ERIC ROHMER'S (ALL TOO) HUMAN COMEDIES

Eric Rohmer populated his films with pretty people making silly mistakes. Andrew Stout considers some of his earliest work ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Comedy isn't pretty, so the cliché goes. Yet the unconventional rom-coms of Eric Rohmer—who died in Paris on January 11th, aged 89—were beautiful, often seductively so. Never was this more true than in his "Six Moral Tales”. The stills from this celebrated series of his earliest films recall cigarette ads in Esquire magazine, circa 1970: postcard-worthy landscapes fill the frame and season-specific light floods the screen. Meanwhile, lithe young characters in mod fashions talk around their emotional follies. Time and again, elegance mixes with hand-wringing prevarication, and often stupidity.

Some critics complained that Rohmer’s films were too remote and self-indulgently introspective. Others argued that he was an aesthete out of touch with the political urgency of French cinema at the time, as typified by the Maoist agitprop of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. Worst of all was the suspicion held by some of his peers that he had turned to film as a last resort, having already struck out as a novelist (he wrote the book “Elisabeth” under the name Gilbert Cordier in 1946).

In 1971 Rohmer published an essay answering his critics. "My films, you say, are literary," he wrote. The things I say could be said in a novel. Yes, but what do I say? My characters discourse is not necessarily my film's discourse." He warned against confusing his characters' windy chatter with their intentions. The chasm between the two created the central conflict of his stories.

Rohmer felt films deserved a literary sensibility. A former literature professor, he understood that the novel's chief virtue was that it provided a space for the protagonist's contemplation, not a showcase for the author's words. In the essay quoted above, called "Letter to a Critic", he lamented the absence of thought—of real Seine-pacing, temple-throbbing deliberation—on screen. It was his aim to show "sentiments, intentions, and ideas in a new light."

Viewers can witness Rohmer approaching his goal gradually over the course of "Six Moral Tales", which he began in 1963 with "La Boulangère de Monceau" ("The Bakery Girl of Monceau") and finished in 1972 with "L'Amour l'après-midi" ("Love in the Afternoon/Chloe in the Afternoon"). It was in these six variations on a single theme—temptation—that Rohmer developed a style more akin to the critical tradition of Voltaire and Goethe, for whom the unfurling of thought was its own spectacle, rather than the faddish radicalism of Godard.

Rohmer stumbled through the first three films in the series, relying too much on voice-overs to convincingly rope his characters' thought into the plots. His real breakthrough came with "Ma nuit chez Maud" ("My Night at Maud's"), released as part of this series in 1969. Its centerpiece is a 40-minute dialogue in which the hero, a morally stuffy and conflicted Jesuit, accepts a divorcee's invitation to share her bed during a snow storm.

After "Maude", Rohmer set out to prove one of his guiding cinematic principles—that things don't "happen in less time than it takes to explain them"—with "Le genou de Claire" ("Claire's Knee", 1971). While on holiday in the South of France, a newly engaged diplomat's worldly appetite shrinks to the exquisite dimensions of an uncomplicated 16-year-old girl. The diplomat rationalises his obsession to his confidante, an ex-lover, who goads him on. All this talk reverberates in the film's bizarre anti-climax, an awkwardly long take of the diplomat caressing Claire while she gazes back with a tearful mix of suspicion and cold comfort.

Claire's knee—and the consternation it arouses in the diplomat—is a painstakingly constructed symbol of rationalisation gone amok. It gives us something by which to measure the diplomat's drift from reason. It also underlines the odd humour of the "Moral Tales": in Rohmer's world, faces are symmetrical, bodies proportional, and words are perfectly measured. Everyone is beautiful, and everything is in its right place. Everything, that is, except the intentions of his heroes.

Rohmer once described these films as “not a tale with a moral, but a story which deals less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.” He was a rare director who seemed to say that following your heart may not be wise, but the temptation is human, occasionally comic and often fascinating to watch.

(Andrew Stout is a writer based in Portland, Oregon.)