\u201cAh, that would make a better story,\u201d she replies. \u201cNothing actually has to happen.\u201d By this, the fifth of Rohmer\u2019s \u201cSix Moral Tales\u201d \u2013 new on Blu-ray<\/a> this week from the Criterion Collection, and all streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a> \u2013 this conversation plays like a winking verbalization of the French master\u2019s artistic manifesto. Later, the novelist (and, thus, the filmmaker) puts it even more bluntly: \u201cSomething\u2019s always happening, even if it\u2019s just your refusal to admit that it is.\u201d And therein lies the brilliance of these works, two shorts and four features shot and released over roughly a decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. The plots are slight, based less on narrative twists and turns than on the establishment and observation of character. These are films about how we act <\/em>\u2013 and what we can learn about ourselves from those actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming early in Rohmer\u2019s distinguished career, they also offer the distinct pleasure of watching a filmmaker stretching his legs, learning his craft and finding his style. The first two pictures, The Bakery Girl of Monceau<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>and Suzanne’s Career<\/em><\/strong>, are modest in ambition and length (the first runs less than a half hour, the second under an hour), and are covered in the watermarks of the French New Wave: brooding\/pining male protagonists, confessional voice-over, black-and-white cinematography, shot on the streets (apparently without permits), culminating in abrupt endings (these guys love to hit the point and bounce, FIN). It\u2019s not so much that Rohmer rises above these devices as he refuses to be defined by them; he will both shed and reuse them in later films, not swearing them off exactly, but deploying them as tools rather than crutches. The later films are sleeker (no doubt thanks to the addition of N\u00e9stor Almendros as cinematographer), and the locations move from metropolitan to pastoral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the central preoccupations remain, and watching the films in close proximity to each other underscores the degree to which Rohmer was using his expanding resources and profile to revisit and rework similar themes. Several of his protagonists are hung up on conventional notions of beauty, and become obsessed with the pursuit of its personification, usually in the form of a blonde \u201cgood girl.\u201d But as they bide their time, they\u2019ll dally with a less obvious pick \u2013 and when their dream girl finally comes around, they typically find themselves regretting the one they cast aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rohmer\u2019s sympathies lie with his protagonists \u2013 as we\u2019d expect, since they\u2019re presumably his stand-ins \u2013 but he doesn\u2019t let them off the hook, either. From Bakery Girl<\/em> on, the backward-glancing voice-overs are filled with reflection and guilt, and the relationships between these men and women are dizzyingly complex. This is perhaps most true of My Night at Maud\u2019s <\/em><\/strong>(intended as the third film, but shot and released fourth), which betrays its 1969 origins in the headier topics of discourse \u2013 politics, philosophy, religion, and of course, morality \u2013 many of which are explored during the title event, a threesome that becomes a twosome of probing, searching, and sometimes cruel conversation, culminating in a missed opportunity that will strike a pang of familiar regret into anyone who\u2019s taken a few trips around the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly fraught dynamics abound in La Collectionneuse<\/em><\/strong>, in which our hero goes into isolation at a friend\u2019s country estate, nursing a broken heart and vowing to \u201ctake inactivity to a level I\u2019d never before reached\u201d (this all hits differently these days), only to discover he\u2019ll be sharing the digs with an attractive young woman, and so a begrudging, peculiar camaraderie and cohabitation develops. This was the era in which Godard\u2019s work was explicitly political, but Rohmer\u2019s politics are sexual and interpersonal; he\u2019s dealing with pursuit, rebuttal, desire, and cruelty, not only in how these two treat each other, but the other men who come into her sphere. \u201cWe all played our parts with great care,\u201d our protagonist explains of one combination, but that explanation doesn\u2019t just hold to that scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though they cover a shorter period, the Moral Tales aren\u2019t dissimilar to Truffaut\u2019s Antoine Doinel films; we see his avatars growing older, and dealing with the frustrations of their advancing age. Claire\u2019s Knee<\/em><\/strong> is the trickiest of these films today, dealing as it does with not one but two age-inappropriate relationships, but this isn\u2019t some romanticized snapshot either; J\u00e9r\u00f4me ultimately gets what he deserves, which is to be stymied and blocked by a bunch of teenage boys. More importantly, Rohmer\u2019s probing style doesn\u2019t softball the emotional wreckage of the character\u2019s actions \u2013 in the penultimate scene, watch how the camera holds on Claire crying and crying about what J\u00e9r\u00f4me has told her, and how the character chooses, in that moment, to manipulate her vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As that film concerns a man on the verge of matrimony, Love in the Afternoon<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>is grounded in the very real experience of being very married and very horny. \u201cEver since I got married, I find all<\/em> women attractive,\u201d Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric explains, in exasperated voice-over; chief among them is Chlo\u00e9, the ex of an old friend who, in her way, represents a path he didn\u2019t take. \u201cShe\u2019s completely impulsive, unstable,\u201d Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric insists to his wife, and Rohmer, brilliantly, keeps his camera on a close-up of her listening<\/em> to these descriptions. It\u2019s a brilliant choice \u2013 she knows (and Rohmer knows she knows) \u2013 the attractiveness of a sexy\/chaotic personality, and much of the push-pull of the picture is in his agonizing negotiation of this indulgence, how he talks himself in and out of this affair, as he pushes and prods and plays the devil on his shoulder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of which brings us to its miraculous last scene \u2013 the last scene of the film, and of this cycle of films \u2013 in which two people, once close to each other but since drifting apart, finally allow themselves to be open and vulnerable. It sounds like the tiniest thing, but within the context it\u2019s shattering, a forceful realization of the power of Rohmer\u2019s filmmaking. (When Chris Rock and Louis CK remade the film a few years back as I Think I Love My Wife<\/em>, this was jettisoned in favor of some Viagra jokes.) Because what he\u2019s doing, throughout all of these films, goes back to those ideas early in Claire\u2019s Knee<\/em>: that the kind of storytelling that can reach us most, that can speak most clearly to the human condition, is that in which \u201cnothing happens\u201d \u2013 or, at the very least, the version of that phrase bandied about in screenwriting textbooks and notes sessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rohmer\u2019s characters don\u2019t act like people in other movies \u2013 they act like actual people<\/em>, and throughout these films, it\u2019s informative to envision how conventional movies would play out these scenarios. And then, it\u2019s thrilling to watch Rohmer not only run counter to those expectations, but ground his outcomes in recognizable human behavior; that\u2019s what reaches an audience, because that\u2019s the kind of thing we all do, all the time<\/em>. We fumble passes and blow opportunities; we act as if moments of devastation haven\u2019t affected us; we say and do the wrong things, and desperately try to take them back. We swallow all those defeats, and digest them, and carry on, because our lives are an accumulation of those events. And at the end of Claire\u2019s Knee<\/em>, when J\u00e9r\u00f4me reports what has happened (and more importantly, what hasn\u2019t) to Aurora, she issues her judgment: \u201cA charming story, but highly banal.\u201d Indeed it is. And all filmmakers should aspire to such banality. \u201cSix Moral Tales\u201d is now available <\/em>on Blu-ray<\/em><\/a> from the Criterion Collection, and (along with several other Rohmer films) is <\/em>streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Early in Claire\u2019s Knee, Eric Rohmer\u2019s 1970 comedy\/drama, our protagonist J\u00e9r\u00f4me engages in an idle, maybe-hypothetical-maybe-not with his old friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-13984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22842,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13984\/revisions\/22842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/6MT2-1024x768.jpeg\")
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