My Love Affair With Eric Rohmer

still from Eric Rohmer's "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1972)

When people break up; risk stability for wild relationships; give in to desire, self-destruction, silly romantic notions; when people do things nobody can explain or understand, not even themselves; when people do nothing, just sit/sleep/stand/settle; run home to repent to their wives; when people complicate the comforting formula [you + me = love]; the spirit and cinema of Eric Rohmer lives on.

That is to say: Eric Rohmer, master of ambiguity, has explored enough variables of love as to last us many more generations of perplexity.

For example, this is generally how one feels after watching a Rohmer film:

• What was that all about?
• Wow. So emotionally consuming.
• Were the actors beautiful or handsome or what? I couldn’t tell.

Which is pretty much the same thing I ask myself after wrecked relationships.

A couple nights ago, my boyfriend and I went to the Lincoln Center for an Eric Rohmer retrospective and saw Tale of Springtime (1990), the first of his Tales of Four Seasons. We had watched Rohmer’s last film The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) in San Francisco during our early courtship as a kind of official date. Now here we were, almost three years later, understanding no more or less about why we were still together. After we watched the film we got ice cream and resumed our conversation about something that had happened. Friends of ours were breaking up after many years of a (seemingly) loving marriage. What had happened? Cheating was involved. Their explanations were vague and tinged with regret, nostalgia, fury, a sense of inevitability. Who was at fault? Who caused the rift? Who was telling the truth? We speculated but could come up with no conclusive answer.

“The whole thing feels like a Rohmer movie,” I sighed.

still from "My Night at Maud's" (1969)

Though Rohmer is one of my favorite film auteurs, his films are frustrating. Best known for his story collection and film series the Six Moral Tales – which include such Criterion favs as My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) — Rohmer promises moral conclusiveness but does not deliver.

I watched all of the Six Moral Tales in college after a bad break-up, living in an uninsulated and isolated cottage in the “woods” (actually, a large yard), hoping to glean just one small bit of insight about what good, moral behavior between couples is supposed to be like. Though I gathered nothing, the films were addictive because they were so much like peering into real life, a boiled down, essentialized version of life. A character–usually male–wanders around trying to decide between one woman and another. Love forms triangles and sometimes squares. Of course, seductive seduction is hard to portray and is itself amoral, because once the artist decides with certainty that “this is the seducer and this is the seduced,” the story becomes much less interesting. Then it becomes a struggle between villainy and naivete — a Disney movie like The Little Mermaid, with an evil singing one and a good one, one we can hate and one we can root for, and so on.

In Tale of Springtime, a young girl, Natacha (Florence Darel), befriends an older woman, Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), at a party and the two spend a weekend together. They talk about many things, but mostly about the girl’s relationship with her father, mother, and the father’s abominable girlfriend. The relationship is felt to be incompatible; her father is 40, the girlfriend is almost Natacha’s age. On the other hand, Natacha is dating a man close in age to her father. It becomes “apparent” that Natacha is plotting to match her father with Jeanne. She doesn’t tell Jeanne her father will be coming home, runs out to buy bread at opportune times, claims to have an engagement and can’t come home, leaving the two adults on a couch together. Can we attribute this behavior to Natacha’s “dreamy nature” as she subconsciously weaves her web of fantasy, or to her irrational petty hatred for her father’s girlfriend? Or it it as Jeanne explains it: that we all do things without a thought in our brains, that if one were to follow us around all day and analyze our actions, none of it would make any sense?

I will venture to say that all the characters in Springtime are immature and unformed. The title/season perhaps signals that the true protagonist and only moral center of the film is the 18-year-old Natacha. Her 40-year-old father says things like “I’ve only ever been loved madly” and means it. Jeanne has a fiance yet allows herself to be lured into the embrace of a man she doesn’t even really like. It’s interesting that the apartment where everything begins is Natacha’s apartment, as if she were the true choreographer of this comedy. “God” does not enter in, and neither do his rules; only Natacha’s persist. (P.S. The ending is shocking. Won’t reveal why here.)

still from "Tale of Springtime" (1990)

If nothing is conclusive, one might wonder: why call these tales at all? (Interestingly, in Springtime, the very important line “I’ll tell you a story” is immediately followed up with “A fairy tale?” as if to accentuate the weirdness in calling a situation a “tale.”) Such a proclamation makes one think of punishment in biblical proportions — heads cut off, people turning to ash, insane floodwaters, etc. Rohmer’s films are not “tales,” nor are they “moral lessons.” Not in the way Bresson’s films can be, or even Resnais, who I suspect never intends to moralize but always inadvertently dishes out some grand philosophical treatise. It seems Rohmer only wishes to show how people conduct their lives based on this or that perceived moral code.  He said in this recent interview (emphasis mine):

I’ve managed to show people discussing morality, whatever morality that may be, in a completely natural way. Whether it’s a dandy’s moral code in The Collector, or religions questions in My Night at Maud’s, or issues of eroticism in Claire’s Knee. They’re all covered by the word “moral” in the general sense.

Perhaps “Moral Tales” should have been translated as “Discussions about Morality.” The etymology of “tale” –> talk, “conte” –> conter, certainly supports this notion. Talk results in momentary compromise between fleeting systems of belief. Maybe the whole project of Moral Tales is to glorify this definition of morality as vague, nebulous, negotiable, and undercut the notion of “morality” as an objective set of laws that has to be obeyed.

Still, even with this tiny observation, after we left the Lincoln Center I felt that same rush of excitement and anger I always feel after watching one of Rohmer’s films. I can’t help it. It’s no fun not to know who’s guilty and who is innocent.

“Why did I waste my money/time on that thing? What does it even mean? It doesn’t mean anything! Why does it have to drag us in like that? I probably won’t do this again.”

Only — I know I will, and then I will write a long blog post.