Film Review - "Six Moral Tales"

"While the narrator is looking for a woman, he meets another one, who occupies his affection until he finds the first woman again."
—Eric Rohmer describes the plot of the Six Moral Tales

The above quotation summarizes the story of all six of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, which are devoted to mining the infinite psychological complexities inherent in such a basic scenario. This willingness to probe the same basic story again and again reminds me of no one so much as the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu (both also have a highly formalist detachment, although Rohmer is much more ironic). In any event, one has to hand it to Rohmer for sheer cussedness. His films stubbornly violate some of the first rules of both mainstream and experimental films (keep the dialogue to a minimum; show, don't tell), and he stuck to his talky guns even though he didn't have a major filmmaking success until nearly the age of 50 (he had also been a teacher and an influential critic for the most influential of nouvelle vague publications, Cahiers du Cinema). Rohmer's cinema is defined by its relentlessly analytical and self-deluding male protagonists, its lofty irony, its refined, restrained camera style, and its almost tactile sense of place.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963): In this 23-minute short, made on 16mm in the streets of Paris, producer Barbet Shroeder plays a law student who ducks into a bakery occasionally while roaming the streets in search of the elusive object of his affections. He begins a flirtation with the girl at the bakery, but what are his intentions?

Suzanne's Career (1963): This is another 16mm short (more like a featurette at 55 minutes). Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen) is friends with Guillaume (Christian Charierre), a womanizer whom he seems to both despise and admire. Guillaume takes up with Suzanne (Catherine See), then takes advantage of her financially when she proves willing to give him money. Bertrand plays around the margins of the relationship, both pining for another girl and feeling alternately contemptuous of and attracted to Suzanne.

La Collectionneuse (1967): Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is a smug art dealer who takes a vacation at a friend's summer house; also staying at the house are an equally smug friend, Daniel (Daniel Pommereule), and a mysterious, promiscuous woman named Haydee (Haydee Politoff). Adrien believes that Haydee's every action is devoted to snaring him, but he's not at all sure whether he wants to be friends with her, teach or a lesson, ignore her, or pimp her out to his art collector friend.

My Night at Maud's (1969): Jean-Louis Trintignant (Three Colors: Red) plays Jean-Louis, a Catholic engineer working in Pascal's hometown of Clermont, who has a rather fraught relationship with that philosopher. He discusses Pascal and other subjects with his friend Vidal (Antoine Vitez), who introduces him to Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee. Jean-Louis is convinced he's going to marry a beautiful girl he's seen at church (Marie-Christine Barrault), but his attraction to Maud threatens to change all that.

Claire's Knee (1970): While on vacation, a diplomat named Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy) meets a precociously analytical 16-year-old (Beatrice Romand) and her quiet, beautiful sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). Although he's engaged to be married, Jerome engages in a verbose flirtation with Laura and a more purely physical attraction to Claire.

Love in the Afternoon (1972): Frederic is a successful businessman, married with one baby and another on the way, but he enjoys fantasizing about women he sees on his daily rounds in Paris. An impulsive old friend named Chloe (Zouzou) comes into his life and, while he is irritated by her at first, a friendship begins to build.

These are "moral tales," but not in that they teach a straightforward lesson: they're all doggedly ambiguous and ironic, and the audience is never given a single figure with whom to identify. As Rohmer has said, they're "moral tales" in the sense that the protagonist is always acting according to some moral code. Rohmer is the master of the deluded and contradictory male protagonist, spinning elaborate rationales and justifications, desperately trying to understand his attraction to some elusive, inscrutable female (although Rohmer's females tend to present a guileless exterior, they are usually just as complex as the men and occasionally as confused; I think it would be wrong to suggest that men are the only deluded figures in Rohmer). The director presents all of this with the driest of ironies and with a detachment that transcends sympathy, pity, or scorn for his characters. This detachment is heightened by Rohmer's calculatedly invisible camera style: he favors a still, somewhat distant camera and never uses close-ups, cuts, or music to tell the audience what to think.

Watching the films in order gives a sense of Rohmer's development as a filmmaker; the early 1960s shorts were made on the cheap at a time when Rohmer had trouble getting funding (his first feature, 1958's La Signe de Lion, had flopped), and they are rough around the cinematic edges; one misses the polish of the later films' virtuosic cinematography and evocative use of direct sound. Still, the elements of Rohmer's style are in place; in The Bakery Girl of Monceau Schroeder's character woos the young title character out of a complex mixture of spite, attraction, frustration, and boredom. He never loses his sense of superiority to her and when he jilts her, he justifies it on moral grounds, saying that it would have been immoral to lead her on when he didn't really care about her. The film has a strong sense of place as well, establishing with a patient clarity the boundaries of its Paris world.

Suzanne's Career has one of the most interesting stories of all six tales, and is also more concerned with plot: there's some business involving stolen money, break-ups, and reunions, although Rohmer doesn't resolve these threads in anything like conventional ways. It's the only one of the six stories told from the perspective of a character who's basically a third wheel. Bertrand's tortured combination of jealousy, admiration, and contempt for both his friend and Suzanne makes a particularly painful kind of psychological sense; Suzanne herself remains just out of reach, always more than the sum of her suitors' analyses. Inevitably, these first two films have the weakest video quality of any of the films in Criterion's set: Suzanne's Career, in particular, looks awfully hazy and soft.

Let's consider La Collectionneuse next, even though the later My Night at Maud's is number three in Rohmer's conception (even he has said that the numbers don't mean much; he meant to make My Night at Maud's first, but Trintignant wasn't available). This is the first of Rohmer's films to be made in color and in 35mm, and the first to be shot by the great cameraman Nestor Almendros; The Rohmer-Almendros team had a unique ability to evoke place and time through precise attention to setting, to physical detail, and especially to weather. La Collectionneuse was shot quickly and cheaply. Direct sound is still missed, but this is the first example of Rohmer's fully mature style. The story is a surgically precise analysis of preening manhood confronted with unapologetically open female sexuality; it's fairly grueling to watch, as Adrien and Daniel are about as insufferable and irritating as Rohmer has ever allowed his characters to be. The film also has one of the worst performances I've ever seen in a Rohmer film, Eugene Archer's hammy, menacing, sub-Orson Welles turn as the American art collector, Sam. It's a jarring false note in a series that seems to contain nothing but perfectly wrought performances.

My Night at Maud's was Rohmer's big commercial breakthrough, which is slightly ironic because it's the film in which he flirts most openly with the flaws his detractors accuse him of: the dialogue here is relentless and often on esoteric subjects, but Rohmer doesn't let Jean-Louis talk about Pascal at length simply because the director finds Pascal interesting; rather, Jean-Louis' thoughts on Pascal illuminate the ways in which he's torn between sensuality and faith, between chance and the rational, between (as he sees it) Maud and Francoise. Almendros's stark, wintry black-and-white photography is peerless, captured with perfect clairty by the transfer. For all of Rohmer's characteristic detachment, this also strikes me as the most tender of his films, the most emotional: he often sets the camera on one character for long stretches in the middle of a conversation, allowing us to really look at them, to feel the way their seemingly assured talk hides complications and insecurities. The ending, with its transition from winter to summer and its sense of both the fragility and tenaciousness of emotions, is gorgeous; for me, there are few images in Rohmer's films more moving than that of Francoise distractedly digging in the sand, remembering what happened long ago but still lives in her.

Claire's Knee is on a similarly exalted level, although I think I like My Night at Maud's a bit more if only for its combinations of wintriness and warmth, elevated talk and deep fragility. In Claire's Knee, Almendros's photography is summery, evoking the vacation that Jerome has taken from life with his fiancee. Jerome's relationship with his girlfriend is tepid; he says that he's marrying her because they get along and live well together, and that passion isn't necessary to a relationship. His views are challenged when he meets Laura, who is one of Rohmer's most charming female creations: articulate, thoughtful, desperate to project a suavity and detachment beyond her years. Laurence de Monaghan's Claire is a more typical Six Moral Tales female: alluring, seemingly simple and guileless, always just out of reach of her pursuer.

Love in the Afternoon was translated as Chloe in the Afternoon for its original American release; maybe Love in the Afternoon sounded too much like a skin flick? Anyway, Chloe in the Afternoon seems like a more evocative title, but Criterion has chosen to go the literal route. The film seems like a step down from the heights of My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee. The premise flirts with cliché (married businessman has to choose between a life of stability and an unpredictable freedom), and Zouzou's Chloe is never quite convincing as a wild child: she seems more like a typically bright and analytical Rohmer character who happens to do impulsive things when she's not on camera. Still, Rohmer's feel for settings is just as strong as ever: Paris exists here both as a vibrant city and as a vehicle for our understanding of Frederic's character.