Midway through Plato’s Symposium the comic poet Aristophanes takes the floor. He tells us that, in the beginning, we were whole, shaped like the heavenly bodies. But we became too powerful and made war on the gods, after which they punished us by tearing us in two. We now resembled the Greek gods (which is to say, we looked like normal humans); instead of one large, circular body, there were two bodies — some both males, some both females, and others mixed. Once torn, we were left with a terrible sense of loss, which could only be assuaged by embracing our former halves. In that act, we again felt the wholeness that we once knew. And to this day we are possessed of an abiding longing — which we experience as erotic need — and which we sate, however temporarily, through sex.
This is Aristophanes’ (or Plato’s, simulating Aristophanes) account of eros, and despite the inherently comic imagery involved, it retains enormous power. But there is a sting in his story, one that often goes overlooked by those who first encounter it as undergraduates. In his telling, it is only the first generation of people that were actually born whole and thus had true halves to return to after they were sundered. Everyone since has been effectively born incomplete; we inherited the profound longing but not the same means of satisfying it. Our attempts to do so — through monogamy or promiscuity — are always partial solutions. Whether we seek it in one person or many people, we find at best an almost-other-half, and the gratification of uniting with them is always in some sense partial or ephemeral.
Aristophanes’ speech, after all, is about eros — longing — not true love. We are only guaranteed the first, though the second remains forever in our sights. I thought of his speech, again and again, while making my way through the filmography of one of cinema’s great auteurs, Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, better known as Éric Rohmer. For, perhaps no other filmmaker has portrayed the human difficulties of coupling and uncoupling with such sustained sensitivity and insight. And while his highly urbane films are generally free of Aristophanes’ gleeful vulgarity, he nonetheless bears something of that humane vision, at once serious and comic when it comes to our romantic travails.
Rohmer was an idiosyncratic figure — in but not entirely of the gang of French New Wave filmmakers who brought an audacious new style to cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Though present at the creation, he was always somewhat out of step with other luminaries like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, or Claude Chabrol.
He was a conservative Catholic, who reportedly never drove a car in his life. Though he had an intense love for film, his innate sensibilities were more literary than visual — he taught Classics at a lycée as a younger man. And he was born a decade before most of his peers: his first full-length film didn’t appear until he was almost 40, and he was nearly 50 when his movie My Night at Maud’s was nominated for an Academy Award in 1969. Like Leonard Cohen, he brought a mature and elevated vision to an inherently demotic medium, though unlike Cohen, his tone is generally playful rather than stentorian. And perhaps his advanced age contributed to his disinterest in politics at a time and place where making films was viewed by many as an inherently political act.
Yet, for a seemingly untimely man, he had a way of remaining surprisingly au courant, albeit on his own terms. He served as an early editor of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, the French film magazine in which the theories behind the New Wave movement were first mooted (though his outsider status was affirmed when he was forced out by his younger colleagues for refusing to turn the publication into a vehicle for their promotion). He was a contributor to Les Temps modernes under the editorships of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, despite being neither a communist nor an existentialist (though once again he was expelled for his conservatism). And his coauthored book on Alfred Hitchcock was one of the earliest statements of auteur theory, which held that a film was fundamentally the product of the director’s vision and in this way was more like a book which is the product of an author, despite the fact that films required collaboration.
And Rohmer has since enjoyed a strong influence on a range of younger filmmakers. Whit Stillman’s depictions of talkative moralists living amid social disorder are utterly Rohmerian, as are Richard Linklater’s improvisatory romances. Rohmer’s fingerprints are all over Steven Soderbergh’s breakthrough, Sex, Lies and Videotape, where most of the action takes place in speech. Noah Baumbach told anyone who would listen that Margot at the Wedding was an homage to Rohmer’s similarly-titled Pauline at the Beach. Two great comedians, Chris Rock and Louis CK, remade Love in the Afternoon (unsuccessfully) as I Think I Love My Wife.
Rohmer compensated for his late start with sustained productivity. Like Kurosawa or Yeats, he continued to produce excellent, varied work up to the end of his life. But his filmography is largely defined by a trio of thematically unified series spanning four decades: the Six Moral Tales, made in the 1960s and 70s; the Comedies and Proverbs (also six) in the 1980s; and the Tales of the Four Seasons in the 1990s. The films in the first series each involve a moral dilemma. The second all take their themes from a famous saying. The last, as the name indicates, are romances inspired by and set in different seasons. All, in various ways, concern the heart.
What is a Rohmer film? Critics used to refer to the “Lubitsch touch.” Is there such a thing as the Rohmer touch? Though his films are not plotless, they are like Platonic dialogues in that their action unfolds largely through speech. His highly introspective characters talk of love, beauty, faith, and meaning in often improvised dialogue, all captured in patient medium-distance shots.
His earliest films rely upon the documentary style, replete with voiceovers which are characteristic of New Wave cinema – but over time he found a more naturalistic approach. Nearly all of his music is diegetic (it comes as something like a shock when the viewer recognizes a poster of Oasis on the protagonist’s wall in A Tale of Summer). His camera moves carefully, favoring long takes and mostly avoiding dolly shots and extreme close-ups or unusual angles.
There is little in the way of authorial intrusion or anything to remind the viewers that they are watching a film. This all may sound boring — Gene Hackman’s character in Night Moves famously likened seeing a Rohmer film to watching paint dry. But the cumulative effect is something like Brian Eno’s best music: totally immersive and as natural as breathing. There are moments of almost shocking intimacy, as if Rohmer has permitted viewers to witness real people at pivotal moments in their lives (the reality of these fictional moments puts the false mimesis of “reality television” to shame).
Much like Jane Austen’s, Rohmer’s plots appear simple and bourgeois on the surface, yet they contain dizzyingly high stakes cloaked in the quotidian. He is among cinema’s great observers of the bourgeoisie. There’s a very funny scene in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, in which a character laments the jaundiced view of the bourgeoisie that prevails among the intelligentsia. Well, Rohmer would be the antidote. His characters are unavoidably bourgeois. They have jobs, they take vacations, they see each other over long dinners or weekend lunches. But their bourgeois status is not reducible to material factors. They display that disunity of soul that Jean-Jacques Rousseau described as the essential feature of the bourgeois man — “Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties.”
Rohmer’s characters are Rousseauean as well in their amour-propre: they share an abiding concern for their sense of self. They are forever observing themselves in relation to others (and vice versa), and these observations comprise a significant amount of their conversation. This close attention is both the impetus for and obstacle to their attempts to form romantic attachments with others.
It is somewhat strange to describe Rohmer’s films as romantic comedies, which they mostly are in a formal sense; that is to say, they take romance as their central subject and feature frequent moments of humor. And yet they do not feel the way we expect romantic comedies to feel. Typical romantic comedies, despite whatever irony or cynicism their scripts introduce, must collapse perspective in the end. They must want the same thing the audience wants: for two attractive people to wind up together. They exist on some level to reassure us: that obstacles can be overcome, that what we most want and what we deserve are one in the same. But while we wouldn’t describe Rohmer as a cynic, his camera retains a kind of Stendhalian distance from his characters, and we the audience end up sharing in this reserve, whatever our own feelings for those characters.
The thesis that defines much of his oeuvre is already made explicit in his early short film The Bakery Girl of Monceau, the first of his Six Moral Tales. In it, the nameless protagonist loses track of Sylvie, a woman with whom he had become enamored. While he longs for her, he strikes up a flirtation with the titular bakery girl (the difficulty, for both men and women, of choosing among prospective lovers is a recurring Rohmerian theme). Shortly before a planned date with the bakery girl, he chances to encounter Sylvie again and makes the sudden and rather cruel decision to desert his date.
In a voiceover, he explains his motivations: “But my choice had been, above all, a moral one. Having found Sylvie again, seeing the bakery girl would be a vice, an aberration. One represented truth and the other a mistake, or so I told myself then.”
Rohmer himself reiterates this point in a subsequent interview in Film Quarterly:
In French there is a word moraliste that I don’t think has any equivalent in English. It doesn’t really have much connection with the word “moral,” 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. . . . But “moral” can also mean that they are 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 behavior, rather than their behavior itself.
Notwithstanding the title of his series, his moralism is also easily overstated. Films like Pauline at the Beach feature a complex array of couplings, while Claire’s Knee and The Aviator’s Wife breeze past age of consent concerns, with nary a hint of judgment from his all-seeing camera. Delphine’s promiscuous friend in The Green Ray is not going to end up like the protagonist in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; we are only given the sense that this is not someone who is a good candidate for lasting love, which is admittedly not nothing. (Fellow New Wave cineaste François Truffaut gives his polyamorous trio in Jules et Jim a far more tragic ending than any faced by Rohmer’s characters.)
At the same time, his overall temperament is out of step with the Candide-like optimism that seems to pervade contemporary discussions of love and sex. Those looking for affirmation that affairs of the body can be conducted without engaging the heart, or that affairs of the heart might proceed without risks or trade-offs will come away disappointed. At any rate, it is evident that he is not interested in viewers predisposed to cheerful underanalysis.
Rohmer is interested in the dark side of eros: manipulation, power games, infidelity, and worse. Adrien’s sexual overture to Haydeè on the beach in La Collectionneuse borders on assault. In Claire’s Knee, Jerome’s consummation of what seems a modest desire (to touch a girl’s knee) is transgressive in a way that far more explicit films rarely are. Latter-day pickup artists have nothing on the cads in Suzanne’s Career. Rohmer is acutely perceptive when it comes to the particular cruelty with which certain men treat women whom they desire but do not consider beautiful. Cruelty in Rohmer’s world is all the more shocking not just because it manifests in otherwise genteel settings, but because these men are frequently revealed to be highly thoughtful and reflective. They are not mere brutes.
Rohmer is that rare thing: a nonjudgmental moralist. This is not as oxymoronic as it sounds. His moralism is fueled by a deep concern for our condition as moral beings. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that this auteur, who is so concerned with moral questions, made such subtle films. Perhaps though it would be better to describe them as ethical rather than moral questions. That is to say, the choices the characters make both reflect and shape a certain ethos or character. Part of what makes Rohmer’s people so engaging is the intense consciousness with which they make their choices. The energy of their concentration imbues otherwise simple plot constructions with surprising drama. Like many of Shakespeare’s characters, they seem highly aware of themselves as playing a part, of trying on different personae.
And yet this same awareness is always partial and limited in its apprehension of reality — particularly when it comes to others. Thus, in My Night at Maud’s, the protagonist, Jean-Louis, views the divorcée with whom he spends a fateful Christmas Eve as a form of temptation. He is determined to refrain from intimacy with her since he is in love with Françoise, a young woman from his church. But then Rohmer turns the screw. Jean-Louis himself is no virgin; his newfound resolution is bound up with a particular conception he has of a woman he’s fallen for but does not really know. In the film’s denouement, we discover (along with him) his solipsistic mistake. Now married to Françoise, he reencounters Maud, and it is revealed that Françoise, in her younger days, was the woman who broke up Maud’s marriage.
In the end, we see that Maud was not a temptress and Françoise not an innocent. It is only Jean-Louis who had wrapped up his self-image in this choice between them. Rohmer shows us (subtly of course) that these are fully human women who defy the categories imposed on them in this young man’s mind. Yet he does so without condemning Jean-Louis. Just as they are not reducible to archetypes, so is he not reducible to toxic masculinity avant la lettre.
Similarly, Frédéric spends Love in the Afternoon indulging, as many married men do, in various erotic fantasies about other women, above all the seductive Chloé. These particular daydreams threaten to become more than just a fantasy. His wife, meanwhile, is relegated in his mind to a domestic and maternal role. In the end, however, when he returns to his wife, in a largely wordless and remarkably moving scene, she displays an unexpected depth and intensity of feeling. And in this moment, we see (and see through his eyes as well), how constrained his image of her had been. Both her perceptiveness of her husband’s obvious loss of interest in her and her own interior desires and emotions had been there all along; he just hadn’t noticed.
Such realizations, in which all the characters appear wholly human, free of their perceived roles, are standard Rohermian. Reality is always breaking things up. This disconnect between our perceptions and reality, or how we see ourselves and how others see us, is mostly played for gentle rather than scathing comedy and drama, but the hits come, nonetheless.
Adrien in La Collectionneuse entertains an image of himself as a bohemian at odds with the modern capitalist world (he gives a monologue late in the film that scans like a rough draft of David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” thesis). He even spends much of the film trying to get through the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet despite his avowals, and unlike Rousseau’s solitary walker, he proves utterly unable to content himself with the experience of tranquil existence. Instead, his mental energy is largely devoted to a series of psychological games with Haydeè, the eponymous “collector.” When these games are finally concluded, he lasts but a few hours on his own before fleeing to London and his fiancée.
Frédéric in Love in the Afternoon largely maintains a cavalier distance from his female secretaries, as he entertains himself with Chloé. It only takes a brief nonverbal moment to make plain to us that his supposed discretion fooled them not at all, and further that he is a perfect walking cliche. It is not until the moment he prepares to consummate their lengthy flirtation (almost too late) that he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and finally sees himself as they always saw him.
That they are continually surprised in such ways doesn’t mean his characters are unintelligent — quite the contrary (they are generally more thoughtful and articulate than their American counterparts in Richard Linklater’s films). Indeed, the way their intelligence and erudition naturally manifest themselves makes for stark contrast with the artificial way these qualities are represented in most American film and television (think of the eccentric crime-solving geniuses on police procedurals, or Aaron Sorkin’s walking CVs, or Matt Damon’s contrived monologues in Good Will Hunting).
The trouble for Rohmer’s characters is that their intelligence does not facilitate self-knowledge, and the gap between what they think they believe and desire and what they actually believe and desire provides the space in which his dramatic and comedic plots play out. He drives this point home in A Tale of Springtime, in which the protagonist, a teacher of philosophy, faces a romantic rival of sorts, who possesses similar academic training but significantly less self-understanding.
This all may sound overly edifying, but Rohmer is not so much trying to instruct his audience to seek self-knowledge as to illustrate how our thoughts invariably lead us beyond ourselves. The sayings associated with the first two entries in the Comedies and Proverbs series are: “On ne saurait penser à rien” (“One cannot just think about nothing”) and “Quel esprit ne bat la campagne? Qui ne fait château en Espagne?” (“What spirit doesn’t wander? Who doesn’t build castles in the air?”)
The trouble is that we (and I am identifying us with Rohmer’s characters, of course) are always wanting, and yet we do not want what we want. The inexperienced protagonist of A Tale of Summer, faced with the improbable prospect of choosing between three desirable females, elects instead to leave to further his recording career, deferring a decision that he is not quite prepared to shoulder.
Louise in Full Moon in Paris demands sexual and personal freedom — to the extent that she insists on maintaining her own apartment in Paris away from her home — only to be shocked and dismayed when her lover avails himself of a similar opportunity. Marion in Pauline at the Beach insists that love for her requires grand passion and intense sexual attraction, declaring “I won’t mistake something for love that’s not love.” Though this is precisely what she ends up doing. This is the catch: eros thrives on imagination, and yet it is our imaginations that continually betray us, even as we cannot do without them.
Rebecca West has a remarkable line that applies very well to Rohmer’s characters: “As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic.” Some of their stories conclude more happily than others, but what connects them all is that they are intensely conscious of themselves as shaping the narratives of their own lives. And it is partly this self-consciousness that makes them of such interest to us. They want their actions to form a continuous expression of a certain idea of their own characters, and this extends to their choice of mates, both male and female. Though they may deceive themselves in this or that particular, almost no one in Rohmer’s films is simply indifferent to the direction of their lives — and their love lives especially. As Rohmer himself remarked, “My intention was not to film raw events, but the narrative that someone makes of them.”
A Tale of Autumn, the final film of his Seasons tetralogy, restates Rohmer’s major themes in an appropriately minor key: romance amid uncertainty; the desire for connection in tension with the desire for independence; the disconnect between our perceptions and reality, especially when it comes to other people. Being an autumn tale, it largely concerns older characters. And there is something quite touching about seeing the kinds of dynamics we associate with younger lovers still playing out among the middle-aged, from misunderstandings to the ease with which affections can transfer from one object to another.
The plot revolves around Magali, a lonely widow and winegrower in the Rhône valley, whose outgoing friends engage in various schemes to pair her off. Her friend Isabelle posts an ad seeking a romantic partner on her behalf, and meets Gérald, a promising prospect, while posing as Magali. These sorts of plot contrivances have been the stuff of romantic comedy going back to Shakespeare, but Rohmer’s version is characteristically subtle.
Before Isabelle reveals her ruse to Gérald, he mentions his fondness for industrial architecture, including the power plant stacks that recur in panoramic shots throughout the film. Isabelle in turn pushes back, knowing of her friend’s preference for natural landscapes, and indeed in a separate scene we see Magali forcefully expressing her dismay over the removal of hedges that once hid the power plants from view. Gérald reasonably replies to Isabelle that a couple does not have to agree on everything to live together. But we know quite well that Magali, like so many Rohmer protagonists, prizes her independence of opinion, and we wonder whether this match will work, once they actually meet.
At the film’s end, following the resolution of the usual misunderstandings that result from these sorts of intrigues, Magali and Gérald each determine the other’s true identity and with apparent mutual interest agree to meet again at her fall harvest. We cannot but root for them to become a couple, but we have already been made to see their imperfect compatibility. Will they too come to recognize it? Or will their romance require a degree of benign mutual misunderstanding? Or, alternatively, as befits a tale of autumn, will their continued romance rely upon reduced expectations — unlike those of summer, which bursts with boundless potential?
As with Aristophanes’ couples, they are an incomplete match, though of course this proves true of the many pairings and unpairings that populate Rohmer’s filmography. We have only caught them further along in their journey. And at the close of the film, and of the series, we are again left wondering — as with Jean-Louis and Françoise in My Night at Maud’s, or Delphine and the literate young man she encounters at the end of The Green Ray — will they be happy together? More than with most films, we come to think of Rohmer’s characters as fully realized people and we live with questions about the trajectory of their lives after the credits roll. But Rohmer’s ever-present, unblinking camera must leave them somewhere, and so must we as well.