woman, and as François carries out his detective work he teams up with Lucie, a teenager he encounters on a bus. The film is about how François leaps to the conclusion that Anne is back with the pilot, and how he and Lucie try to discover what the pilot and the other woman are up to. Throughout the film, Anne, François and Lucie, all attempt to deal with their confusions by thinking of something, anything, that might enable them to make some kind of sense of their world and their relationships. In the film itself, the proverb is explicitly referred to towards the end when

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François is talking with Anne and trying to keep secret from her his encounter with Lucie. As Crisp says, ‘Rohmer manages to suggest that the “nothing” which François is thinking about in his moment of ... clarity ... is precisely that web of overt and covert relationships, and the conflicting stories which each of the characters has fabricated ... about those relationships’ (Crisp 1988: 94). A Good Marriage explores La Fontaine’s question: ‘Can any of us refrain from building castles in Spain?’ Obviously this proverb refers to the day-dreams in which we all indulge and which we seek to impose upon the world and others, despite and perhaps even in spite of their refusal entirely to fit in with what we have planned for them. The castle builder is Sabine, who breaks off her affair with Simon, seemingly in a moment of pique when he interrupts their love making to take a phone call from his children. She gets out of bed and tells Simon that she is going to get married. This is an act of pure will on her part, and it is made even though Sabine has no idea who her future husband will be. At a party she is introduced to the lawyer Edmond and decides that he will become her husband. The tragicomedy of the film focuses on Sabine’s attempts to deal with Edmond’s obvious indifference (if not in fact panic when he realises what is going on), and how Sabine’s determination to subordinate the world to her plan of a good marriage means that she misses the possibility that her true partner is regularly sitting near to her on the train. The film is then a cautionary tale, and is proposing that castles in Spain ought not to blind their builders to the world in which they live. The third film in the series, Pauline at the Beach, takes as its proverb Chrétien de Troyes’ aphorism that ‘A wagging tongue bites itself’. The tongue belongs to either Marion, who is so obsessed by an ideal of love as a burning passion that she falls into bed with more or less the first man who comes along, or it belongs to Henri, Marion’s holiday love, who is two-timing her. Neither character finds what they are looking for, probably because they do not really know what they want. In the end they just leave, almost certainly none the wiser about themselves or, for that matter, anything else. But present throughout the story is Marion’s cousin, the teenage Pauline, who watches the duplicity and delusions of the purported adults with astonishment but, also, a certain melancholy that follows from the knowledge that one day she will be just like them. This film is the most obvious comedy in the series, and owes more than a little to eighteenth-century farces by the likes of Marivaux. Indeed, his ghost can be found throughout the series, not just in this film: ‘Marivaux’s criss-cross plots are masked dances,

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impersonations of status, role, identity; emphases that persist in French plotting through Renoir’s La Règle du jeu ... to Rohmer’ (Durgnat 1990: 188). In many ways, Pauline is the counterpoint to Lucie in The Aviator’s Wife. Pauline appears to be all too aware that her future is represented by the idiotic adults with whom she has to spend her holiday, while Lucie lacks that kind of reflexivity and simply finds everything intriguing and absurd. Lucie does something that Pauline never does; she smiles and laughs, a lot. Full Moon in Paris is guided by the argument that ‘He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind’. This proverb is given the somewhat vague attribution of being a French country saying, and it applies to Louise. She lives in the new satellite town of Marne la Vallée with her boyfriend Rémi, but feels that she is missing out on the opportunities that Paris has to offer. Consequently, Louise decides to split her time between the house with Rémi, and her pied-à-terre in Paris. Louise has two homes and, as the proverb has it, loses her mind. Louise’s plan is that she will be able to enjoy quiet domesticity in the suburbs and the life of the single woman in the city, but she finds only loneliness, and forgets that Rémi has a life of his own. At the end of the film Louise decides to return to living with her boyfriend, only to discover that he has started a relationship with someone else. Crisp is right to see Full Moon in Paris as a ‘tale of heartlessness and self-deception’ (Crisp 1988: 103). It has no entirely likeable character, and each is utterly self-absorbed in one way or another, even by the standards of the self-absorbed characters of the series. The Green Ray is prefaced by a quotation from Rimbaud: ‘Ah! Let the time come when hearts are enamoured’. The friend with whom she was going to go on holiday has stood up Delphine, and so she has to make her own plans. But it is clear that for Delphine the holiday will only be a success if it also brings her the true love that she desires. She tries a number of different holiday options, but all of them are unsatisfactory, although whether Delphine is disappointed by the place or herself is an open question, to say the least. Finally she goes to Biarritz where she hears an old man telling a story to a group of women about the meaning of the green ray. This is the last ray of the sun as it sets, but it can only be seen in certain very specific conditions. According to a story by Jules Verne, if it is seen it gives an insight into true feelings. At the end of the film Delphine, who has spent a day with Jacques, a cabinet-maker she met at the railway station sits on the wall of the promenade, hugging him closely. She looks out to the sunset and, at the last ray, gasps. She believes that she has seen the green ray and that this

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man is, for her, the man. But has she seen the green ray? Is this a film of well-placed hope or self-delusion? Will the relationship of Delphine and Jacques endure, or will they go their separate ways when they return to the railway station, as they must? Finally, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend is a kind of comedy based on the well-worn proverb: ‘My friend’s friends are my friends’. The film opens by introducing each character in their work setting, and it is hard not to see a virtual pastiche of the opening credits of a television soap opera in this method (that Rohmer has never used since and, in his entire body of work can only be compared – and then rather loosely – to the prologues of La Collectionneuse). There is something Dallas-esque about it. The film is set in the sterile satellite town of Cergy-Pontoise, and concentrates on Blanche. She is successful in her career, but lonely in love and seeking a partner. Yet the only men she meets are already in relationships, and those with her friends. Blanche sets her sights on Alexandre, but when her girlfriend Léa goes away on holiday, Blanche spends time with her boyfriend, Fabien. Blanche and Fabien convince themselves that they have fallen in love with one another, but Blanche refuses to take things further because Fabien is her girlfriend’s boyfriend. Blanche decides that the relationship can only proceed if Léa is told, yet when Léa arrives at the rendezvous, she is with Alexandre. The four have now entered into two couples, and after some embarrassment, they laugh together. The film ends on a freeze frame although, as Ennis remarks, ‘We know that when the action resumes, the games will continue’ (Ennis 1993: 127). According to Rohmer the idea for the series came to him when he was working on Perceval: ‘A new way of composing a story presented itself to me; a new structure became evident’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 63). This new way of composing a story consisted in the quotation of a proverb, and then seeing it play out in the relationships and behaviour of typically Rohmerian micro-groups of relatively young and eloquent men and women in the spaces and places of the ‘now’. Consequently, the Comedies and Proverbs are nothing less than comedies of manners or, perhaps more precisely, comedies of the heart. That is to say, if they are comedies at all. Each film revolves around a question of love and it is clear that the series was pretty well thought out at the very outset. As early as 1982, Rohmer was already aware that ‘my proverbs will always be false ones or those taken against the grain. I don’t believe in proverbs anymore than did Alfred de Musset’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 64). The new structure to which Rohmer referred in his comments about the series was clearly indebted to the theatre. Indeed, he was quite clear that ‘The fact that I call these films “comedies” and not “tales” shows

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that the connection with the theater is more specific’ than it was for the Moral Tales, which drew instead on literature (Rohmer in Hammond 1982: 220). Rohmer said that the films would be ‘divided into acts, but that’s all the theater there will be’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 220–1). Well, that is not entirely the case. There are other debts to the theatre. First, there is the matter of the acting style. To be sure, this rule does not apply to every character in each film, but some of the performances in the Comedies and Proverbs are obviously indebted to theatrical styles. The most overt example is Arielle Dombasle as Marion in Pauline at the Beach, but when Marie Rivière plays Anne in The Aviator’s Wife, it is as if her small flat is a stage with its sole furnishing being the bed that is pushed close against a wall angling over it, pressing in. Anne is almost like a character out of Zola or, more appropriately perhaps, Balzac. There is also a theatrical bombast about Sabine (played by Béatrice Romand) in A Good Marriage. Furthermore there are two narrative senses in which the films in the series can be interpreted as being rather like plays on the stage. First, Rohmer himself suggested that the series was infused with ‘the spirit of social games’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 219). The playing of these social games is, of course, a dominant theme in the comedies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the opera of Mozart and Rossini that was inspired by Beaumarchais. Ennis notes that after the completion of the series of Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer made a programme for French television on traditional parlour games such as Blindman’s Bluff, and he sees traces of such pastimes in the films (Ennis 1993: 121). According to Ennis, The Aviator’s Wife is a game of detectives (although it might also be identified as a version of hide and seek); A Good Marriage is a game of patience on the part of Sabine and a warning of the perils that follow from playing one’s hand too hastily; Pauline at the Beach is all about role playing, especially on the part of Marion; Full Moon in Paris is about the games that Louise plays to increase Rémi’s desire, although she forgets that he is not playing by her rules alone; The Green Ray is not about game playing as such but features playing cards at key moments (Ennis 1993: 122) and it could be proposed that the quotation from Rimbaud that is the proverb for the film points to the film being about patience. But Ennis focuses particularly on My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend and argues that it is a variation on the theme of the parlour game Les Quatre Coins, ‘a game involving five players, four of whom take up positions at the corners of a square. The fifth participant remains outside and attempts to occupy a corner while the others move around’ (Ennis 1993: 122). The careful choreography and

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occasional mismeeting that happens during all of this moving around provides the fun of the game, and it is a fairly accurate way of understanding the manoeuvres of Adrienne and Alexandre, Léa and Fabien, and the outsider Blanche, as they all move from partner to partner, always leaving one out. Second, there is a curtaining of the action. This is clearest in Pauline at the Beach. In the opening scene, Marion and Pauline arrive at the closed gates of their holiday cottage. Pauline gets out of the car and opens the gates. Marion drives through. In the final scene Marion and Pauline are leaving. Marion drives through the open gates, and Pauline closes them. Consequently, the first and last frame of the film is the same. They are both of the closed gates to the holiday cottage where the story begins to unfold and comes to be unfolded. It is impossible not to see the gates as a deliberate allusion to the curtains that open and shut during a theatrical performance (and unfortunately they are more than a little reminiscent of the opening titles of the 1960s French children’s television series Hector’s House). The Aviator’s Wife is topped and tailed with François, Anne’s younger boyfriend, at the post office where he works nights. Circularity also features in A Good Marriage and Full Moon in Paris. In the first case Sabine fails to notice the same rather foppish man who sits near to her on the train, and who most certainly notices her. In the latter case meanwhile, the film ends and begins with shots of the desolate new town in which Louise lives and lived with Rémi. Louise is shown walking to the railway station to go into Paris, although the intervening story entails that the resonance of each of these images is radically different. The circularity means that the films often present a closed narrative, and yet, even where the end is not identical with the beginning, the audience is always required and called upon to carry out the work of interpretation that runs as a guiding thread through Rohmer’s production. The narrative might sometimes be circular and closed, but the film itself is radically open. This is because there is a total absence of the kind of retrospective narration that featured, at least at the outset, in the Moral Tales. For Crisp this is another sign of the debt that the 1980s series owes to theatre (Crisp 1988: 88), while Rohmer himself argued that the absence of narration highlights the difference between the Comedies and Proverbs and the Moral Tales, and he proposes that it means that ‘we’ll follow the main character from one end to the other, but we won’t necessarily identify with him –or at least we won’t imagine that all that the story could be in the first person’ (Rohmer 1982: 220). This point about the film not being in the first person became increasingly

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significant by the time that Rohmer came to the end of the series, although its implications are much clearer in A Summer’s Tale (1996) where it is actually not at all self-evident who is the main character. According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image proposed by the camera’ (Crisp 1988: 88). But what this objection misses is that the absence adds a measure of complexity to attitudes towards the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs. There might well be less identification with the characters in this series than there was in the Moral Tales, but there is certainly more engagement with them. They become much less ironic than their counterparts in the Moral Tales, and the audience is left instead to come to terms with these characters who are frequently irritating (Anne in The Aviator’s Wife and Delphine in The Green Ray must be two of the more annoying heroines of recent films) but who are perhaps all the more human precisely because they are stuck in an empirical situation about which they have only incomplete knowledge yet in which they seek to stumble across the ‘real life’ for which they so deeply yearn. Whereas the encounter with the characters in the Moral Tales is largely abstract identification, that with the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs is much more engagingly compassionate (this is the catch of a loss of identification; the characters are always other, and therefore they can be the subjects of an empathetic engagement), for the simple reason that they are seen to make mistakes and embarrassing leaps of faith, and are inclined to take as destiny what is in fact only an accident, in a world from which they can never escape. Unlike the retrospective narrators, who imposed a false certainty and confidence on the story of the Moral Tales, the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs do not know what is going to happen next, and neither does the audience. Taken overall, what the Comedies and Proverbs do is focus on a range of characters and take them through an experience that leads them to the threshold of – what? – Maturity, failure, insight, disappointment, happiness? Will they come to live a real life, or will they always feel as if they are trapped within the emptiness and disillusion of the empirical? Rohmer is sufficiently lacking in didactic intent and certain of his audience not to answer those questions. Yet that is also the basis upon which there is a good chance of compassion towards these characters. Their very confusion and the annoyance that they cause lend them a

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measure of all-too-human fragility, that is itself a reflection of the possibility that they are not strong enough to bear the weight of the story that is loaded upon their shoulders. In short, the Comedies and Proverbs can be identified as Rohmer’s version of tales of sentimental education. The problem is that the characters steadfastly confuse their sentimental education with their sentiments (especially love), and so there is good cause to wonder whether they could ever move beyond the threshold to which the film takes them. To this extent, it is possible to identify a paradox in the structure of the Comedies and Proverbs. They are indebted to theatrical style and form, and yet their motif, the sentimental education, is from the literature of Flaubert. Indeed there is another way in which Flaubert haunts the series, because it is not at all unreasonable to propose that the heroines of the films are all the daughters of Emma Bovary. The relationship between Rohmer’s heroines and Emma is one of the questions to be explored in this chapter. But before that matter is tackled it is pertinent to consider the theme of dislocation that is recurrent in the series.

Place and dislocation Rohmer’s turn to period films and the theatre in the 1970s followed on from the increasingly problematic relationship with Paris that can be charted through the course of the Moral Tales. Whether it was due to the events of 1968 or more immediate issues is not clear, but it is obvious that Rohmer found dealings with the French capital to be becoming less and less easy. In an interview that was published when the series of Comedies and Proverbs was just getting underway, Rohmer remarked that ‘The love of Paris had a lot to do with the return to a contemporary subject matter. The disaffection I felt for Paris at one point was the reason for my historical films’ (Rohmer in Ziolkowski 1982: 65). The disaffection grew through the 1960s. It is very noticeable that the confident students of the early Moral Tales are replaced in the end with the small-time flânerie of Fréderic in Love in the Afternoon, although in the way that his dreams are perpetually tripped up and trapped by the reality of the city and its inhabitants he does rather anticipate the frustrated heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs. Paris makes an overt return to Rohmer’s work in the first of the Comedies and Proverbs, The Aviator’s Wife, but now the city has been transformed somewhat. No longer merely a setting or playground, now it is a place of mystery and intrigue. It is, in fact, more Hitchcockian. Rohmer might well have always loved Paris, but this was an affair that

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had been going through a bad patch and in the 1980s it still needed stitching back together. Everything had become right by the time Rendezvous in Paris appeared, but in retrospect The Aviator’s Wife rather looks like the first moves towards a reconciliation. Albeit for different reasons, neither François nor Lucie is entirely at home in the city. They act like detectives and both participate in ‘fashioning the phantasmagoria of Parisian life’ (Benjamin 1983: 41). They do this by attempting to impose a logical narrative on otherwise banal events. In so doing, François and Lucie invest the pilot and the woman he accompanies around the parks and offices of Paris with a degree of mystery that the otherwise ordinary events of their day contradict. Indeed, it could be argued that the mystery of the pilot and woman is all the more compelling, and they are all the more intriguing, precisely because on the face of the matter they do absolutely nothing of note. They are mysterious precisely because they do nothing terribly mysterious except visit a solicitor. Or more exactly, the pilot and the woman are worth investigating because their individual traces are ‘obliterated’ ‘in the big-city crowd’ (Benjamin 1983: 43). According to Benjamin the possibility of this disappearance into the crowd is the social source of the genre of the detective novel that emerged in the nineteenth century. What the detective seeks to do is recover everything peculiar and individualising that the criminal wants to hide and have disappear in the crowd. And since every inhabitant of the city is also a member of the crowd, then she or he too is a potential criminal and worthy of investigation. Once again then, the fact that the pilot and the woman spend so long sitting together in the public spaces of the Buttes-Chaumont can be interpreted as the most compelling proof that they have something to hide. The reflexive failure of François and Lucie is, of course, that they fail to notice that exactly the same kind of logical constructions might be applied to themselves. Perhaps François only begins to glimpse this possibility when he tries to avoid telling Anne that he spent his afternoon with a teenage girl. Why is there this lack of reflexivity? Crisp gives one answer when he comments that the Comedies and Proverbs all emphasise ‘young people ... unhampered by moral torments, religious anxieties, philosophical reflections, or anything that might distance them from their own activities’. Crisp continues to say that ‘These young people are too absorbed in their experience to reflect on it at any length’ (Crisp 1988: 88–9). However, if the detective theme is followed, there is another way of explaining François and Lucie’s lack of reflexivity. Walter Benjamin contended that because the detective knows that what others see as his

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idleness is, instead, a cover for his close observation and hard work of attempting to construct a logical narrative for what he observes, he ‘sees rather wide areas opening up to his self-esteem. He develops forms of reaction that are in keeping with the pace of a big city. He catches things in flight; this enables him to dream that he is like an artist’ (Benjamin 1983: 41). François and Lucie lack in reflexivity because they are young but also, then, because their self-esteem is flattered all the time that they see without being seen. It is also worth noting that they both have ‘forms of reaction’ that enable them to carry on their observation. François leaps off a bus at a moment’s notice and Lucie can get tourists to take her photograph. François and Lucie might be lacking in reflexivity, but they are most certainly confident young metropolitans. The only challenge to their skills is presented by François’ tendency to fall asleep. After all he works nights as a sorter in the post office (it seems to turn out at the end of the film that his friend is Lucie’s boyfriend) and has not yet been able to go to bed. The attitude of the detective means that the surroundings in which they find themselves, whatever those surroundings are, can never be taken entirely for granted. The environment might offer clues to the mystery (and even the absence of a mystery can itself be mysterious, especially to the unconfident lover), while those who are espied need to be watched especially closely and carefully so that their secrets might never be allowed to disappear into the crowd and thus be lost forever. From all of this it follows that in The Aviator’s Wife, and therefore at the very beginning of the Comedies and Proverbs, Paris is not entirely home to the characters. The city is invariably a there much more than it is a here, as it was in the early Moral Tales, and as it came to be once again with Rendezvous in Paris. The theme of the there-ness and not the here-ness of Paris carries through to the last of the series of Comedies and Proverbs, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. There is a sense in which Paris for Adrienne, Blanche and Léa has the same attraction, because it seems so tangible and yet so far away, as Moscow had for Chekhov’s Olga, Masha and Irina. Paris is a place of culture in the form of art exhibitions and of excitement, for example a tennis tournament at Roland Garros. The metropolis acts as the magnetic opposite to the perfectly planned world of work and living that is the satellite town of Cergy-Pontoise, where the bulk of the film is set. In the film Paris is always shown in the distance, far away and yet so close, and the working lives of a number of the characters, especially Alexandre, all take their bearings from the capital. Paris is there. But what then of here?

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In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, here is a planned utopia that is utterly soulless. There is one especially chilling shot, from the window of Blanche’s apartment. She looks out to a perfectly symmetrical garden within the hemisphere of the semi-circular block, and there is not a person around. The scene is perfectly ordered and yet almost inhuman. It is tempting to compare this scene with the views out of Parisian windows that feature in some of Rohmer’s other films. From Parisian windows there is the chaos and noise of a changing city that is a more or less difficult setting in which men and women act, but the view from the window of Cergy-Pontoise is of a scene that is still, quiet, empty and quite dead. The public life that exists in the new satellite town revolves entirely around shopping, which is shown to be about the choice between consumer goods, whereas Rohmer invariably shows Parisian shopping to be a trap of one kind or another (witness the jumper incident in Love in the Afternoon); cafés that are a little too open, too orderly and light to permit the flux of their Parisian forebears; and leisure time pursuits around the lake. There is little or no spontaneous human interaction and, apart from the mismeetings that are the lessons in the sentimental education of the characters, there is little by way of the potential messiness of life that is typical of Paris. In an architectural, social and individual sense then, Cergy-Pontoise is a utopia that is here but, as if to illustrate the literal meaning of the word ‘utopia’, it is also and indubitably nowhere. However, the utopian nowhereness of the new satellite towns is implied with the most concision in Full Moon in Paris, when Louise is shown leaving the apartment she shares with Rémi in Marne la Vallée. In the establishing shot at the beginning of the film, the camera pans to the left across a piece of land that has not yet been built upon, and to the front door of the apartment building. The landscape is bleak and bereft of men and women, except in cars. At the end of the film the same open land is shown, as Louise walks back to the railway station after discovering that Rémi has found someone else. In the background lurks a group of men with a road sign that they are about to put up. The hint seems to be that Louise is leaving a satellite town that is about to become the kind of ‘somewhere’ that she so desperately wants to find, but that hitherto it has been another literal nowhere. The question is of course whether Marne la Vallée will merely turn out to be another literal utopia, just like Cergy-Pontoise. (It would be interesting to see how Rohmer would deal with Marne la Vallée today, now that it has become a very special commodified somewhere: Disneyland). In both Full Moon in Paris and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, here is nowhere and there is somewhere to be visited by train. But neither of those films

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actually shows a railway journey. The situation is very different in A Good Marriage. In this film railway journeys are of crucial significance. Sabine spends a lot of her time commuting between her family home and work in Le Mans, and her student flat and studies in Paris. Although she reads on trains, Sabine also tends to look vacantly out of the window. The hint is that she is not admiring the scenery so much as dreaming of castles in Spain where she will be happily married. Sabine has too much dead time (and in this way the train journeys of A Good Marriage anticipate the dead spaces of Full Moon in Paris and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend). As such, A Good Marriage complicates the here and there theme that is important in the Comedies and Proverbs. Whereas it is clear from the point of view of the new satellite towns that Paris is there and here is nowhere, Sabine lacks that clarity. She has a life of sorts in both Paris and Le Mans, and so when she is here a fundamental dimension of her life is absent because it is simultaneously there. As such, neither here nor there can offer the promise of any kind of satisfaction, since each has attractions that the other lacks. For example, when Sabine is in Le Mans, friends and family surround her, but they only act as brakes against her freewheeling dreams. But when she is in Paris, Sabine is invariably alone and desperately seeking to make contact with someone. Indeed, in this regard Sabine and Louise are siblings, because whenever they are in their flat alone they spend most of their time on the telephone or preparing to go out again. Yet even as they are virtually sisters Sabine and Louise are different. Louise deals with the problem of never being here through an almost hyperactive desire to be with people, whereas Sabine goes on train journeys there. The point is that the spatial compression that is made possible by transport like railways confuses distinctions between here and there. Or at least there is a confusion that can only be avoided if life remains spatially located in a way that it exactly does not for the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs. What has happened is that the spatial geography of France has contracted, as the means of transportation from place to place have improved and become quicker (Schivelbusch 1986: 35). Consequently, anywhere is inherently here and there at one and the same time. This in turn means that there can be no place of escape from the confusions that follow from the conflation of here and there. Neither can the problems that are associated with one place ever be entirely forgotten by the simple expedient of going on a journey somewhere else. Wherever they are in France, none of the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs ever completely leaves Paris even when it is there. The only way out of this paradox is to either stay in one place and never

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move, or orient one’s entire hopes and ambitions around a very restricted domestic sphere (as Louise attempts, and fails, to do in Full Moon in Paris). But then again, such location only has value because it is an avoidance of the shuttling between here and there, and so the problem of dislocation is restated even in its erstwhile denial. Indeed, movement between here and there is a central theme in the Comedies and Proverbs. Admittedly, as the series progressed and as Rohmer’s relationship with Paris became more complex, the Moral Tales increasingly stressed travel, but the Comedies and Proverbs are dominated by it. In addition to the train journeys that are implicit or explicit in A Good Marriage, Full Moon in Paris and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, a bus journey changes the course of The Aviator’s Wife. But the Comedies and Proverbs also emphasise another kind of movement, another kind of journeying. The series is overwhelmed by holidays. An unseen holiday is central to the story of My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (because it results in the colour coordinated pairings with which the film ends), but the whole story of Pauline at the Beach and The Green Ray is structured around vacations. To this extent, there is something of a continuity with the Moral Tales in as far as La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee both recount stories of holidays too. Given the virtually exclusive focus on micro-social groups that runs through Rohmer’s work, it is unsurprising that when his characters go on holiday they tend to do so either as individuals or in small familial groups. Rohmer’s holidays always take place in France, and are never dependent on tour companies to put them together. As Ewa Mazierska notes: ‘Rohmer’s characters come to their chosen location unassisted, without the help of a travel agent, not because as model travellers they seek adventure, and want to get lost in a new place, but, on the contrary, because they know the place so well that they do not need any guides’ (Mazierska 2002: 227). Typically then, they tend to stay in holiday cottages that are owned by either friends or family. As such even though Rohmer’s holidays often feature exactly the kinds of French seaside resorts that Jacques Tati made rather well known, not Pauline, not Marion, Delphine or any other Rohmer character ever stays in a hotel like Monsieur Hulot. Rohmer’s characters might be on holiday but they are always here too (or always-already there as well). If then Rohmer’s characters go on holiday to places that they already know very well, why do they go? What are they looking for if it is not for new places to explore, new people to meet? Mazierska provides the answer when she argues that what Rohmer’s characters seek is ‘genuine and lasting human contact’ (Mazierska 2002: 227). In other words, the

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characters move from their everyday here, which is confronted more in terms of its absences as opposed to its possibilities, to a special there, in which the hope is to find everything that the here lacks. To this extent, characters like Pauline, Marion and Delphine are all cut of the same cloth as Sabine and Louise. The problem however is whether the vacationers are capable of actually appreciating ‘genuine and lasting human contact’ if they find it. In Pauline at the Beach Marion distorts everything because her desire to ‘burn’ with true love means that she refuses to see that it is rather banally right in front of her, in the form of the repeatedly rejected Pierre. Meanwhile in The Green Ray Delphine is desperate to have a holiday companion, but when she is on vacation with a friend and her family near Cherbourg (there are no umbrellas), she does nothing but whine and go for solitary walks. John Fawell is right to call Delphine a ‘monstrous egotist’ who is ‘frightened by people and she justifies her inability to make friends by a Byronic self-affirmation of solitude and nature worship’ (Fawell 1993: 781). When all is said and done Delphine is from the city, and she proves herself to be remarkably ill equipped for the nature worship she claims to enjoy. ‘She is looking for something in nature that she cannot find. She reaches an extraordinary mountain view but does not know what to do with it. She just stares listlessly ... The various summer vistas she visits offer no consolation, only a heightened sense of her loneliness and sterility’ (Fawell 1993: 784). In Rohmer’s films holidays are not to be taken lightly. They are deadly serious. It is unsurprising then that the vacations of the likes of Marion and, probably, Delphine (after all, at the end she believes herself to have found the genuine contact she has been pining for), are rarely terribly successful. The point is though that there is no reason to imagine that the likes of these characters will ever learn anything from their experiences. It is improbable that there has been any sentimental education of Marion or Delphine because, as they will doubtless explain to themselves when they recall what the audience has witnessed, it was just a holiday romance. Their self-deception will be quite literally endless. That is to say, they will deceive themselves that actually it all meant nothing, unless they allow themselves the resigned clarity of Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau and admit the possibility that it was, in fact, the happiest time of their life. But why do the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs have this weakness of not being able to accept, or perhaps even understand, what they want so much? The answer to that question that runs through the whole series is that the characters are fundamentally incapable of

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satisfaction, or indeed of ever knowing if they have got what they always thought they wanted, because their lives are radically without a centre. For example, although Sabine wants so desperately to be married, when she meets an old friend who is happily married, and who invites her back to his flat, she is openly dismissive, maybe even contemptuous, of domestic solidity. Just as Marion wants a passionate love that burns, probably because she has never experienced it, so Sabine believes that marriage will be all wine and roses because she, too, does not really know what she is talking about. Because their lives have no centre, neither can they ever be fulfilled. One of the themes that the Comedies and Proverbs explores is the chance that a life without a centre is also a life without happiness. To this extent the theme of movement that runs through the Comedies and Proverbs is much more than a simple narrative device or conceit. It is also making a point about decentred lives. By extension, the implication is that the lives of the characters will be more fulfilled (more here, less there or just more able to tell the difference) if they stay long enough in one place to establish genuine human contacts and connections. However, Rohmer is not making a point about the virtues of spatial immobility. His claim is moral and existential as opposed to geographical and transportational. His claim is that it is only by engaging with reality as it is, and not by subordinating it to one’s dreams and expectations, that it is possible for the characters to find a spiritual centre. Mazierska observes that the characters all move around so much because they are searching ‘for a place where they could settle down, not only physically, but also mentally, which they would not like to leave, except for a short time’ (Mazierska 2002: 236). This is their spiritual centre, in which work and leisure, love and home, all of the different dimensions of life are all integrated in a single place that enhances human contact. As such this place cannot be a satellite town, because that is dominated by inhuman dead space, and neither can it be commercial Paris because that merely appropriates experiences. Neither can the spiritual centre be found on holiday – although that is where so many people try so desperately to find it – because that is a time of short visits and therefore of more or less untrue and theatrical, fleeting, contacts with others. The spiritual centre is found when all life activities are integrated, and when that integration leads to satisfaction. In this way, the counterpart to Delphine in The Green Ray is a retired taxi driver, who is presumably a relation of one of Delphine’s friends, with whom she has lunch one day. Although he could never afford to go on holiday he claims that it does not matter because Paris has everything that

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anyone could ever want. As if to emphasise his rootedness in a place, he is filmed sitting with his back close to a wall. Delphine would almost certainly find the wall to be a trap (she is rarely shown with anything solid behind her), whereas for the taxi driver it is a guarantee of a centred life. But life might also be centred culturally. The taxi driver is filmed in a documentary style that reappears in one of the Tales of the Four Seasons, A Summer’s Tale, when Margot and Gaspard visit an old fisherman. Margot is an ethnology student, writing a doctorate on the sea shanties of the fisherman who once sailed from Brittany to the banks off Newfoundland. He is filmed inside his house, again sitting with his back close to a wall. His contentment is represented by the ease and humour with which he sings an old song, which would probably be forgotten if it were not for Margot’s research. When Rohmer films the Parisian popular (The Sign of Leo, Rendezvous in Paris), or when he includes old Parisian tunes as a kind of commentary on the action (as most notably happens in The Aviator’s Wife) a similar point is being made. Life can be centred if it is integrated spatially and culturally. Such integration leads to satisfaction, contentment and a spiritually rich life of the kind represented by the taxi driver and very few others in the Comedies and Proverbs. Yet this integration can only happen if the character carries out a distinctly Pascalian move and resists any temptation towards vanity. Sabine’s friend in A Good Marriage, Clarisse (ironically played by Arielle Dombasle, who reappeared in Rohmer’s next film, Pauline at the Beach, as the ridiculous Marion) is a representation of the centred life that Sabine herself desires but would almost certainly find stultifyingly dull if ever she were to get it. Clarisse is happily married to a local doctor, lives in Le Mans, the town of her birth and works in the old quarter of the city, making lampshades. She is obviously happy in her work but never allows herself to believe that she is doing anything more than what she is doing, making lampshades. Clarisse has a centred life that also means that she avoids any temptation towards vanity. Crisp points out that ‘Clarisse’s self-effacing approach to her productions recalls Rohmer’s own, and introduces a form of reflexivity into the film’ (Crisp 1988: 96–7). By contrast Sabine only studies art and sells it in an antique shop. Sabine has none of the centred-ness that Clarisse’s relationship with an integrated life possesses. Sabine wants her life to be the integrated whole that is Clarisse’s, but her incomprehension of what such a life actually entails means that Sabine relentlessly tells Clarisse that she needs to be more assertive. Clarisse is everything that Sabine at once yearns for and dreads to be. Consequently Sabine is fated to live a life

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entirely in fragments. Running through the oppositions of A Good Marriage is a fairly explicit critique of the Paris that has lost any touch with its popular culture and traditional forms of expression. Rohmer is saying that all that remains are the contractual and commercial relationships of the kind that Sabine experiences in the antique shop and seeks to introduce into marriage too. Paris is a city without a centre. Even as it is the ever-attractive there for those who consider themselves to be trapped in a mundane here, from the inside Paris is rarely here at all because it is a city that only displaces. In many ways, the only character in the Comedies and Proverbs who is at all at home in Paris is Anne, and she only shuttles between her small flat, work, a café for lunch and the hairdresser. Her Paris is all on a human scale that can be walked, but for others in the series, Paris is much more overwhelming because it causes only confusion and reveals itself to be too incoherent to be an integrated here. Of the six films in the series Full Moon in Paris is the case study in displacement, as its guiding proverb indicates with its claim that having two houses leads one to lose one’s mind. Louise leaves Marne la Vallée to live what she believes will be the exciting life in Paris but, as Crisp rightly says: ‘Louise’s mistake is to confuse the geographical/social center of things with the spiritual’. She discovers that Paris is a place that displaces, where you lose yourself (Crisp 1988: 102). When she is in her apartment in Paris, leading the life she dreamed that she always wanted (at least which she dreamt of when she was with Rémi) all she comes to appreciate is that ‘her “center” as she calls it is located off-center as it were, out in the sterile suburbs of Marne-la-Vallée’ (Cone 1996: 428). For Louise, the only hope of finding a centre in Paris is through the strategy of bringing men back to the apartment that was intended to be her refuge from the outside world. Consequently, she at once destroys the value of the Parisian space that she tried to make her geographical base, and proves to herself that in the end her life can only achieve any semblance of integration if it is lived with significant others like Rémi, the man happily living in the satellite town that he helped to design, and who she left because she never felt sufficiently here. Louise’s sentimental education resides in the lesson that for the likes of her Paris is not here either. For the likes of Louise indeed, there might well never be a here. Bérénice Reynaud has taken the theme of Louise’s lack of a centre in a feminist direction. She argues that ‘Louise’s displacement is not anecdotal, but structural. It is as a woman, in her relationship with men, that she is essentially displaced’ (Reynaud 2000: 257). First, Rémi displaces Louise.

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He lives where he works, and has installed her in his flat. According to Reynaud, Rémi ‘represents a certain form of patriarchal, patrilocal relation to space’, and from Louise he expects companionship and domesticity (Reynaud 2000: 257). Second, Louise’s Parisian friend Octave displaces her too, because in his fantasies (and, it might be added frequently his actions too), he identifies Louise ‘both as a virgin and as a sexless being who could be entirely possessed, a position that is literally untenable’ (Reynaud 2000: 258). Actually Octave’s relationship with Louise might be much simpler than that. She sees him as a friend, and he sees her as a woman he has not slept with yet. From all of this Reynaud suggests a Lacanian reading of Louise’s situation and unhappiness: ‘as a woman, she is seduced, and even mesmerized, by men’s fetishizing gaze. She lets them define her as an object of their desire, and, as such, lets herself be posited within the phallic function, where, being both inside and outside ... she is constantly rejected at the periphery, dislocated, denied, displaced’ (Reynaud 2000: 259).

Emma’s Daughters There is a stark fact about the Comedies and Proverbs that has not been stated, although it is probably very clear by now. The main character in each film is a woman: Anne, Sabine, Pauline or Marion, Louise, Delphine, Blanche. Reynaud indeed argues that these women follow in a distinctive line in Rohmer’s work. For Reynaud it is noticeable that ‘when their desire confronts that of men, women usually lose in Rohmer’s movies, and are often ridiculed ... while man’s own desire is measured to the extent he resists, or denies that of the woman’. The only exception to this general rule is The Green Ray, in which Delphine’s ‘ridiculous stubbornness eventually pays off’ (Reynaud 2000: 259). If this line of thought is followed, and there is no need to force the films into this analytic framework since they do appear to fit it rather well, the message of the Comedies and Proverbs, and perhaps even of most of Rohmer’s work is pretty straightforward. It could be argued that Rohmer is making a fundamentally conservative point about the desire of women being dangerous for men, and that within patriarchal relationships women can only be truly satisfied and ‘centred’ if they accept domesticity and a rather narrow life in the way of Clarisse. It could be suggested that Rohmer’s basic point is that women are more displaced in the ‘now’ than men because they refuse to accept what Reynaud calls ‘patrilocal’ relationships in which work and home are kept close together. In short, the nub of the problem is that women want to break out.

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There are three problems with this argument. First, it imputes didacticism to Rohmer that is contrary to the fundamentally hermeneutic role that is given to the audience of his films. Indeed, the audience’s work of interpretation is more important to the Comedies and Proverbs than it had been hitherto because all traces of the retrospective narration had been abandoned. Consequently, the heroines of the films are shown to be going through a sentimental education, and it is the role of the audience to work out what that will mean. Second, the men in the Comedies and Proverbs are hardly shown in a sympathetic light, and there is no pretence in the series that men are strong because they either do or can resist. For example, Henri in Pauline at the Beach is plainly priapic, Edmond (the lawyer Sabine has decided to marry in A Good Marriage) is almost emotionally stunted, and in Full Moon in Paris Octave simply cannot accept that Louise would rather have him as a friend than a lover (and judging by the men she does find attractive, Octave is hardly her ‘type’). Men are much more complex – and for that matter ridiculous – than Reynaud’s position allows. It is certainly the case that if they have any presence at all, nevertheless they stand on the weakest feet of clay. Third, there might well be a very simple reason why women are the focus of attention in the Comedies and Proverbs. Perhaps Rohmer concentrated on women for no greater reason than that it was their turn. After all, the Moral Tales had dissected the pretensions and peculiarities of men, and now Rohmer was simply turning to the other side of the human equation. John Pym perhaps only slightly overstates the case when he calls the heroines of the series of Comedies and Proverbs ‘silly girls’. According to Pym, they are all ‘silly’ because they attempt to subordinate the world to their own desires and designs, only to discover that other men and women have desires and designs of their own, that might not necessarily fit in with what is willed for them. He rightly contends that for each of the women in the series, ‘the principal motive force is a peculiarly ridiculous vision of sentimental love, love at twenty (sometimes offset by visions of love at fifteen and thirty): he loves me too much, not enough, enough but not quite the right way; he loves someone else, perhaps he loves someone else ... The self-absorption is staggering’ (Pym 1986: 47). Pym thinks that the likes of Anne, Sabine, Marion, Louise, Delphine and Blanche are all ‘silly’ because they live a life that ‘is not for them real life’ (Pym 1986: 47). Put another way, and without lapsing into the moralism or condescension of calling the characters ‘silly’, the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs are all women who feel themselves to be trapped in an empirical life that denies them – and

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perhaps is even a denial of – real life. To this extent, Pym gets the matter exactly right, and yet draws exactly the wrong conclusion, when he condemns the ‘silly girls’ on the grounds that ‘All this talk of love, when it comes right down to it, means very little. It is a fantasy, an agreeable, endless, excuse-me dance’ (Pym 1986: 48). But it is attractive for that very reason. At this point it is worth recalling Georg Lukács’s contention that because men and women fear ambiguity they are all too ready to settle for the predictabilities of empirical life, and to shift their dreams and desires towards ‘eternally unreachable Gardens of Eden’ (Lukács 1974: 153). These ‘Gardens of Eden’ are at once the dream of a real life that is desired by men and women who are almost certainly too scared of what lies beyond empirical life to actually try to get it, and they are the ideals that make the empirical seem to be so much less than perfect. Each proverb at the beginning of each film in the series can be read through this prism, in that each is either an imagination of a Garden of Eden or it is a cautionary note against taking them too seriously. Moreover, in these terms it is also valid to contend that the heroines of the films are only ‘silly’ in as far as they either through a leap of faith or through a lack of self-awareness attempt to scale the rock face behind which the Garden of Eden might be found. Their failure is, quite simply, that they either attempt the climb without the right equipment or scale the wrong face of the mountain. Consequently, the heroines are not really ‘silly’ at all, and neither are they merely the prisoners of patrilocal power relationships that condemn them whenever they try to break out. They are considerably more complex than either of those approaches might allow (the first sees them as idiots, the second as cardboard cut outs). Actually, and despite the title of the series of films in which they appear, the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs are all characters from tragedy. They are tragic. But their tragedy is of a specific sort, and it follows in a literary tradition because Anne, Sabine, Marion and all the others, are similarly the daughters of Emma Bovary, one of the most beastly, tragic and human characters in nineteenth-century literature. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is one of the great designers of Gardens of Eden. She is desperate to escape her empirical life and to experience the delights of what she takes to be the real life that she has read about in novels, and glimpsed at a ball. But despite her attempts to find real life with lovers (to this extent she anticipates Rohmer’s Louise), and despite her seduction by the possibilities of shopping (and to this extent she does not really anticipate any of Rohmer’s heroines; one thing that women very rarely do in Rohmer’s world is go shopping), the obstinate

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otherness of the empirical world destroys her. Emma’s lovers turn out to be fickle or fake, and she learns the lesson that ultimately debts have to be repaid. In the end, Emma takes the only way out that she can, and in this regard once again she is quite unlike any character in any Rohmer film; she commits suicide. But throughout the book, Flaubert has more or less precisely the same attitude towards Emma Bovary that Rohmer has towards the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs. Both Flaubert and Rohmer are realist – and for that matter realistic – enough to see that their heroine’s obsession with real life at the expense of the empirical is rather ridiculous, but they are both careful to avoid blaming the individual woman for her plight. They approach their heroines with compassion. Rather the explicit condemnation in Flaubert, and the implicit criticism in Rohmer, is of the ‘now’ that dislocates men and especially woman from the surroundings in which they might have the chance to flourish and to lead integrated lives. Once again however, this is not a conservative moralisation about a woman’s rightful place. It is, instead, a realist criticism of the ‘now’ in which men – and especially women – are fated to try to reconcile empirical and real life. Emma and Rohmer’s heroines, all lack a spiritual centre because they live in a ‘now’ that makes any centre more or less impossible to find or hold on to. For them all there is no here; or at least there is no here that is valued, and their tragedy is that all of these women discover that, for them, the yearned for there is always out of reach. According to Baudelaire it is possible to identify four aspects of Emma Bovary’s character, all of which make her a victim of a ‘narrow world, hemmed in by restricted horizons’ (Baudelaire 1992: 251). First, Emma’s imagination dominates her. She is unconstrained by reality because with an imagination like hers, ‘reasoning is ordinarily excluded’. Second, Emma possesses an impulsive ‘desire for action, speed in decision’ (Baudelaire 1992: 250). Third, she has a love of seducing and of seduction that leads her to value fashion, perfume and cosmetics even as she almost certainly values herself less and less: ‘And yet Madame Bovary gives herself; carried away by the sophistries of her imagination, she falls magnificently and generously ... for cads who are not her equals’ (Baudelaire 1992: 251). Fourth, Baudelaire notes that when she attended a convent school young Emma was delighted by the aesthetic as opposed to the spiritual resonance of her surroundings, and he takes this as a sign that ‘she exchanged in her soul the image of the true God for that of a God of her own imagining, a God of promise and chance, a keepsake image of God, with spurs and moustaches’ (Baudelaire 1992: 252).

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It is possible to see these traits in the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs. The domination of the imagination over reason is clear in Sabine, Marion and Louise. The desire for action characterises Sabine with her completely wilful decision to get married, and the speed in decision typifies Louise and, in the end, Delphine who quickly allows herself to believe that her cabinet-maker is the man of her dreams because she has purportedly seen the green ray. The love of seduction is attempted by Sabine but with a clumsiness that would horrify Marion. On her holiday with Pauline, Marion is always dressed and made-up very carefully indeed, and she seems to be so convinced of her beauty that she gives herself to Henri on a whim. It is also noticeable that Pauline at the Beach’s Marion provides more nudity in this single film than all of the actors and actors in all of Rohmer’s other films put together. The nudity is not at all gratuitous, because it is making a point about seduction and seductiveness. In Full Moon in Paris Louise attempts seduction through dancing. Finally, the subsumption of the spiritual into the aesthetic is strongest in Sabine again, and also in Delphine (with the green ray). The only two women who do not easily fit into the typology of being Emma’s daughters are Anne in The Aviator’s Wife and Blanche in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. This is because both of them are, in different ways, so trapped in the empirical that they have not yet come to yearn for the real. Anne will start to yearn when she comes to convince herself, as she surely will, that the loyal François, labouring away at his studies and at the post office, is no replacement for Christian, the debonair pilot. Blanche will become more like Emma when she realises, as she surely will, that Fabien is a little too dull (as would be any man) to fill the emptiness of her life in the new town. Put another way, perhaps neither Anne nor Blanche are sufficiently advanced in the syllabus of their sentimental education to understand that they are children with the same mother. They have not yet realised the identity of their forebear. For all of them, the route to real life is identified with the romantic love of an other. That special kind of attachment is presumed to offer recompense for the dislocation of living in a place that is a dull and featureless here. It is taken to be something like the royal road to there, a road that is travelled only one way and without ever having to come back again. The problem is that all of these women do always have to return to the here that they so desperately seek to escape. Emma Bovary sought romantic love to escape from the vacuity of provincial life with its encroachments of modern stupidity (that appeared mostly in the guise of the meaningless facts of Homais the chemist and self-declared

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man of modern science). Baudelaire, rightly, wrote that for Flaubert the provinces are ‘the home of vacuity, where the environment ... is at once the most inane, the most fertile in absurdities, the most productive of intolerant fools’. The provinces are populated with ‘small fry that busily perform their petty jobs, in the exercise of which they acquire a host of distorted notions’ (Baudelaire 1992: 249). When Rohmer focuses on Emma’s daughters, the place of vacuity has changed. Rohmer’s characters only go to the provinces on holiday. They spend most of their time in Paris or the satellite towns that surround it, yet they still confront emptiness nearly all the time. On the one hand this is the vacuity that follows from a life that is dominated by fleeting work-place relationships, but the environment in which Rohmer’s heroines move and talk also determines it. The heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs, all have to deal with the human consequences of living in dead space. This is particularly true for Blanche and her fellow game players in Cergy-Pontoise. Rohmer has never filmed a place so humanly empty and soul destroying. It is a space in which there is more or less complete visibility (Blanche, Léa and the others never have any trouble bumping into one another), thanks to the carefully designed public spaces of the urban utopia, but sociability is reduced to empty formalities for precisely that reason. Nothing escapes the potential gaze of others, and therefore men and woman always have to be on their guard. After all, ‘When everyone has each other under surveillance, sociability decreases, silence being the only form of protection’ (Sennett 1986: 15). They can never enter into genuine relationships, nor have deep connections. Yet this is only one reason why space has become dead and vacuous. According to Richard Sennett, space has also been deadened because now, ‘we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior urban civilization’ (Sennett 1986: 14). Indeed, quite how easy it has become to be mobile is one of the recurrent themes of the Comedies and Proverbs. Rohmer’s heroines are never still. They are always moving about and never stay terribly long in any single place. Sennett says that the stress on movement has resulted in the rise of two different kinds of isolation in the ‘now’. First, ‘it means that the inhabitants or workers in any urban high-density structure are inhibited from feeling any relationship to the milieu in which that structure is set’ (Sennett 1986: 14). The point can be extended to underpin the proposition that in all social situations that emphasise movement, men and women will be inhibited from entering into a relationship with any milieu. This is because they will never be either here or there, but always in-between. To this extent

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it is worth once again comparing Sabine with Clarisse in A Good Marriage. The former clearly treats Le Mans as somewhere to get money and sleep (sometimes), whereas for Clarisse it is pretty much the only place in the world. In these terms, it is not surprising that Sabine has trouble with human relationships but that Clarisse is far more relaxed and able in social situations. Second, and in the context of his discussion of the rise of mobility, Sennett sees isolation as meaning that ‘one can isolate oneself, in a private automobile, for freedom of movement, one ceases to believe one’s surroundings have any meaning save as a means toward the end of one’s own motion’ (Sennett 1986: 14–15). So, maybe this is why the mobile women of Rohmer’s films (and women are shown to be mobile much more than are men; it is women who drive cars) are also exceptionally isolated, feel the pangs of isolation most sharply, and, therefore, are most attracted to the ‘Garden of Eden’ of romantic love. Isolation means that public spaces, and public life itself, is deadened and, indeed, dead. If Sennett is right, the confrontation with dead public space leads men and women to turn to intimate relations because that is the only place left in which there appears to be any chance of deep and genuine human connection. He suggests that ‘Dead public space is one reason, the most concrete one, that people will seek out on intimate terrain what is denied them on more alien ground’ (Sennett 1986: 15). If public life is empty or structured around spaces in which there is the chance of total surveillance and therefore the only solution is formality or silence then, according to Sennett, men and women will emotionally bare themselves to those with whom contact is desired because only such baring can break through formality. In these terms, friendship is not going to be enough for deep and genuine contact with others. Only love will suffice because only love involves a complete, literal and metaphorical, baring. To this extent it is worth wondering whether it is a coincidence that the Comedies and Proverbs is the series that is most obviously about love and which contains most of the nudity by main characters that appears in any of Rohmer’s work. Both represent kinds of baring. Love is taken by all of the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs, and by Emma their mother, to be the only way of building genuine human connections in a world that is otherwise empty and never really here or there. Love is an attempt to relocate oneself in the face of situations that are experienced only in terms of dislocation. It is not so much that love is all they need, but that love is all that remains. The tragedy is that the love they all want, the love that will make life ‘real’ is always

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challenged by the empirical life in which it must be contained and, therefore, there can only be disappointment, failure, or a Marionesque shrug of the shoulders that says that everything will turn out well next time.

Conclusion In a Cahiers du cinéma discussion that was held in 1957, Rohmer said that ‘today’s generation is not so much looking for freedom (at any rate a theoretical freedom which there’s no shortage of) but for morality, whatever it might be’ (Rohmer 1985b: 44). The heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs are the children of that generation, and they have even given up on morality. From their point of view the schemes and ironies of the Moral Tales would probably seem to be simply old-fashioned because they say little or nothing about the most pressing issue of the ‘now’. For them it is the issue of finding a centre that will transform empirical life into real life through the magic of romantic love. And yet, even as the heroines yearn for this love so desperately they never find it, and when they convince themselves that they have they will almost certainly end up bitterly disappointed. It is noticeable that not one of the heroines says ‘I love you’. Probably, possibly, none of them ever will even after the completion of their sentimental educations. The series presents literary and sociological reasons for this unrequited love of love (although it is necessary to remember Rohmer’s caution that he is not a sociologist), but there are also hints of a theological explanation. In the Moral Tales, God lurks, but in the Comedies and Proverbs God has become a little more Pascalian and disappeared. Or to make the same point without such a burden; the narrative structure of the Comedies and Proverbs, which owes so much to theatre, denies any point of entry for the immanent into the empirical. It might be said that God himself has been dislocated. There are only three traces of the immanent in the whole series. The first is perhaps the most orthodox and depressing. In A Good Marriage, Sabine lights a candle in Le Mans cathedral and prays (it is not hard to guess what for), at which point her old friend appears and she proves herself incapable of understanding the empirical reality of love. This is a moment of grace that does not fit in with Sabine’s personal Garden of Eden, and so she rejects it. Second, and most oddly, during the course of the narrative of The Green Ray, Delphine finds playing cards in her path. They appear at significant moments but without reason and most certainly not by any hand within the space of the film. Perhaps Rohmer intends that the cards are seen as signs from God, but the point is made

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with such an uncharacteristic heavy-handedness that the intimation is, instead, that for Delphine, the really real is associated with magic and a somewhat crass occultism. Even the green ray itself is less a sign from the deity than it is a fiction that is willed. Third, and most delicately, in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, trees surround Blanche, and they bow and creak in the wind, just as they had around Delphine in The Green Ray, and like Delphine Blanche starts to weep. But why is Blanche crying? Is it because she glimpses the possibility that the trees are moved by the breath of God or, more likely, because she feels so lost and alone in an indifferent universe? Does Blanche cry because she confronts her isolation, her dislocated life, and thus turns to a romantic love that her sentimental education will probably eventually prove her to be incapable of believing is real? It is because they persistently raise that kind of question that the Comedies and Proverbs are actually Rohmer’s most sustained and relentless tragedies.

5 Tales of the Four Seasons: Atmosphere and Faith

With the series of Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer returned to a measure of critical acclaim after the confusion that had been caused by Perceval and The Marquise of O. Pauline at the Beach was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1983, and in 1986 The Green Ray delivered the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. By the end of the Comedies and Proverbs then, Rohmer was in much the same situation as he had been by the time that he had reached the conclusion of the Moral Tales. He had a public, he had a measure of critical acclaim and, given the cheap costs of production of the recent series, he was also in the financial position to do pretty much what he wanted. But perhaps the experiences of the 1970s had taught Rohmer important lessons, and perhaps he had learnt during the process of making the Comedies and Proverbs that it was possible to work in a characteristic style and yet manage to avoid the trap of vanity. The series that followed on from the Comedies and Proverbs, the Tales of the Four Seasons, consists of more or less exactly the kind of films that could have been expected from Rohmer. In a 1996 interview Rohmer said, ‘My intention is to cover related topics and, without ever changing genres, to keep varying my approach’ (Rohmer 1999: 16). That is not a comment that he would have made after the Moral Tales. Or at least, had he made such a comment, he promptly went off and did exactly the opposite. It is certainly the case that the transition from the series that was Rohmer’s dominant concern through the 1980s, to that which took up his time in the 1990s, was relatively quick and smooth. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend had been released in 1987, and Rohmer then made two programmes for French television before releasing the first of the Tales of the Four Seasons in 1990. Rather unsurprisingly, there are four films in 139

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this series. It opened with A Tale of Springtime in 1990, and continued with A Winter’s Tale (1992), A Summer’s Tale (1996), and concluded with An Autumn Tale in 1998. During this time Rohmer also completed The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, Rendezvous in Paris, and a number of programmes for French television. A Winter’s Tale was given the International Critics Award at the 1992 Berlin Film Festival, and An Autumn Tale won the Golden Lion for Best Original Screenplay at the 1998 Venice Film Festival. Clearly, Rohmer entered the 1990s refreshed and energised, and he pushed into the new millennium with the period films: The Lady and the Duke, Triple Agent and Romance of Astrée and Céladon. As such, the Tales of the Four Seasons stands as Rohmer’s last serial treatment of the contemporary ‘now’. It is worth wondering about why the move out of the Comedies and Proverbs was seamless, whereas that out of the Moral Tales was much more difficult. Despite his history of avoiding the limelight, one explanation is that actually Rohmer did come to be seduced by vanity. It could be argued that the failure of the period films of the 1970s, but the success of the Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs showed to him where his success was to be found. The wave that took Rohmer from obscurity to note to commercial failure and back to note again could be interpreted retrospectively as a clear sign of what to do next. Consequently, by this explanation, the move from the Comedies and Proverbs to the Tales of the Four Seasons was smooth and evidently unproblematic because now Rohmer knew what was expected of him, what his niche was and, therefore, what he ought to do next. By this explanation then, Rohmer’s career in film making was also a kind of sentimental education, but whereas he left the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs standing on the threshold leading somewhere or other, in his own education Rohmer saw the door and walked right through it. But these same points can be interpreted in a radically different way and, indeed, in a way that sits more consistently with Rohmer’s long-standing attempt to hide himself behind his work. After all, from the point of view of making himself invisible, the period films had been less than successful. They were so very peculiar that they actually pushed their maker into the limelight. The lesson that could be drawn from this experience therefore was that the best way of keeping oneself hidden is simply to carry on doing the kind of work with which one is associated, and that the audience expects. In that way, any rips in the curtain behind which Rohmer hid might be repaired easily or, even better, not noticed. And so the film-maker might once again be able to keep himself firmly in the background, even as the work becomes increasingly noted.

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But that strategy, of keeping vanity at bay by making films that are clearly identifiable with a certain authorial name and not with any other, has an attendant difficulty. If the work tends to become somewhat generic, how then can it carry on being interesting? This is the mark of Rohmer’s skill. In the 1990s, when he was working on the Tales of the Four Seasons, Rohmer was proving over and again that he was able to produce films that could only be his and which yet retained a huge measure of surprise. The brilliance of this series is that it is typical and intriguing at one and the same time. The Tales of the Four Seasons do not diverge from the realist strictures to which Rohmer had started to recommit himself with the Comedies and Proverbs. In terms of shooting style, mise en scène and lack of retrospective narration, the two series follow on, one from the other. At the first impression the only major difference between the two series is that the Tales of the Four Seasons gives a far greater centrality to music than the Comedies and Proverbs. In the 1990s series, characters listen to music on hi-fi systems, hear bands at clubs, play pianos and guitars, sing, write their own songs which are then sung, or, sometimes, music is used in a very non-Rohmeresque way for dramatic emphasis and to highlight key moments in the narrative. For example, in A Winter’s Tale, a piece of music from the beginning of the film which is associated with the life-defining moment for Félicie reappears later at once to recall that event and the man who was involved in it. It is not at all unreasonable to identify the Tales of the Four Seasons as a ‘microcosm of the Rohmerian universe’ (Heinemann 2000: 50). They recurrently deal with the attachments of love and whether a potential beloved can be found or, if found, recognised. The characters are eloquent (even though these films also feature the longest silences in Rohmer’s work: five minutes without speech at the beginning of A Tale of Springtime, seven minutes in A Summer’s Tale) and there is an exceptionally strong sense of place. Indeed, in terms of the location of the stories, the Tales of the Four Seasons are almost like continuations of the Comedies and Proverbs. Both A Summer’s Tale and A Winter’s Tale feature holidays on the Brittany coast, not far from the Normandy resorts of Pauline at the Beach; An Autumn Tale is staged on and by the landscape of the Rhône valley, and A Tale of Springtime continues with the dislocated metropolis that typifies Full Moon in Paris. Uniquely for a Rohmer film that is set in Paris, A Tale of Springtime reduces the city to interiors, once Jeanne has driven home at the beginning of the narrative, and the only external shots are in the garden of the old cottage that Natasha’s father, Igor, owns on the outskirts of the city.

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The title of the series is more than simply descriptive. The ‘four seasons’ to which it refers can be applied to the time of year in which each film is set, and also to the characters and their tale. For example, A Tale of Springtime might ignore much of the blossoming of nature, thanks to its restriction largely to interiors (although a beautiful cherry tree is in full yet temporary flower at the cottage), but the story focuses on what might emerge from hard exteriors. There is obviously the precocious teenager Natasha, who is beginning to blossom as a young woman, and will Jeanne allow herself to stretch towards a kind of warmth or will she remain within the bud that protects her? Indeed it might be said that this whole film takes place in the bud. A Summer’s Tale focuses on a time of aimless possibilities and long days. Everything is ripe but choosing is too much effort and the days drift away in a bit of a heat haze. Meanwhile An Autumn Tale concentrates on the last flickers of golden radiance in the life of the characters before the confrontation with winter in the days and in their days. But perhaps A Winter’s Tale contains the most nuanced connection of story to time. Winter is a time of external cold but of spiritual warmth, and that warmth is the kindling of new beginnings, of natality. (See also Mann 1999.) Now, by the time Rohmer came to the Tales of the Four Seasons, his observational realism was so nuanced that it is difficult to identify exactly who the main character in each film actually is, and so it is probably best to summarise the story of the films as straightforwardly as possible. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the series consists in the challenge of working out which, if any single one, of the characters the film focuses upon. In A Tale of Springtime, Jeanne is a high-school philosophy teacher who feels dislocated from the untidy flat that she shares with her presently absent boyfriend, and from her own apartment, which is currently being used by a cousin who takes back young men. In desperation to find somewhere to go, Jeanne visits a party where she knows only the host, meets an eighteen-year-old woman, Natasha, who doesn’t know anyone there either, and ends up being offered a place to stay by her new young friend. What follows are Natasha’s attempts to break up her father’s relationship with Eve so that he might start an affair with Jeanne and, thus, Jeanne might become Natasha’s step-mother. But there is one scene, which is very peculiar for Rohmer, and that raises a question about the nature of the interiors in which most of the film is set. When Natasha first takes Jeanne back to the apartment in which she lives largely alone (her father is away a lot in his work as an arts bureaucrat), Natasha plays some Schumann on the piano; the camera

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begins with Jeanne’s face at the centre of the frame, and gradually moves out, so that increasingly she is shown in the context of the interior that surrounds her. Heinemann has speculated that this camera move can be taken to imply that what follows in the rest of the film is merely Jeanne’s dream (Heinemann 2000: 51), but another interpretation is possible. It can be proposed that what is happening in the scene when Natasha plays Schumann and Jeanne is shown to be sitting and thinking on her own is that there is the intimation of a dialectic of the bourgeois interior, a dialectic that represents each character’s desires and that comes to be played out in the film. For Jeanne, the interior is a void of loneliness and isolation that needs to be filled. It stimulates a need for her to find a home (a home that the opening silent sequence of the film shows her to be lacking even though, as she tells Natasha at the party where they meet, she has the keys to two front doors; to this extent Jeanne is a more sedate variation of Louise from Full Moon in Paris). But for Natasha, dressed like a small-scale Princess and playing the piano, the apartment is the site of ‘phantasmagorias of the interior’ (Benjamin 1983: 167), in which she can dream of a new step-mother, and where it is possible to indulge in the detective story of the mystery of the missing necklace (Natasha blames Eve for stealing a necklace when, as Jeanne discovers at the end of the film, it was merely misplaced in a wardrobe). To this extent it is interesting to compare the Paris of the private sphere that features in A Tale of Springtime with the city of public appearances and meetings that features in Rendezvous in Paris, released five years later. In the latter film the interior is a place to which to return or in which to meet friends. It is a place of the resolution of problems created in public places. All of this is clear in the first episode of the film, The 7 o’clock Rendezvous, in which a missing purse is returned to the heroine in her apartment, and where friends can talk and help one another so long as they can keep the always-likely-to-intrude exterior firmly outside (although the attempt is never entirely successful). But in A Tale of Springtime, the interior is shown as being more or less sufficient unto itself. Here, the interior is isolated from work or external relationships, and becomes the casing of the individual (Benjamin 1983: 169). It becomes a casing in that it separates the individual from the outside, although modern technology like the telephone means that the outside can never be kept firmly outside (this explains why Natasha is so hostile to the presence of Eve in the apartment; Eve transgresses Natasha’s casing against the world), and it is also the shell in which the traces of individuality might be left. Consequently, Natasha is surrounded by

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the memory of her mother, who left to live with the architect who designed their kitchen. This film represents something of a setback in Rohmer’s long reconciliation with Paris. It is of the city but not at all in it. In A Tale of Springtime then, the private interior is seen as a distinct and separate world, and as the setting of a ‘phantasmagoria’ in which a real life might be dreamt that will overcome the perceived failings of empirical life. The interior becomes a safe and bourgeois Garden of Eden, of a kind that the heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs would have never accepted. A more nuanced view, one that sees the private and the public, the interior and the exterior as relationally dependent upon one another, runs through the second instalment of the Tales of the Four Seasons, A Winter’s Tale. This is in fact a film that is arranged in terms of spatial contrasts between holidays and the city, commerce in the form of a hairdressing salon and the immanent symbolised by a cathedral, the interior as a place of warmth and emotional attachment, and the outside as cold and full of strangers. When she is on holiday in Brittany, Félicie has a romance with Charles. As she leaves to return to Paris, she gives him her address but, by mistake, gives him the wrong one; her old house has been demolished and she has relocated. The film moves on five years, and Félicie is now living in Paris with her mother and her daughter Lise. Charles is the father. The film is about Félicie, and whether she will settle for what empirical life has to offer (she has two suitors: Maxence, the owner of the hairdressing salon in which she works and with whom she moves for a brief time to Nevers, and Loïc, a librarian) or whether she will hold out on her dream of real life in which Charles returns and they all live happily ever after. In Nevers cathedral Félicie decides to wait for Charles somehow to return, which he does at the end of the film when he and Félicie miraculously (the word is used deliberately) sit opposite one another on a Paris bus. In this way it is worth comparing this bus journey, which is like a journey to a Garden of Eden, with that of François and Lucie, the would-be detectives in The Aviator’s Wife. In both cases there are fleeting eye contacts, civil inattention and, ultimately, human contact of a sort that is empirically improbable but, from the point of view of real life, perfectly reasonable. After all, is it really improbable that a soul mate will be met on the bus, so long as one is prepared to pay sufficient attention to one’s fellow passengers? A Winter’s Tale is about rebirth and faith, and therefore it is no coincidence at all that it takes place during the liturgical season of Advent. It is Rohmer’s most obviously Catholic film and suffused with the presence of the lurking God (who perhaps does not lurk so much as actually appear).

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The third film in the series is A Summer’s Tale, and of all Rohmer’s work this is probably the one in which the identity of the main character is most open to doubt. On the face of it the film is about Gaspard. He has just finished his maths degree and is spending the summer holidays in Dinard, where he will meet his girlfriend Lena, when she returns from an independent holiday with friends in Spain. While Gaspard is waiting he befriends Margot, a part-time waitress and ethnology student, with whom he goes on long, possibly platonic but possibly not, walks along the coast. Despite their burgeoning friendship, Margot sets up Gaspard with another woman, Solene. In a way that recalls the careful identification of different women with different environments in the Moral Tales, in this film each woman has a specific location (Rohmer 1999: 16). For example, Margot is linked with the coast, Solene with interiors and Lena with the beach. Margot is the only character that wanders onto all three of these stages, and she is also the most mobile of them all. Margot drives a van to go to interview old sailors for her research project. The film explores Gaspard’s relationships with these three women, and the crisis comes when he separately invites each of them to go with him to visit the island of Ouessant (which thus becomes something like a Garden of Eden). The question is which one, if any, he will go with. Rohmer has said that the film deals with ‘a moment when nothing very significant is taking place and which, in any case, ends without any kind of conclusion’ (Rohmer 1999: 16). But this is a deceptively simple, and perhaps even simplistic, description of the narrative. One of the reasons why A Summer’s Tale repays close and attentive viewing and reviewing, perhaps more than any other of Rohmer’s work, is because there is a high level of instability about precisely who is the main character. There is even some instability about the characters’ own character, at least in the case of Gaspard. Rohmer has said that in A Summer’s Tale he was ‘keen to show the male character altering according to the people he meets, according to the girls he is with. He is always the same, and always different’ (Rohmer 1999: 16). Even then, given that he appears first and is rarely out of shot, cinematic convention would point to Gaspard as the principal character in the film. However, running through the whole narrative is a very strong sense in which all of the other characters are little more than puppets for Margot to play with, analyse and perhaps even laugh over. Of course, Margot is an ethnologist, and it is not at all unreasonable to suggest that A Summer’s Tale constitutes field notes from a little study she carried out one dull summer while she was waiting for her own boyfriend to return from Polynesia. Yet Margot is one of Rohmer’s

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most engaging characters thanks to the performance of Amanda Langlet (who had taken the role of Pauline in Pauline at the Beach), and the poignancy of her farewell with Gaspard. To this extent, Rohmer might also be making a point about how observing the actions of others and occasionally prodding them along, ought not to blind the observer to their own desires and needs. This film is also complicated because it quite deliberately omits key information. Title cards are used to indicate the temporal dimension of the story (Rohmer 1999: 14), but not every day is shown. There are gaps in the temporal sequence and, moreover, the film sometimes pays scant attention to some days. What Rohmer seems to be doing is highlighting the partiality of what is shown. What is shown is observed objectively, but there is an unresolved question about why the audience is being shown this and not that. Rohmer allows his film to be fundamentally unreliable, and it is left to the audience to fill the gaps in the filmic narrative. If ever there was a film that had to be watched until its very final frame, it is the last of the series, An Autumn Tale. The film takes Rohmer’s focus of attention away from the twenty- and thirty-somethings who feature in the rest of the Tales of the Four Seasons (and for that matter in the Comedies and Proverbs), and adds to that cast Béatrice Romand (from Clare’s Knee and A Good Marriage) and Marie Rivière (Anne in The Aviator’s Wife and Delphine in The Green Ray) as two women in their forties, the former now without her husband and lonely, the latter married and planning her own daughter’s wedding. The narrative of the film concerns the attempts of Isabelle (Rivière) to find a partner for her friend, the organic wine-maker, Magali (Romand), although she does not know that Magali’s son’s girlfriend, Rosine, has independently decided to do exactly the same thing. Isabelle and Rosine both plan and plot in ignorance of the other. The comedic – and rather Mozartian – possibilities of this scenario are however subverted by the autumnal sensibility that runs through the film. Isabelle finds a partner for Magali by placing a lonely-hearts advertisement in the paper, but discovers that she is attracted to the respondent, and early twenty-something Rosine sees her plots dashed as her older, possibly former, lover (who she is trying to set up with Magali) instead seems to dump her for another much younger woman. If it can be said that the film charts Rosine’s sentimental education, then it also tells the story of Isabelle and Magali’s sentimental experience and, poignantly in the very last frame, sentimental disappointment. In the very last frame Isabelle seems to realise that the best moments of her life have just happened, and that nothing else will compare to the opportunities that have just been

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clutched and allowed to slip through her fingers. Real life, now, is for others. Fiona Villella is quite right when she says that An Autumn Tale plays on the conflict between the middle-aged expectation that things will all be in their right place, and the middle-aged fear that once everything is in order all will be lifeless: ‘Rohmer reveals ... these ambiguities, uncertainties, fears and feelings of restlessness in his middle-aged characters’ (Villella 2000). This is the film which best illustrates Rohmer’s argument: ‘My films are comedies. But the difficulty is knowing what a happy end means in comedy. There is always a touch of bitterness. As Maupassant used to say, “Happiness is no fun”. So, yes, there is always a touch of bitterness’ (Rohmer 1999: 16). Isabelle and Rosine, albeit in different ways and no doubt with quite different implications, both learn the truth of the adage from Maupassant. One of the continuities between An Autumn Tale and the style of the Comedies and Proverbs is that it demonstrates once again Rohmer’s fondness for theatrical acting. The two male leads in the film are both very experienced theatre actors. Didier Sandre plays Etienne, the philosophy teacher who tries to avoid middle age by seducing his students, and Alain Libolt takes the role of Gérald, the man who replies to the lonely-hearts advertisement. Libolt is a major actor on the French stage and specialises in the likes of Molière, Pirandello, Marivaux and Shakespeare. In other words, Libolt is experienced in the work of exactly the kinds of authors who also interest Rohmer. Meanwhile, in 1996 Didier Sandre won a Molière award for Best Actor for his performance in a French staging of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, and he also appears regularly in Corneille, Marivaux, Molière, Racine, Shakespeare and others from the classical tradition of theatre. Sandre also worked on the stage with Andre Dussollier, who played Edmond the lawyer in A Good Marriage, and with Antoine Vitez, who was Vidal in My Night at Maud’s (Leigh 2006). The director Claude Sautet has commented on what is different about working with theatre actors like Dussolier in comparison with film actors: ‘Dussolier is used to the theatre. He questions everything, every position, every movement, before the shoot’ (Sautet 1999: 66). Meanwhile, Marie Rivière has become one of Rohmer’s regular cast of film actors, and her first major role was in his staging of Katherin von Heilbronn (although admittedly she had a small part in Perceval). But the use of stage actors went hand in hand with the use of other performers who could lend a degree of veracity to their role. For example, the middle-aged dilemmas of Isabelle and Magali are made somewhat more pressing for the audience precisely because the actresses who play those roles have made regular appearances in Rohmer’s work and,

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therefore, they have been seen to age. Gaspard in A Summer’s Tale is a musician, and Rohmer has said that this is because Melvil Poupaud, the actor, plays guitar in a band. As such, Gaspard could play the instrument because Poupaud is a guitarist in ‘real life’. Rohmer said that ‘if he had not been a guitarist, I don’t think he would have been a songwriter in the story. I don’t like to get people to fake that sort of thing, by using doubles and so on’ (Rohmer 1999: 14). Furthermore two of the amateur performers in A Summer’s Tale, really are the sailor and accordionist as which they appear (to this extent it is also worth recalling that Françoise and Bernard Verley, the married couple from Love in the Afternoon, really were married). There is another connection between the Comedies and Proverbs and the Tales of the Four Seasons. As with the Comedies and Proverbs, the Tales of the Four Seasons too feature a lot of travelling about. ‘Jeanne and Gaspard live out of suitcases. Félicie sleeps at Loïc’s place, then at her mothers, moves to Nevers, then back to Paris, all with a five-year-old in tow. Even the mature Isabelle ... shuttles between her place and Magali’s, as well as between different towns in the region for her clandestine meetings with Gérald’. Igor is only at home fleetingly, for a meal or to change the contents of his suitcase. Heinemann is right to contend that in this series: ‘Physical movement expresses spiritual movement. The characters’ restlessness betrays a dissatisfaction with their lives, a longing for something more’ (Heinemann 2000: 54). Perhaps the situation is a little more complex than that however. The nub of the Tales of the Four Seasons is that the characters are dislocated in one way or another. Yet – and this is what makes the series so different to the Comedies and Proverbs – they know that although the dislocation brings dissatisfaction, the alternative causes only fear. The Comedies and Proverbs were about women who attempted to transform empirical life into real life through an act of will that was intended to achieve a sentimental closure, and the Tales of the Four Seasons are predominantly about characters for whom empirical life is gesturing towards a real life that they cannot endure or, more simply, do not want. The Tales of the Four Seasons for the most part are about women who come face to face with the unambiguous real life, and who do all that they can to put atmospheric smog between it and themselves. As Lukács said, ‘What men love about life is its atmospheric quality, its uncertainty, forever swinging this way and that, like a pendulum – but one that never swings out as far as it can go. They love the great uncertainty of life which is like a monotonous, reassuring lullaby’ (Lukács 1974: 153). Empirical life might well be known not to be real life, but it

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can be endured precisely in as far as it reassures and is reassuring within comfortable limits. Real life destroys that sleepiness. It consists in confrontation with the unambiguous and brings about the starkest clarity. The heroines of the Comedies and Proverbs were taken to the threshold of this truth and left by Rohmer simply standing there, but in the Tales of the Four Seasons the characters for the most part are confronted with a choice. Will they embrace the lullaby of dull but endurable empirical life, or the passion and stark clarity without hiding place of real life? The series is about how that choice is confronted and, for the most part, how the characters try to make very complicated and grubbily ‘atmospheric’ what is otherwise very obvious and in clear light, simply in order to ensure that they never have to confront the dangers – but also the sublime possibilities – of real life. It might be said that this series is mostly a book of lullabies. This chapter is divided into two substantive parts. In the first section, attention is paid to the strategies of the avoidance of real life that run through the Tales of the Four Seasons. The films show characters that glimpse real life and then do all that they possibly can to obscure and obfuscate what they see. Where there is simplicity they bring complication and confusion. How? In answering this question the key characters are Natasha from A Tale of Springtime, Gaspard and Margot from A Summer’s Tale and Rosine and Isabelle from A Tale of Autumn. Of all of these, perhaps Rosine is the most interesting, and a lot of attention will be paid to her. Now, that little list does not include one of the films in the series, A Winter’s Tale. The reason for the absence is simple. Whereas the three films already mentioned are about the avoidance of real life, A Winter’s Tale is about a wager on its acceptance. As such, the second part of this chapter turns to Félicie. It is argued that her character is significant in Rohmer’s universe because through a wager, through an act of faith, she subordinates empirical life to the chance of the appearance of an asked for but not at all causally willed, miracle. Félicie is the culmination of Rohmer’s theo-logia. She embraces the empirical void and is receptive to the possibility of an irruption of grace. Félicie takes the chance of real life.

Atmosphere Lukács said that ‘In ordinary life we experience ourselves only peripherally – that is, we experience our motives and our relationships’. This is because ordinarily life ‘has no real necessity, but only the necessity of being empirically present, of being entangled by a thousand

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threads in a thousand accidental bonds and relationships’. These threads are of themselves without any deep or profound meaning and ‘everything that is, could just as well be otherwise’ (Lukács 1974: 157). Such is the metaphysical basis of empirical life. It has no this-worldly, empirical, inevitability at all. It is precisely the threat of the revelation of the accidental basis of everything that situates us in the world (that makes us present) that the glimpse of real life makes tangible, and it leads to the desperate attempt to shore up the empirical by turning it into an erstwhile necessity. From this it follows that in our experience of ourselves we turn away from the unambiguous ‘big questions’ and focus instead on the ambiguities of our empirical motivations and relationships, since they are always in and of the empirical present. The more the latter obsess, the less the former oppress. The empirical becomes dominant. Consequently empirical ambiguities are embraced since they help to keep the unambiguous at bay. This tendency is exactly what Pascal condemned. It is through a relentless focus on the ambiguities and the accidents of the empirical that an ‘atmosphere’ is created that makes sure that the clear light of unambiguous real life can never get through or, if it does, that it might be passed over without too much difficulty (although perhaps with increasing regret, that is part of the meaning of a sentimental education). The relentless concentration can take the form of the transformation of entirely contingent love relationships into an erstwhile fate that cannot be avoided and for which all must be sacrificed, and therefore the ambiguities of empirical life become a problem, yet an attractive one, because they mean that the accident of love need never be glimpsed (the initial accident becomes subordinate to the matter of maintenance). Or it can involve acts of will that allow for the conceited belief that the ambiguous things of the empirical world need to be, and can be, put in order and subordinated to a design. Consequently, atmosphere can be defined as the product of social and individual emphasis on the ambiguities of the empirical, in order to hide away the dreaded unambiguous real. Atmosphere is what makes the ambiguous appear to men and women as their inevitable fate, and which means that a life on the periphery of the world can come to seem like the only and maybe the best place that life might possibly be lived. It is a metaphysical lie but an empirical comfort. The Tales of the Four Seasons share a formal structure in which ambiguity is created through the introduction into unambiguous relationships of an extra character that causes confusion and instability. In this way, the clarity of the unambiguous is fogged, and none of the characters

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have to confront its challenge. The formal structure involves the more or less wilful transformation by the characters of dyadic into triadic relationships. The sociologist Georg Simmel identified dyads as social forms that have only two participants. The problem with dyadic relationships is that they are always confronted with the danger of their termination. Whereas larger groups can withstand the loss of one participant, by definition a dyad cannot. Simmel said, ‘A dyad ... depends on each of its two elements alone – in its death, though not in its life: for its life it needs both, but for its death, only one’. The consequence of this unambiguous fragility is that ‘it makes the dyad into a group that feels itself both endangered and irreplaceable, and thus into the real locus not only of authentic sociological tragedy, but also of sentimentalism and elegiac problems’ (Simmel 1950: 124). This is precisely the temper of the Tales of the Four Seasons. In all of them, dyadic relationships are identified as irreplaceable and essential, but they are also presented as fundamentally endangered. They are threatened not by death, that great stranger from Rohmer’s cinematic universe, but by geographical mobility and spatial absence. It is very noticeable that the series has a recurrent theme about the physical absence of the dyadic other. In A Tale of Springtime, Natasha is trying to come to terms with the absence of her mother. A Winter’s Tale is all about the absence of Charles. Meanwhile, in A Summer’s Tale, Margot’s boyfriend is in the South Pacific and she is waiting for him ‘like a sailor’s wife’ and Lena, Gaspard’s rather atrocious girlfriend, only appears quite late on in the film. As such, dyadic relationships are at once the site of a tragic sensibility and also somewhat mournful. No dyadic relationship in Rohmer’s work is entirely happy, yet many teeter on the brink of sentimentality. What happens in the Tales of the Four Seasons is that complicating triadic forms that act as atmospheric pollution are put around the unambiguously endangered but irreplaceable dyad. Thanks to this creation of new social forms, the truth of accident can be pushed to one side and, thereby, the key motivation becomes one of sustaining the relationship that is taken by the characters to be central to all that they are and might be. Simmel argued that dyadic forms could be intensified for their participants by the introduction of a third element. The arrival of the third can make ‘the dyadic relationship more intensive and strong. For, many otherwise undeveloped, unifying forces that derive from more remote psychical reservoirs come to life in the feeling of exclusive dependence upon one another and of hopelessness that cohesion might come from anywhere but immediate interaction’. But if the triadic complication of dyadic forms can thus be the basis of a certain

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kind of desperate strength, it also poses the possibility of a disturbance to intimacy and ‘this is the reason why the dyad constitutes the chief seat of jealousy’ (Simmel 1950: 136). Ambiguity is generated so that truths need never be confronted, although this does not mean that all problems consequently disappear. According to Simmel, triadic forms pertain when a third social element is introduced into previously dyadic forms. With this new element, everything changes because ‘The appearance of the third party indicates transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrast’ (Simmel 1950: 145). In short, the triadic form is one in which the different members have to spend time negotiating their mutual relationships, forging alliances and differences, and so questions of threat and irreplaceability become less significant at an empirical level than matters of presence and co-presence. Exactly this theme can be seen in the series, where a number of the characters go to considerable lengths to ensure that the unambiguous truths about dyadic forms are surrounded with atmospheric pollution. So, Igor and Eve are in a relationship with which they are both content, but Natasha refuses to accept it and thus does all that she can to make sure that Jeanne’s presence makes Eve jealous and Igor look elsewhere. Margot and Gaspard become potentially intimate friends while he is waiting for Lena to arrive, and so Margot decides to smother the fragility of this relationship by adding Solene into the equation. Finally, in An Autumn Tale, Rosine tries to disguise what appears to be her playful desire for Etienne by pushing him towards Magali (only for Etienne to go elsewhere of his own volition and much to Rosine’s annoyance). In each case there is an unambiguous relationship founded on an accident of meeting, and in each case a character intervenes to add a triadic third element into the dyad and, thus, to render the clear opaque. Consequently Igor is torn and loses Eve and possibly Jeanne too. Margot and Gaspard avoid one another by making sure that others get in the way, and Rosine tries to avoid the contingency of her close relationship with Magali (who she clearly sees as a surrogate mother) by cementing it through Etienne. The trouble is that Rosine proves herself to be unable to keep her jealousy at bay, and everything that she has planned falls apart. Rosine is the greatest schemer in all of Rohmer’s work. She is the character who is most obsessed with subordinating the unambiguous to the ambiguous. She is the young student whose boyfriend Léo is Magali’s son, but who is also at the evident end of an affair with Etienne her philosophy teacher. Rosine tries to ensure that Etienne and Magali become a couple, presumably so that she can stay in contact with both,

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and, moreover, she becomes exceptionally jealous when her teacher lover talks to another young woman at the wedding reception that Isabelle has organised. Perhaps Villella provides a more succinct summary of Rosine’s tendency to multiply and create ambiguity: ‘She remains emotionally tied to Etienne throughout the film, which becomes fully evident at the wedding where she is jealous of the former student Etienne constantly “eyes” and in the fact that she finally goes home with him and not Léo’. Furthermore: ‘Her relation to Magali is ... [an] area of ambiguity – even she cannot clearly explain its intensity’ (Villella 2000). Jacob Leigh has carried out an insightful analysis of Rosine’s meetings with Etienne. They emphasise the lengths to which she goes to create an atmospheric fog of ambiguity where there might otherwise be all too much clarity. Rosine’s problem is that she does not want to admit that her largely accidental relationship with Etienne might actually be possessed of the unambiguous weight of the real. As Leigh notes: ‘Throughout Conte d’automne’s scenes of these ex-lovers, Rohmer contrasts Rosine’s verbal resistance to Etienne with her hesitant physical welcoming of his embrace: she declares that their relationship is over; he repeatedly responds tactilely; several times, she accepts his touch before pulling away’ (Leigh 2006). For example, Etienne embraces Rosine from behind; she nestles in his body and smiles as he kisses her shoulder. However, when he slips his fingers under the shoulder strap of her vest-top, she pulls away. Etienne expresses confusion about why such a trivial act should cause Rosine to move away from him. She responds that Etienne has gone beyond the boundary line that separates friends from lovers. In other words, Etienne is unambiguously attracted to Rosine, and yet she responds with complete ambiguity. Her nestling into Etienne is hardly the action of a simple friend, and yet she announces that that is all that they are now. However Etienne could not but be ‘confused ... by Rosine’s to-ing and fro-ing across the boundary between love and friendship’ (Leigh 2006). After all, Rosine is probably confused too. Her struggle to mask the unambiguous truth in a fog of ambiguity leads to Rosine’s plot to bring together Etienne and Magali: ‘Rosine meddles in Magali’s affairs apparently selflessly, but her meddling disguises to herself the extent to which Etienne continues to attract her ... In her plotting, Rosine ... seeks a distraction from her own feelings; but, as her crotchety sulking at the wedding reception reveals, she remains capable of powerful jealousies’ (Leigh 2006; see also Leigh 2007). Rosine wants to distract from the accident of the dyad by means of implicating it in a web of triadic relationships, but instead of

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bolstering her relationship with Etienne on her own terms, all Rosine manages to do is cause herself to be exceedingly jealous. In all, Rosine is an exemplar of what Simmel called coquetry. For him, coquetry is a form of sociability in which eroticism takes on the form of play, and therefore in which interaction takes place on the basis of what is promised and yet withheld. It is a form of sociability that is always at once more and less than it appears. Indeed, by Simmel’s definition, coquetry is impossible without the creation and manipulation of ambiguity. He argued that ‘The nature of feminine coquetry is to play up, alternately, allusive promises and allusive withdrawals – to attract the male but always to stop short of a decision, and to reject him but never to deprive him of all hope’ (Simmel 1950: 50). Rosine, for example, gives Etienne hope when she lets him embrace her and later she sits on his lap with her arm flung around his neck. She lets Etienne put his fingers under her shoulder strap, but immediately pulls away, and so rejects him but, perhaps, only this time. Yet coquetry is only a form of sociability when the man indulges in the game on its own terms, and not because of what it evidently promises. According to Simmel, coquetry is not sociability until the man ‘asks for no more than this freely suspended play which only dimly reflects the erotically definitive as a remote symbol; until he is no longer attracted by the lust for the erotic element or by the fear of it which is all he can see in the coquettish allusions and preliminaries’ (Simmel 1950: 51). Rosine’s tragedy is that all the time she can play the game of coquetry on her own terms all is well in her world, but as soon as Etienne evidently accepts that this is a game in which that which is promised will always be withheld, and as soon as he turns elsewhere, Rosine comes face to face with the unambiguous truth that she tried so desperately to hide away. Perhaps she was attracted to Etienne after all. In the end the only one who gets lost in the atmospheric fog that Rosine creates is Rosine herself. Maria Tortajada, however, contends that coquetry is just one variation on the much broader theme of seduction. She argues that An Autumn Tale shares with a lot of Rohmer’s work a concern to explore what she refers to as ‘seduction through ambiguity’. Tortajada begins by arguing that seduction is ‘the appearance of desire, the method by which desire exposes itself to the one it wishes to reach’ (Tortajada 2004a: 230). Now this fairly simple definition needs to be unpacked. What it means is that the seducer presents the object of seduction with an appearance of desire. As such, the seducer represents her or his desire to a spectator, but this in turn raises the question of whether the representation truly reflects desire, or whether the connection, between the representation

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and the represented, by contrast is false. For Tortajada this question of connection is the basis of ambiguity. First, and within the film, there is the question of the seducer, and second, there is the matter of the response of the object of seduction. But Tortajada says that there is a third place too, that of the spectator. The ‘seduced spectator, just like the seduced characters, can never be sure of the seducer’s desire. Even if the hero talks about it openly, we can never be sure that he is telling the truth’ (Tortajada 2004a: 231). This is of course the basis of so much of the irony that is given to the Moral Tales by the frequent gap between the images on the screen and the complacency of the retrospective narration, but in the Comedies and Proverbs and the Tales of the Four Seasons, Rohmer leaves the audience to work out the ambiguities for themselves. To this extent there is a kind of similarity between the object of seduction in the film and the seduced spectator, in that they are both required to try to understand whether or not the seducer is telling the truth. In A Summer’s Tale Margot raises all of these ambiguities and questions especially well. She is always something of a mystery. In this context all of the questions that so bedevil Rohmer’s characters emerge in all their force: ‘what is the nature of this desire of which I see the appearances? Am I really the object of this desire? How does this seduction address me, what does its representation want from me? Is it really destined toward me?’ (Tortajada 2004a: 231). These are exactly the questions that Rohmer’s characters, and his heroines in particular, never stop asking themselves. And as soon as a character like Margot is seen, neither does the audience stop asking these questions either. This ambiguous situation can be seen in the case of Isabelle too in An Autumn Tale. She has decided that the best way for Magali to meet someone is if she, Isabelle, places a lonely-hearts advertisement in a local paper on her behalf. Isabelle’s plan is that she will meet Gérald, who replies, and act as an ‘ambassador’ on Magali’s behalf. The grand plan will come to fruition at the wedding reception when Isabelle will leave Magali and Gérald alone together. Well, the last part of the plan goes quite well (despite Rosine’s interference when she forces Magali to meet Etienne), but when Isabelle is acting as ‘ambassador’ her situation becomes increasingly ambiguous. For example, Isabelle tells Gérald at one of their slightly too numerous lunch meetings that ‘It’s rather risky to meet an attractive man. I could have fallen in love with you’. This is a remark that operates at a number of levels since Isabelle by ‘immediately denying the last assumption ... expresses her ambiguous attitude’ (Tortajada 2004a: 234). First then, Isabelle is the seducer because even though she is ostensibly acting as Magali’s ambassador she still has to

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get Gérald interested in the plot. Second, Isabelle has to allow herself to be seduced by Gérald in order to discover if he is a suitable man for Magali. Both of these needs require by the logic of the plot that, in their initial meetings at least, Isabelle actually pass herself off as Magali. As such she is at once seducer and seduced and ‘What really creates the seduction is not the man, the object of desire, but being in the unstable position of the third person, which is set at the moment Isabelle enters into her double and ambiguous role as both Isabelle and Magali. Seduction has produced the excitement of desire’ (Tortajada 2004a: 234–5). But third, there is the position of the spectator, who looks upon all of this ambiguity and is, according to Tortajada, seduced too: ‘The spectator’s seduction does not only depend on narrative structures, on ambiguous interpretations of meaning with regard to the plot. This seduction also works by placing the spectator in the unstable place of the third person in relation to what is represented’ (Tortajada 2004a: 235; see also Tortajada 2004b). This complex of seduction is the nub of the exceptional ambiguity of the very final frame of An Autumn Tale (Warehime 2001: 127). At the wedding reception, Isabelle is dancing with her husband. Her daughter is now married, and Magali and Gérald appear as if they might be able to make something out of their meeting. Everything is in its place, and as Isabelle is seen over her husband’s shoulder, the look on her face represents ... what? Fear that this is all that remains for her, acceptance that now the autumn years have arrived, loss, regret, unrequited love, or contentment? It is impossible to say what the final image represents, and the preceding story offers little by way of guidance. The spectator is put into the position of the third place that Tortajada identifies, and so the spectator is also thereby seduced by ambiguity. For the characters and the audience alike, the seduction, coquetry and plotting that runs through An Autumn Tale has created so much atmospheric fog that any chance of an encounter with the unambiguous has become difficult if not, actually, quite impossible. The price that Isabelle and Rosine have to pay for their attempt to avoid the unambiguous is massive. If her final look is taken on its own terms, Isabelle is gazing towards a future in which it will become clear that everything that she values is largely based on encounters that were initially perfectly accidental and contained in the fragile dyad. Meanwhile, Rosine leaves the wedding reception with Etienne. She has likely discovered through her jealousy that her feelings towards him were quite unambiguous, but that thanks to her game of coquetry she has now lost him for good. They have both discovered that trying to

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make everything how it is as it ought to be proves only that everything could be otherwise than it is intended to be.

Faith Simone Weil wrote that ‘The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass’. She also wrote: ‘The imagination, filler of the void, is essentially a liar’ (Weil 1952: 16). If these elliptical remarks are tied to the themes from Lukács, then it can be contended that the unambiguous opens up the void. It reveals the accident and contingency of the empirical and cuts it adrift from any metaphysical moorings. This is the reason why love, for example, is so often said to be like a natural force about which the lover could do absolutely nothing. The utter contingency of the love relationship cannot be admitted since, to so admit, would also be to accept that all of one’s most valued empirical relationships are too fragile (because they are dyadic) to be able to bear the weight of investments of real life. As Roland Barthes saw, love has two affirmations. The first occurs when the lovers encounter one another and there is a feeling that seems almost natural because it is so overwhelming: ‘there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything’. The second affirmation undermines the first, and it might be said that it reveals the void that lurks beneath it: ‘my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and of oblation’. How then is the doubt overcome, how is the void avoided? Barthes says that the doubts can be overcome by means of what amounts to a third affirmation, ‘what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference’ (Barthes 1978: 24). Put another way then, the second, doubtful, affirmation is overcome through a desperate restatement of the first affirmation and by the imaginative pretence that the reiteration is always a new beginning and never a return. The third affirmation complicates the unambiguous doubts of the second by naturalising the first. It is the work of imagination to fill the void, to complicate the unambiguous, by subordinating it to the wills and whiles of empirical life, by subordinating the second of love’s affirmations to the first or third. By this argument imagination is less about the creation of a desirable ‘what could be’ than it is a more or less desperate attempt to refuse any

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need to accept the unambiguously true. It is in this way that, to return to Weil, imagination fills the void in the empirical that the unambiguous throws open and, therefore, it is also in this way that imagination is essentially a liar. Imagination is a kind of coquetry of untruth. This is definitely the mode of operation of Natasha, Rosine and Isabelle in the Tales of the Four Seasons. Perhaps Margot too becomes so imaginative in the plans for love, and takes such efforts to make sure that Gaspard spends time with Solene and Lena, precisely because the utter contingency and dyadic fragility of her love for the boyfriend in the South Pacific has been revealed by Gaspard’s equally accidental arrival into her life. What all of these heroines are trying to do is fill up the void through incredibly imaginative schemes, and in these terms the empirical success or otherwise of the plots is less important than the plotting itself. After all, if a plot is known to succeed then the barrier that it can establish between the empirical and the void of the unambiguously real might well collapse. If a plot is never fulfilled it can continue to obsess and distract, although always at the cost of dissatisfaction and a sense of frustration or loss. This is what Rosine and Isabelle appreciate at the end of An Autumn Tale, but what Natasha does not come to learn in A Tale of Springtime. In the first place, Rosine’s imagination releases unintended consequences while Isabelle’s seems to have been all too successful. For both of them, the imaginative scheme reaches a kind of conclusion. In the second case, in A Tale of Springtime, Natasha learns little because the outcome of her imaginative plan to bring her father and Jeanne together is never revealed. Rosine and Isabelle live through a story at the end of which is the void that the story itself was intended to cover, and Natasha is stuck in an eternal episode that likely has no definite ending. For example, the question that A Tale of Springtime raises but quite fails to answer is whether Natasha will be happy if Igor and Jeanne get together, or if she will be unhappy. Margot at the end of A Summer’s Tale appreciates that her scheming has simply killed the chance of the thing that she might love, a relationship with Gaspard. All of this would be a game and of little consequence if it did not contain the theological dimension that Weil identifies. If imagination fills the void, it also blocks the fissures in the casing of the empirical through which grace might pass. Consequently, Weil recommended that ‘We must continually suspend the work of the imagination filling the void within ourselves’. Then we will be able to discover that ‘come what may, the universe is full’ (Weil 1952: 18; original emphasis), and what the universe is full of is nothing less than grace, that freely given gift from

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God through which empirical life is transformed into real life. Natasha, Rosine and Isabelle, all fail to see the fullness of the universe and, in the end, all they are left with is the need to continue the work of imagination in order to fill the void of their empirical life. They need to continue to work to make sure that the void within is filled with distractions and that the contingent relationships that make them present in the world can come to seem like inescapable fate. Whether or not Natasha and Rosine will succeed is an open question, but it is certain that at the very end of An Autumn Tale Isabelle comes to appreciate the costs of such a way of maintaining empirical life. The case of Margot is somewhat more complicated because although all of her plotting and playing in the empirical has led her to oscillate between the two affirmations of love in her relationship with Gaspard (Gaspard himself is far too lacking in self-awareness to glimpse any of this), at the end of A Summer’s Tale she seems to be a character who has achieved at once a kind of innocence and a lot of experience. She is innocent because for her the void will not entirely open even after Gaspard’s desperate flight from his three women. In their farewell scene Margot tells Gaspard that her boyfriend will shortly be returning to her and therefore her wait has been rewarded (although the audience must ask the question whether Margot is telling Gaspard the truth or, to put the same point the other way round, is she likely to lie in order to keep the fissures in the empirical closed and to save face in front of Gaspard?). Yet Margot has also gained experience because she has seen that living a lie can mean missed chances. However there is one character that rescues the Tales of the Four Seasons from complete tragedy or farce. Indeed, there is one character that acts as the counterpoint to all of the delusionists, deceivers and schemers in Rohmer’s work. This is Félicie in A Winter’s Tale. In her fragility Rohmer’s theo-logia speaks, and it speaks in the voice of Simone Weil: ‘Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes the void’ (Weil 1952: 10). Félicie accepts the void of the empirical; she refuses to fill it with the work of imagination and is thus receptive and attentive to the infusion of grace into her life. Félicie refuses ambiguity and is open to the reception of an intimation of the unambiguously real. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Félicie is one of the misunderstood characters in Rohmer’s work. Heinemann calls her an ‘uncultivated, working-class hairdresser’ (Heinemann 2000: 52). At one level this is a perfectly accurate description of Félicie, but it is an entirely empirical nomination of her, and quite misses her other dimensions. Félicie is a character that is

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torn between two empirical choices. On the one hand there is the world of vanity that is represented by Maxence, the owner of the hairdressing salon. He wants Félicie and Lise to move with him to Nevers, to start a new life as a family. On the other hand there is the world of cultivation and of reading books without understanding them that is represented by the librarian Loïc and his somewhat awful group of friends (with whom Félicie spends one long belittling evening listening to a discussion about books that she has never read). In these empirical terms, Félicie is indeed an uncultivated hairdresser. But of all of Rohmer’s characters she is the one who is most attentive to the void and the fullness to which it gestures. Félicie is the least imaginative of Rohmer’s characters, the least distracted by the empirical world; and therefore she is also the one who is most receptive to grace. It is not at all farfetched to identify Félicie as the point of redemption in Rohmer’s entire body of work. However, she is not presented as a figure of saintly virtue or as a mere carrier of theological principles. Félicie is very human. She is torn, she is confused, and she has to make hard decisions that will have an impact upon others. Félicie has to make choices without knowing in advance what will be best and whether the choice she makes will reap any reward. Quite simply then, every bit as much as she is a character that carries a certain theological weight, Félicie is also just like us. Félicie’s empirical life is not comfortable. She is a hard-working single mother, living in a cramped house with her mother and little daughter. She is offered ways out by two men who seem sincerely to love her: Maxence and Loïc. But Félicie has never forgotten Charles, the father of her child with whom she had a brief holiday romance and, due to her own mistake over addresses, has never seen since: ‘oscillating between two lovers, Félicie still cherishes Charles as her ideal man and their summer romance as her only experience of true love’ (Heinemann 2000: 52). She is torn between the pendulum swings of empirical life with their ambiguities (Maxence or Loïc, Loïc or Maxence?) and the stark clarity of real life, of the real love, that reveals the void that is at once terrifying and yet potentially full. The key moment comes shortly after Félicie has plunged into the empirical and moved to Nevers with Maxence, to work as the manager of the hairdressing salon that he has opened. It is very shortly before Christmas, and Félicie takes Lise to the cathedral to see the Nativity scene. Félicie stands before the crib and then goes to sit at the other side of the building, as Lise’s footsteps are heard, tapping out the sound of her exploration. Yet the sound of the footsteps disappears and the camera pans to the altar and then to Félicie’s rapt face.

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Félicie has been infused with inspiration, but the editing suggests that ‘it is not from the building itself that her inspiration comes: she looks into the distance with an air of intense concentration’ (Ennis 1996: 313). This is nothing less than a moment of grace, which Félicie is able to receive precisely because within her there is an empty space between two suitors, and that empty space is made into a void that is then filled through an act of grace itself. Ennis contends that Rohmer seems to suggest that Félicie has experienced a revelation of God through her visual concentration on the altar, but he points out that there is also an auditory dimension to the moment of revelation since, for no realist reason, a few bars of the music from the opening idyll of A Winter’s Tale (the idyll of the romance of Charles and Félicie) are heard again. The music re-members Charles in Félicie’s life. She does not simply recall the idyll, but she also commits herself to her long lost true love (Ennis 1996: 314). Félicie leaves Maxence and returns to Paris because she believes that only there will she meet Charles. The void has opened up. After all, presumably she now misses Charles as never before precisely because he has been re-membered, and yet through an acceptance of the void that her lack of imagination makes all the easier to see (Félicie is neither a schemer nor someone who wears her knowledge as a badge of ostentation), grace infuses the empirical and opens it up to a wager on the real. The scene in Nevers cathedral obviously echoes that in ClermontFerrand’s cathedral that features in My Night at Maud’s. In both cases Rohmer’s story turns around a moment when the central character carries out a leap of faith. However, the narrator of the Moral Tale only embraces the terms of the wager to the extent that it fits in with his own plans and will lead him to a good marriage to his ideal kind of woman. The narrator does not make the wager on the basis of a petition so much as an expectation. The situation is quite the reverse with Félicie. The moment of the infusion of grace in the cathedral is the moment when she makes a wager on waiting for the real (or perhaps it is better to put the point the other way around and to identify the moment of the wager as the moment of infusion). She knows that the alternatives of empirical life can never be satisfactory, and so her wager consists in an acceptance of the need to wait and to pay attention in the hope (and not at all the expectation) that the unambiguously real will be revealed, that her sacrifices will be redeemed and that the void will be replaced with plenitude. It is faith through repentance for having moved from Paris to Nevers with Maxence that brings Charles’s back into life, Félicie’s life, just as in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (which she

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goes to see with Loïc) it is faith through repentance that brings Hermione back to Leontes. Charles returns in the mundane setting of a bus journey when Félicie quite contingently sits opposite him. They recognise one another, she takes him home to meet her mother and their daughter. Charles asks Félicie to be the manager of his restaurant, and the film ends with everyone looking into a future that they cannot possibly know. In short, Rohmer is not crass enough to represent the miracle of Charles’s reappearance as a moment of sentimental closure or as an ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ resolution. It is not impossible that Félicie will come to realise that Charles is not her ideal, that he is just another person stuck in the empirical world, trying to avoid confrontation with the void. Félicie has hoped in the same spirit of St Teresa of Avila, although in an empirical temper: ‘Hope, O my soul hope. You know neither the day nor the hour ... Dream that the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end’ (quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1821). That is the substance of Félicie’s love for Charles, but the question that remains dangling is whether she also has the perseverance to endure, as that real hope increasingly has to be made to sit alongside the empirical Charles. A Winter’s Tale makes its audience will that Félicie’s wager will be repaid but it also ‘serves to undermine our belief in Félicie’s future happiness, for although she idolises Charles and her revelation in the cathedral leads her to bet on him, Pascal’s bet may be lost ... Félicie may find herself becoming ... bitter. She would have given up two relationships for a man who could not live up to her ideal image of him’ (Ennis 1996: 318). Or as Maupassant might have had it, there is no reason to suppose that happiness is fun. Yet without faith, the risk would never have been taken, and Félicie would have ended up with a different kind of nothing. As it is, the film ends with her standing on the threshold to either the deepest void or the greatest plenitude.

Conclusion The Tales of the Four Seasons are the culmination of Rohmer’s dealings with the ‘now’, and they are his most poignant human dramas. In this series, the metaphysical dilemmas of the Moral Tales have disappeared, as have the desirable and destructive Gardens of Eden that haunted the women of the Comedies and Proverbs. With this final series to be set in the ‘now’, Rohmer brings the human to the fore, even more powerfully

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than he had in any of his preceding work. The characters in this series are, in fact, very recognisably ‘real’ because they all sing simultaneously songs of innocence and experience, and all of them glimpse the chance that real life is so terrifying and requires such a gamble that it might be better to settle for the compromises and disappointments of everyday life. And yet, even if this might be the lesson that is learnt by Natasha, Margot, Rosine and Isabelle, there is also the maligned and childishly hopeful Félicie. She looks at the narrow swing of the pendulum of empirical life, and refuses to accept that it can offer fulfilment. Instead, sitting in the cathedral, she makes herself a void, suspends imagination and is infused with the gift of grace. Félicie stops seeing the empirical and her hope is rewarded with a moment of the infusion of unseen grace that will cause her to see all the more carefully, even on a Paris bus. Rohmer’s work is possessed of a theo-logia that can be summed up in the principle that it is necessary to pay absolute attention. This is the premise of his realism, the demand that he makes of his audience, and the problem that bedevils his characters. The film-maker needs to pay attention to Creation, the audience to the beauty of humanity in its setting with all its confusions, hesitations and hopes, and the characters are called to pay attention to the chance of the miracle of the infusion of grace that will transform empirical life into real life. In all of this there can be no guarantees that the attention will be attentive enough or directed in the right places. But it can be guaranteed that if the attention is not even attempted, life will be lived within the narrowest swing of the pendulum and without any strength or, ultimately, reality. Rohmer’s theo-logia is saying that there is more to the world than meets the eye, and that wonders can only be seen through the development of a disposition to look for that which is unseen. Félicie, one of the less erudite characters in ‘Rohmer territory’, becomes its best and indeed sole teacher.

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References 165 Crisp, C.G. (1977) ‘The Ideology of Realism: Eric Rohmer: Celluloid and Marble and My Night with Maud’, The Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 2: 3–32. Crisp, C.G. (1988) Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Davis, Melton S. (1971) ‘Rohmer’s Formula: Boy Talks with Girl, Boy Argues with Girl, Boy Says ...’, The New York Times Magazine, 21 November: 38–9, 82–98. Dalle Vache, Angela (1996) Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film, London: Athlone. Durgnat, Raymond (1990) ‘Eric Rohmer: The Enlightenment’s Last Gleaming’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 57: 187–8. Elliott, Peter J. (1995) Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite: The Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ennis, Thomas (1993) ‘Games People Play: An Analysis of Eric Rohmer’s L’ami de mon amie’, Nottingham French Studies, 32(1): 121–7. Ennis, Tom (1996) ‘Textual Interplay: The Case of Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud and Conte d’hiver’, French Cultural Studies, 7: 309–19. Fawell, John (1993) ‘Eric Rohmer’s Oppressive Summers’, The French Review, 66(5): 777–87. Ferenzi, Aurélian (2001) ‘Interview with Eric Rohmer’, Senses of Cinema, at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/Rohmer.html Flanagan, Kieran (1996) The Enchantment of Sociology: A Study of Theology and Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Forbes, Jill (1992) The Cinema in France after the New Wave, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gerlach, John (1980) ‘Rohmer, Kleist and The Marquise of O’, Literature and Film Quarterly, 8(2): 84–91. Goldmann, Lucien (1964) The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goldmann, Lucien (1972) Racine, trans. Alastair Hamilton, London: Writers and Readers. Greeley, Andrew (2000) The Catholic Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press. Grey, Tobias (2001) ‘The French Revolutionary’, The Observer, 2 September. Hammond, Robert and Pagliano, Jean-Pierre (1982) ‘Eric Rohmer on Film Scripts and Film Plans’, Literature and Film Quarterly, 10(4): 219–25. Herbst, Hildburg (1988) ‘Coloring Word: Rohmer’s Film Adaptation of Kleist’s Novella The Marquise of O’, Literature and Film Quarterly, 16(3): 201–9. Heinemann, David (2000) ‘Reinventing Romance’, Film Comment, 36(6): 50–4. Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1958) Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Huysmans, Joris-Karl (2003) With the Flow, trans. Andrew Brown, London: Hesperus Press. Insdorf, Annette (1999) Double Lives, Second Chances. The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, New York: Hyperion. Jeffries, Stuart (2004) ‘Agent provocateur’, The Guardian, G2 section, 26 October: 14. Jones, Edward T. (1981) ‘Claire’s Knee and That Obscure Object of Desire: Desire under the Helms of Rohmer and Buñuel’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 9(1): 3–8. Kemp, Philip (2004) ‘Summer’s Tale’, Sight & Sound, October: 42–3.

166 References King, Norman (2000) ‘Eye for Irony: Eric Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)’, in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts, second edition, London: Routledge. Lazen, Matthew (2004) ‘“En perme à Nantes’’: Jacques Demy and New Wave Place’, Studies in French Cinema, 4(3): 187–96. Leigh, Jacob (2006) ‘The Caprices of Rosine or the Follies of a Fortnight: Parallel Intrigues in Eric Rohmer’s “Conte d’automne”’, Undercurrent, number 2, www.fipresci.org/undercurrent Leigh, Jacob (2007) ‘Reading Rohmer’ in John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (eds), Close Up 02, London: Wallflower. Lennon, Peter (1992) ‘The Accidental Auteur’, The Guardian, 11 December. Lennon, Peter (1999) ‘A Way with Women’, The Guardian, Weekend, 27 February: 18. Lewis, C.S. (1940) The Problem of Pain, London: The Centenary Press. Lichfield, John (2001) ‘French Critics Lose Heads over Rohmer’s Anti-revolution Film’, Independent on Sunday, 9 September: 19. Lukács, Georg (1974) Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Merlin Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (1999) ‘Un Homme et des Femmes’, The Independent, 18 March: 12. Mann, Chris (1999) ‘The Seasons in the Films of Eric Rohmer’, Australian Journal of Film Studies, 36(1): 101–9. Mauss, Marcel (1990) The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, London: Routledge. Mazierska, Ewa (2002) ‘Roads to Authenticity and Stability: Representation of Holidays, Relocation and Movement in the Films of Eric Rohmer’, Tourist Studies, 2(3): 223–46. McNab, Geoffrey (2001) ‘Back to the Barricades’, The Independent, 24 August: 12. Mellen, Joan (1974) Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film, London: DavisPoynter. Milne, Tom (1981) ‘Rohmer’s Siege Perilous’, Sight and Sound, volume 50, March: 192–4. Monaco, James (1976) The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, New York: Oxford University Press. Moriarty, Michael (2003) ‘Grace and Religious Belief in Pascal’, in Nicholas Hammond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pascal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neupert, Richard (2002) A History of the French New Wave Cinema, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Norman, Neil (2001) ‘The Oldest New Waver in Town’, Evening Standard, 13 September: 33. Orr, John (2005) Hitchcock and Twentieth-century Cinema, London: Wallflower Press. O’Shaughnessy, Martin (2001) ‘The Parisian Popular as Reactionary Modernization’, Studies in French Cinema, 1(2): 80–8. Pascal, Blaise (1931) Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter, London: J.M. Dent. Pascal, Blaise (1967) The Provincial Letters, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Petrie, Graham (1971) ‘Eric Rohmer: An Interview’, Film Quarterly, 24(4): 34–41. Pym, John (1986) ‘Silly Girls’, Sight and Sound, 56(1): 45–8. Reynaud, Bérénice (2000) ‘Representing the Sexual Impasse: Eric Rohmer’s Les Nuits de la pleine lune (1984)’ in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) French Film: Texts and Contexts, second edition, London: Routledge.

References 167 Rhiel, Mary (1991) ‘The Author-Function as Security Agent in Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O ...’, The German Quarterly, 64(1): 6–16. Rivière, Marie (1999) ‘Growing Old with Eric’, The Guardian, features, 24 March: 14. Rohmer, Eric (1980) Six Moral Tales, trans. Sabine d’Estrée, Farncombe: Lorrimer Publishing. Rohmer, Eric (1985a) ‘The Land of Miracles’, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma. Volume 1: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rohmer, Eric (1985b) ‘Six Characters in Search of auteurs: A Discussion about the French Cinema’, in Jim Hillier (ed.) Cahiers du Cinéma. Volume 1: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rohmer, Eric (1989) The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rohmer, Eric (1999) ‘Eric Rohmer on Conte d’été. Interviewed by Vincent Amiel and Noël Herpe’ in Michael Ciment and Noël Herpe (eds), Projections 9: French Film-makers on Film-making, trans. Pierre Hodgson, London: Faber & Faber. Rohmer, Eric (2004) ‘Triple Agent: The Director, Eric Rohmer, Speaks’, at www. ericrohmer.com/en.html Rohmer, Eric (2005) Elisabeth, Munich: Heyne Verlag. Rohmer, Eric (2007) ‘Je voulais trouver un style’, Le Monde Des Livres, 17 May. Rohmer, Eric & Chabrol, Claude (1979) Hitchcock: The First Forty-four Films, trans. Stanley Hochman, New York: Frederick Ungar. Originally published in 1957, Paris: Editions Universitaires. Sautet, Claude (1999) ‘Claude Sautet on Un Coeur en Hiver. Interviewed by Michel Sineux and Yann Tobin’, in Michael Ciment and Noël Herpe (eds), Projections 9: French Film-makers on Film-making, trans. Pierre Hodgson, London: Faber & Faber. Schilling, Derek (2005) ‘Narrativity and Theatricality in Rohmer’s Contes Moraux and Comèdies et Proverbes’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 9(4): 337–44. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1986) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Leamington Spa: Berg. Sennett, Richard (1986) The Fall of Public Man, London: Faber & Faber. Sennett, Richard (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, London: Faber & Faber. Showalter, English (1993) My Night at Maud’s, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Simmel, Georg (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff, New York: The Free Press. Sontag, Susan (1969) ‘Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson’, in James Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson, Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario. Sourian, Peter (1973) ‘Eric Rohmer: Starring Blaise Pascal’, Transatlantic Review, 48: 132–42. Sullivan, Victoria (1977) ‘The Marquise of O: Rohmer Changes His Erotic Formula’, Wide Angle, vol. 1: 61–3. Theophrastus (1929) The Characters of Theophratus, trans. J.M. Edmonds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Kevin (1968) ‘“Six in Paris” on Los Feliz Screen’, Los Angeles Times, 9 October.

168 References Thomson, David (2002) The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, fourth edition, London: Little, Brown. Tortajada, Maria (2004a) ‘Eric Rohmer and the Mechanics of Seduction’, Studies in French Cinema, 4(3): 229–38. Tortajada, Maria (2004b) ‘From Libertinage to Eric Rohmer: Transcending “Adaptation”’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), A Companion to Literature and Film, Oxford: Blackwell. Toumarkine, Doris (1989) ‘Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle’, Film Journal International, August: 58. Tracz, Tamara (2005) ‘Triple Agent: Portrait of the Unknowable Other, Reflection of the Unknowable Self’, at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/05/34/triple_agent.html Vest, James M. (2004) ‘To Catch a Liar: Bazin, Chabrol and Truffaut Encounter Hitchcock’, in Richard Allen and Sam Ishil-Gonzáles (eds), Hitchcock: Past and Future, London: Routledge. Villella, Fiona A. (2000) ‘Magical Realism in Conte d’automne (Autumn Tale, 1998)’, Senses of Cinema, at www.sensesofcinema.com Vincendeau, Ginette (2004) ‘Painting from Nature’, Sight and Sound, November: 38–9. Walsh, Martin (1976) ‘Structured Ambiguity in the Films of Eric Rohmer’, Film Criticism, 1(2): 30–9. Warehime, Marja (2001) ‘Eric Rohmer in the ’90s: Seasonal Variations in the Conte Moral’, Philological Papers: West Virginia University, 47: 120–8. Weil, Simone (1952) Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. White, Armond (1996) ‘Auteurcritique ... Eric Rohmer Reflects’, Film Comment, 32(5): 14–19. Wiegand, Chris (2001) French New Wave, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Williams, Christopher (1980) Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ziolkowski, Fabrice (1982) ‘Comedies and Proverbs: An Interview with Eric Rohmer’, Wide Angle, 5(1): 62–7.

Index absent God, 87–9, 101, 137 accidental, the, 13, 99, 150, 152–3, 156–8, 162 acting styles, 110–13, 117, 147 actors, amateur, 4, 9–10, 19, 112, 148 Adair, Gilbert, 49 aesthetic perceptions/ representations, 22–8, 73, 133–4 Almendros, Nestor, 47–8, 51–2, 54–5, 57 ambiguity, 22, 26–7, 132, 147, 150, 152–6, 159–60 appropriation, 58, 60–2, 65–7, 69, 71–2, 74–5 atmosphere, 44–6, 148–57 audience, 20–1 engagement of, 88, 105–7, 119 role of, 49–50, 93, 99, 105, 118, 131 Autumn Tale, An (1998), 6, 50–1, 67–8, 72, 140–2, 146–9, 152–9 Aviator’s Wife, The (1981), 12, 19–20, 54–5, 58, 61, 66, 113–15, 117–22, 125, 134, 144 awards, 1, 23, 77, 108, 139–40 Balzac, Honoré de, 81 Père Goriot, 6 Barthes, Roland, 157 Baudelaire, Charles, 80–1, 87, 133, 135 Bazin, André, 7–10, 12 beauty, 11–13, 81 Bedouelle, Guy, 13 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 121–2 Biblical references, 70 Blue Hour, the, 71, 73 Bois ton café (1986), 54 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de Voyage around the World, 83 bourgeoisie, 85–6, 91, 94, 104, 143–4 Bovary, Emma theme, 120, 132–7 Bresson, Robert, 109, 111

Bright, Martin, 55–6 Bruyère, Jean de la, 83–4 Cahiers du cinéma, 3, 7, 76, 78, 110, 137 Carné, Marcel, 9 catastrophic events, 3, 35–43 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 89, 162 Catholicism, 7, 12–17, 33–4, 38, 41, 70, 74, 81, 86–9, 95–9, 144 centredness, 127–9, 133 CER (Compagnie Eric Rohmer), 21 Chabrol, Claude, 4, 86–7, 106 L’Enfer, 3 chance encounters, 13, 99–101, 106, 152, 156, 158, 162 Charney, Hanna, 82 choices, 93, 95, 149, 160 Chrétien de Troyes, 25, 114 Christian symbolism, 33–5, 37–9, 41, 70–2, 74 churches, 66–7, 74, 160–1 cinematic style, 2–4, 9, 25–6, 118, 128, 141 circumstance and grace, 97–106 Claire’s Knee (1970), 47, 50–1, 77, 79–80, 82, 84, 91–3, 99, 102–4 clarity, 40, 149, 160 closure, avoidance of, 4, 18, 118 La Collectionneuse (1967), 32, 52, 63, 77, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 91–3, 99, 101–2, 104, 125 colour, 31–4, 38, 57–8, 71–2 Comedies and Proverbs (1981-87), 10, 29, 39, 49, 58–9, 83, 113–20, 138–40, 147–9, 155, 162 and dislocation, 120–30 and Emma Bovary theme, 132–7 and gender difference, 130–2 and theatre, 109–12, 116–20, 137, 147

169

170 Index Comedies and Proverbs (Contd.) see also Aviator’s Wife, The (1981); Full Moon in Paris (1984); Good Marriage, A (1982); Green Ray, The (1986); My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1978); Pauline at the Beach (1983) commentaries, 48–50, 118–19 commercialisation, 11–12, 62, 64–6, 85, 129 Communio journal, 13 Compagnie Eric Rohmer (CER), 21 compassion, 119, 133 confusions, 3, 59, 113, 124, 153 contemporary concerns, 3, 22–8 contingency, 157–9 coquetry, 154, 156 cosmopolitanism, 65, 75 courtly love stories, 82–3 Crisp, C. G., 4–6, 10, 49, 51, 59–60 on Comedies and Proverbs, 109, 114–15, 118–19, 128–9 on Moral Tales, 78, 82, 91, 101–4 on period films, 25–7, 30, 32, 40 critics, 22, 36, 49, 84–5 Delpy, Julie, 112 delusion, 3, 40, 42–3, 72, 96 denial, strategies of, 100–6 description, film as, 10–11 desire, 3, 126–7, 130–2, 154–6 destiny, 43, 91, 96–7, 99, 150 detective theme, 121–2 dialectical positions, 111, 143 dislocation/ displacement, 120–30, 134, 136, 138, 141, 148 diversions, 92–5, 97, 102, 104–5, 107 Dombasle, Arielle, 10, 54, 117, 128 domestic sphere, 125, 130 Don Quixote motif, 102–4 dreams and dreamers in Comedies and Proverbs, 114, 120, 122, 124, 127–9, 132, 134 in Four Seasons, 143–4, 162 in period films, 29–31, 43–6 Durgnat, Raymond, 83, 115 dyadic relationships, 151–3, 156, 158 Elisabeth (novel, 2005), 5 Elliott, Grace, 23, 34, 37–9, 44

Emma Bovary theme, 120, 132–7 empirical, the, 3, 7, 11, 14–18 in Comedies and Proverbs, 119, 131–4, 137 in Four Seasons, 144, 148–50, 157–60, 163 in Moral Tales, 89, 97–8 in period films, 28–31, 34, 38, 40–1, 45 emptiness, 119, 134–5 Ennis, Thomas, 116, 161 environmentalism, 12, 37, 52, 72 essay, sense of, 52–3 essential, the persons, 31–4, 45, 151 revelation of, 31, 33–4, 37–9, 41, 43–5 eternal and transient, 80–2, 84, 87–8, 92 expropriation, 60, 62–6, 69, 71, 73, 75 faith, 98, 144, 149, 157–62 fate, 43, 91, 96–7, 99, 150 Fawell, John, 68–9, 126 fear, 104–6, 132, 147–8 feminist positions, 129–32 Fermière à Montfaucon (1960s), 72 fetishisation, 92–3, 130 film festivals, 77, 108, 139–40 Les Films du Losange, 21, 56 Flaherty, Robert Nanook of the North, 8 Flanagan, Kieran, 7 Flaubert, Gustave, 83, 119–20, 126, 132–3, 135 Fontaine, Jean de la, 30, 114 Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1986), 1, 53–4, 56, 60, 65, 67–73, 88, 109 free will, 16–17, 103, 150 French Revolution, 23, 36–8 fulfilment, 28, 30, 39, 46, 127, 163 Full Moon in Paris (1984), 3, 11, 54, 113, 115, 117–18, 123–6, 129–31, 134 funding, 19–22

Index 171 games, 117–18, 154, 156, 158 Gardens of Eden, 29–30, 41, 45–6, 132, 136, 144–5, 162 gender difference, 130–2, 136 Gerlach, John, 39–40 gift relationships, 73–5, 94 Girl at the Monceau Bakery, The (1962), 21, 49, 53, 60, 77, 79, 90, 92, 99–100 Godard, Jean-Luc, 1, 3, 78 Good Marriage, A (1982), 3, 12, 29–30, 54, 67, 113–14, 117–18, 124–9, 131, 134, 136–7 grace, 7–8, 13–18, 75, 81 attention to, 88–90, 92–4, 97–9, 101, 107, 159–61, 163 and circumstance, 97–106 diversions from, 92–5, 97, 102, 104–5, 107 and hardheartedness, 87–97 refusal of, 98, 101, 104, 137, 158–9 Greeley, Andrew, 88 Green Ray, The (1986), 19, 51, 53–4, 68–72, 113, 115–17, 125–8, 130, 134, 137–8 hardheartedness, 87–98, 100, 102, 106 Haussmann’s Paris, 59–60, 62–4, 66 Heinemann, David, 143, 148, 159 Herbst, Hildburg, 32–3 here-ness, 122–6, 129, 133–4 historical research, 23, 27 Hitchcock, Alfred, 3, 11, 87, 120 Rear Window, 31–2 Strangers on a Train, 106 holidays, 125–7 hope, 98, 105, 116, 161, 163 Huston, John Moby Dick, 31 Huysmans, Joris-Karl Against Nature, 64 identification, 50–1, 118–19 illusion, 29–30, 65 imagination, 133–4, 157–60 immanence, 87–90, 93, 107, 137, 144 improvisation, 51, 53 impulsiveness, 133–4

independent working method, 76–7 integration, 128–9, 133 interiors, 141–4 intimacy, 136, 152 irony, 39–40, 43, 48–9, 97–8, 155 isolation, 126, 135–6, 138, 143 Jansenism, 16 jealousy, 153, 156 Jeffries, Stuart, 36 journeys, 124–5, 127, 144, 148 Kieslowski, Krzysztof The Double Life of Veronique, 89–90 Three Colours trilogy, 1, 89–90, 112 King, Norman, 85 Kleist, Heinrich von, 40 Katherin von Heilbronn, 24, 109 Lady and the Duke, The (2001), 3, 21, 23–6, 28, 36–9, 43, 47, 58, 140 Langlet, Amanda, 146 language, 24, 27–8 Lewis, C. S., 35 Libolt, Alain, 147 Linklater, Richard Before Sunset, 112 literary roots, 80–5, 113–15, 119–20 love affirmations of, 157–9 courtly, 82–3 as petition, 3 romantic, 131, 134, 136–8 Love in the Afternoon (1972), 10–12, 15–16, 32, 77, 79–80, 83, 85, 91, 99, 103–5, 108, 120 Luescher, Max, 32–3 Lukács, Georg, 17, 28–31, 34–5, 38, 42–3, 132, 148–50, 157 Malle, Louis Zazie dans le Métro, 58 Marivaux, Pierre de, 114–15 Marmontel, Jean-François Moral Tales (1761), 82 Marquise of O, The (1975), 3, 21, 24–6, 28, 31–3, 36, 39–43, 47, 108–9, 112, 139 Maupassant, Guy de, 147, 162

172 Index Mauss, Marcel, 73 May 1968, 85–6, 120 Mazierska, Ewa, 125, 127 meaning, 9, 29, 32, 39–40, 44, 49–50, 100 Mellen, Joan, 85–6 metaphor, 60–3, 69 micro-social structures, 2, 62, 116, 125 Milne, Tom, 26 miracles/ the miraculous, 14–18, 29–31, 34–43, 45, 75, 88, 149 mise en scène, 2, 24, 108, 141 modernity, 65–6, 80–1 Monaco, James, 52, 57, 81–3 montage editing, 7–8, 11 moralistes, 83, 86 Moral Tales (1962-72), 13, 21, 48–9, 53, 76–87, 107–9, 111, 117–20, 131, 140, 155, 162 and circumstance, 97–106 and hard-heartedness, 87–97 see also Claire’s Knee (1970); La Collectionneuse (1967); Girl at the Monceau Bakery, The (1962); Love in the Afternoon (1972); My Night at Maud’s (1969); Suzanne’s Career (1963) Moriarty, Michael, 89, 92, 96–7, 105 motives, 149–50 movement, 124–5, 127, 135–6, 145, 148 music, 54–5, 141–3, 148, 161 Musset, Alfred de, 83, 116 Comedies and Proverbs, 113 Les Caprices de Marianne, 113 My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1978), 11, 33, 69–70, 113, 116–17, 122–5, 134–5, 138–9 My Night at Maud’s (1969), 47, 52, 67, 77, 79–80, 82, 85, 91–2, 94–7, 99–101, 104, 161 mystery, 121, 143 naked souls, 31, 37, 43–5, 136 narration, 48–50, 118–19 naturalism, 26–7, 111 nature, 18, 68–74, 88, 98–9, 126, 138 necessity, 149–50 Neupert, Richard, 76

newsreel devices, 3, 27 New Wave, 1, 3–4, 19, 21, 56, 86, 109 non-didacticism, 88, 98, 119, 131 now, the, 90, 97–8, 101, 104–5, 116, 130, 135, 162 objectification, 102 objectivity, 7–10, 12, 48, 51, 146 observation, 2, 4, 7, 11, 58, 88, 90, 122, 142, 146 obsession, 30, 50, 79, 82, 114, 133, 150, 152, 158 occasional films, 52–5, 75 commentaries, 48–50 dialogue, 50–2 preparation, 47–8 set in Paris, 56–66 set in the country, 66–74 see also Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1986); Rendezvous in Paris (1995); Sign of Leo, The (1959); Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, The (1993) ontological positions, 7, 11–12, 22, 24, 26–7 orders in opposition, 87–8 Orr, John, 86, 89 O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 65 painting devices, 3, 23, 27 paradox, 98, 119–20, 124 Paris, 56–66, 79, 85, 120, 129 interiors, 141, 144 and satellite towns, 122–5, 127, 135–6 Parisian popular, 65–6, 110, 128 Pascal, Blaise, 76, 82–3, 89, 93, 98, 137, 150 Pensées, 14–16, 70, 87–8, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 100–1, 105, 108–10 The Provincial Letters, 17, 95 Pascalian wager, 14, 94–5, 101, 149, 161–2 past, the, 22–8 patrilocal relations, 130, 132 Pauline at the Beach (1983), 10, 54, 113–15, 117–18, 125–8, 131, 134, 139

Index 173 Perceval (1978), 3, 21, 25–8, 31, 34, 43–4, 47, 76, 109, 112, 116, 139 period films, 3, 19–22, 46, 109–10, 120, 140 and contemporary concerns, 22–8 empirical and essential in, 28–34 and miracles, 34–43 and tragedy, 28–34, 43–5 see also Lady and the Duke, The (2001); Marquise of O, The (1975); Perceval (1978); Romance of Astrée and Céladon (2007); Triple Agent (2004) personal catastrophe, 39–43 personhood, centrality of, 44–5 place, sense of, 55–6, 120, 141 interiors, 141–4 rural, 56, 66–75, 86 see also Paris pleasure, 55, 85, 97 polarities, 56, 67–8, 73–5, 86–8 political catastrophe, 36–9 political positions, 36–7, 44–5, 72, 74, 85–6 popular culture, 66, 110, 128–9 Portal, Alexia, 50–1 possibilities, 90, 101, 105–6 predestination see fate Présentation (1951), 78 pride, 84, 87, 92, 96–7, 100, 102, 106–8, 128 probabilities, 100–1 Pym, John, 131–2

reciprocity, 73–5 redemption, 14, 91, 160 reflexivity, 48, 93, 115, 121–2, 128 relationships, 73–5, 94, 149–53, 156, 158 with nature, 71–4 Rendezvous in Paris (1995), 4, 25, 30, 55–6, 58, 60–3, 65–6, 85, 110, 112, 140, 143 Renoir, Jean, 9 La Règle du jeu, 113, 115 responsibility, 41, 100, 103–4 Reynaud, Bérénice, 129–31 Rimbaud, Arthur, 117 Rivière, Marie, 51, 117, 146–7 Rohmer, Éric see Comedies and Proverbs (1981-87); Moral Tales (1962-72); occasional films; period films; Tales of the Four Seasons; individual films Romance of Astrée and Céladon, The (2007), 3, 21, 140 Romand, Béatrice, 50–1, 117, 146 romantic love, 131, 134, 136–8 Rossellini, Roberto Journey to Italy, 13–14 Rome, Open City, 9 Stromboli, 13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Confessions, 82 La Nouvelle Hélöise, 82 routines, 90–1, 94, 97–8 rural settings, 56, 66–75, 86

realism, 6–12, 163 in Comedies and Proverbs, 109–13, 133 in Moral Tales, 90, 97 in occasional films, 48, 57, 60, 69 in period films, 22–4, 26–7 real life, 28, 30, 37–8, 97–8, 119, 132–3, 137, 144, 147–9, 160 subordination of, 91, 96, 100, 105, 114, 131, 150, 152, 157 real self, 31–4, 45, 151 rebirth/ resurrection, 37–41, 144

St Augustine, 89 St Teresa of Avila, 162 Sandre, Didier, 147 Sautet, Claude, 147 scheming, 114, 152–3, 158–9 Schroeder, Barbet, 21, 56, 78 seduction, love of, 133–4, 154–6 Ségur, Comtesse de, 81, 83 Comedies and Proverbs, 113 self-absorption, 83–4, 98, 102, 115, 121, 131 self-control, 94–5, 97 self-deception, 3, 11, 17, 31, 42, 45, 96, 115–16, 126

174 Index self-effacement, 4–6, 9, 12, 24, 36, 87, 108, 128, 140 self-interest, 94–5 Sennett, Richard, 59–60, 135–6 sentimental education, 119–20, 123, 126, 129, 131, 134, 137–8, 140, 146 Showalter, English, 82, 101 signification, 111–12 Sign of Leo, The (1959), 1, 4, 52–4, 56, 59, 62–4, 66, 76–7, 110 Simmel, Georg, 151–2, 154 sociability, 18, 89, 135, 154 social games, 117–18, 154, 156, 158 social interactions, 28, 88, 98–100, 125–6, 136 solidarity, 73–4 Sourian, Peter, 15–16 spatial contrasts, 144 spontaneity, 52 Stendhal, 83 stories, primacy of, 10, 24, 48, 51 studio system, 19 subconscious mind, 32–3 subordination of reality, 91, 96, 100, 105, 114, 131, 150, 152, 157 success/ failure, 20, 76–8, 140 Summer’s Tale, A (1996), 30, 33, 54, 93, 119, 128, 140–2, 145–6, 148–9, 151–2, 155, 158–9 surroundings, characters in, 9–11, 25–6, 56, 58–60, 63, 69, 85, 112, 122 suspense, 89, 106 Suzanne’s Career (1963), 21, 60, 77, 79, 90, 92, 99 symbolism, 41 Christian, 33–5, 37–9, 41, 70–2, 74 of colour, 32–4 vs description, 10–11

Tati, Jacques, 125 television, 21, 24, 68, 72, 76, 78, 109, 111, 117, 139–40 temptation, 79–80, 85 text, fidelity to, 24, 26, 51 theatre, 24, 109–12, 116–17, 120, 137, 147 theatricality, 26, 110–11, 117–20, 147 thematic territory, 3, 28, 31 theme/ variation, 78–80, 82, 87 theological dimensions, 69–70, 158, 160, 163 Theophrastus, 84 there-ness, 122–6, 129, 133–4 Thomson, David, 84–5 time, dimension of, 8, 91, 94, 98, 142, 146, 148 Tortajada, Maria, 154–6 tourism and tourists, 62–4 tradition, 82–3, 86, 147 traditional culture, 113, 128–9 tragedy, 28–34, 36–8, 43–5, 132, 136, 138, 151, 154 transcendence, 3, 14–18 Tree, the Mayor and the Mediacentre, The (1993), 1–3, 37, 54–6, 60, 66, 73–4, 86, 140 triadic relationships, 151–3, 156, 158 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 10, 47, 77 Triple Agent (2004), 3, 6, 21, 27–8, 31, 43–4, 140 Truffaut, François, 1, 3–4

Tale of Springtime, A (1990), 140–4, 148–9, 151–2, 158 Tales of the Four Seasons (1990-98), 1, 54–5, 128, 139–49, 162–3 and atmosphere, 149–57 and faith, 157–62

vacations, 125–7 Vache, Angela Dalle, 25 vanity, 84, 87, 92, 96–7, 100, 102, 106–8, 128, 139–41, 160 Verne, Jules, 71, 81, 115 Villella, Fiona A., 147, 153

ultimate questions/ answers, 43–4 unambiguous, the, 148, 152–4, 157–9, 161 uncertainty, 91–2, 96, 106, 147–8 utopias, 123

Index 175 Vincendeau, Ginette, 27 visibility/ invisibility, 121–2, 135–6 void, the, 157–61 Vorodin, Fyodor, 27, 44

wind in trees motif, 69–71, 138 Winter’s Tale, A (1992), 59, 67, 110, 112, 140–2, 144, 148–9, 151, 159–63 Wyler, William, 9, 11

Weil, Simone, 1, 157–9 Welles, Orson, 9, 11 White, Armond, 54–5, 71

young people, 58, 85–6, 116, 120–2 Ziolkowski, Fabrice, 61