The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World 9781628929034, 9781441171399, 9781441198310

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of some sections of this research have already been published. I would like to thank the editors of the books and journals for their suggestions about how to improve my work, for agreeing to publish it and for permission to reprint some of the material here. Those editors were: Lúcia Nagib, Chris Fujiwara, Tom Brown, James Walters, Rolando Caputo, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. The last two provided valuable advice about how to improve my work. In ‘Reading Rohmer’, I present close readings of Le Beau mariage, Le Rayon vert and Conte d’automne. The interpretations are twice as long as the ones contained in this book, with different emphases and focusing on different scenes. Nonetheless, the interpretative work I did on these films was important preparation for this project. I am also grateful to Wallflower Press publisher Yoram Allon for publishing ‘Reading Rohmer’ and for permission to reprint some of the material here. I would also like to thank several other people who read sections of the book and offered advice. David Russell provided helpful notes on an early version of the Conte d’été material. Adam Ganz gave excellent advice on several chapters. Steven Marchant read different sections of my work and was a constant source of excellent recommendations. Thomas Hinton read the section on Perceval le Gallois and offered expert advice about how to improve the chapter; his detailed feedback was immensely helpful. I am also grateful to Fiona Handyside for her marvellous talk at Royal Holloway on Rohmer and the subsequent discussion, in which I was able to participate, and to Leah Vonderheide for allowing me to quote from her MA thesis. Two terms of sabbatical leave from Royal Holloway allowed me to do the bulk of this research without distraction. The British Film Institute library in Stephen Street and Senate House library in Malet Street provided fantastic access to exceptional resources. Loreta Gandolfi’s work on infidelity in the Six contes moraux was in my mind as I was writing the chapter on those films. She has always been supportive of my research and I have always valued our conversations about Rohmer. I am grateful to publisher Continuum and editor Katie Gallof. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to my family for all their support and encouragement, especially Sarah, Alice and George.

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INTRODUCTION

This book presents the results of studying Eric Rohmer’s 23 feature films.i The priority of this research has always been Rohmer’s remarkable achievement as a filmmaker. In different films, Rohmer reconciled the demands of creative order and photographic fidelity according to his aims. This book is the result of studying those reconciliations. It focuses on one film at a time, analysing styles and themes, looking at patterns, motifs, settings and viewpoint. The book concentrates on specific decisions and the visible results of those decisions. The decisions Rohmer made were those of a producer as well as a director. As Margaret Menegoz said: ‘Eric Rohmer is himself like a producer and we are his assistants: he doesn’t have any assistant directors, but he has production assistants (Bergala and Philippon 1984: 15). Rohmer was producer, scriptwriter and director. He wrote all his scripts, never directing a film written by anyone else. His period films credit a production designer, but on most of his films there was neither art department nor location manager; he found and decorated locations himself. Doing the research and preparation took time, but it ensured that he familiarized himself with the settings, enabling him to incorporate things discovered there. In this way, working with low budgets, Rohmer remained independent. There are many examples of filmmakers with large resources at their disposal producing bad, unimaginative or rushed work; Rohmer produced exceptional work with small resources, but with patience, craftsmanship and sensitivity. Rohmer worked within a narrow area, in which the rules appear inflexible, but his inflections of these rules allowed for considerable creativity. Over time, he refined his genre of ironic comedy, reworking ideas and plots, developing his mode of expression, re-creating devices.ii The Rohmer comedy is a genre, with conventions, just as the Hitchcock thriller is a genre.iii In Rohmer and Chabrol’s book (1979 [1957]) on Hitchcock, Rohmer wrote about the American films and Chabrol the English films.iv In 1981, Rohmer declares, ‘I was one of the most fervent Hitchcockians’ (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 30). Nearly 30 years later, he says: ‘I still consider myself to be a Hitchcockian filmmaker’ (Rohmer 2008: 6). Throughout his career, Rohmer uses Hitchcockian plotting, though he

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removes the murders and transposes the investigations, mysteries, spying and suspense to ordinary settings.v This book has no single idea or argument to press on readers. I have tried to respond to Rohmer’s films first, discussing topics which the films bring up and which other writers have addressed: where I have felt that more background information was needed, I have provided it. Therefore, some parts of the book summarize contexts for and responses to Rohmer’s work. This study also describes some examples in detail. Space forces one to restrict. I hope I have interpreted scenes that readers will find interesting, but other parts of Rohmer’s films would reward study. Throughout the book, I cite writers whose analyses of film style have provided examples for this research. The book also refers to the many writers on Rohmer’s work, in French (Magny, Bonitzer, Tortajada, Serceau, Hertay, Cléder and Herpe) and in English (Crisp, Schilling and Tester). Amongst them, Bonitzer (1999), Cavell (2005), Klevan (2000) and Rothman (2004) have been particularly helpful. The most recent books in English on Rohmer, Tester (2008) and Schilling (2007), update Crisp (1988) and contribute substantially to Rohmer scholarship, yet their approaches differ from that of this book. I have no major disagreements with Schilling or Tester. There are some minor differences; where appropriate, I indicate such disagreements in the notes, but this book does not review all of the issues on which we agree and disagree; nor does it systematically compare my work with theirs. One difference between my project and the existing books in English is that I say little about Rohmer’s work as a film critic in the 1950s. Examples of his writings were collected and published in French in 1984 and in English in 1989; others are available in Hillier (1986 and 1992a), while Herpe (2007) provides a full list of Rohmer’s publications. Several writers have analysed Rohmer’s criticism.vi Crisp (1988) and Schilling (2007), for example, present a formal discussion of Rohmer’s writings. Schilling (2007: 59–87) identifies the main ideas in Rohmer’s criticism and outlines Rohmer’s experiences at Cahiers du cinéma. Schilling is also recommended for anyone who would like to read a discussion of Rohmer’s films which places them more within a general context of French cinema and culture. In contrast to Schilling, my objective has been to present interpretations of individual films; where Schilling privileges ‘questions of theory, style, and form relevant to films of all periods over strict chronology’ (2007: 8), this book does the reverse; it limits general summaries of Rohmer’s work and treats the films separately. A further distinction of this book is that it does not examine Catholicism in Rohmer’s life nor judge his films according to the evidence of his religious beliefs found in his criticism, whereas some others, including Tester, discuss religion in Rohmer’s criticism and films. Asked in 1999 whether he remains a Catholic, Rohmer replies:

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Yes. In the end – yes, I am. This is what I can tell you. What I am marks my films and you can see it straight away. But there is nothing of the mystic in them, even in films which mention religion or destiny, or films in which there is a reference to superstition . . . I don’t want to show rupture. Couples breaking up is not a subject which interests me [although several of his characters are divorced]. I am more interested in people who are committed. I don’t know if the commitment will be durable, but in principle, yes. I don’t ever criticise the family. On the contrary, there is never a rejection of the family, and these are Christian values. At the same time, there is a sliding into agnosticism. As a believer, one is often crossed by doubt. One is as moral as one can be. (Lennon 1999: 21)vii The origins of Rohmer’s preoccupations with people’s intimate lives may well have been religious, but it does not necessarily follow that the consequences of his interests are religious.viii Like Rossellini and Ozu before him, Rohmer filmed stories about human relationships in contemporary society.ix His films address moral issues in an open-minded and liberal way. Rohmer was too intelligent an artist to make films that expound one belief, propound religious dogma or attempt to convert viewers by covert means. He may have been a practising Catholic, but this has not been a pressing issue for me because, whatever his comments, I have interpreted his films, which are fascinatingly subtle works, rooted within the mainstream of cinematic art. One of this book’s guiding principles is its combination of accounts of Rohmer’s creative decisions with interpretations of the results of those decisions. The book charts his artistic development and it explains his working methods partly by combining Rohmer’s own words with quotations and information taken from other sources. In interviews, Rohmer offers extensive explanations of techniques, yet his interviews resemble Hitchcock’s, in that neither director delves far beyond technical elements. The method of this book is based on the notion that it is important to communicate what I perceive in Rohmer’s films. Readers can test my judgements against their own experiences of the films. Therefore, although the book uses quotations from Rohmer to describe his creative decisions, its interpretative focus is on the evidence found in his films. Lastly, this book refers to topics within film history that relate to Rohmer’s films, but it is not about the nouvelle vague or French New Wave. Most histories of the nouvelle vague discuss Rohmer’s role within it, from Monaco (1976) to Neupert (2007), and film historians often describe Rohmer as a nouvelle vague filmmaker, though he made his best work after the nouvelle vague and he failed to cash in on the publicity surrounding it in the years between 1958 and 1963.x The history of the nouvelle vague is tied to the history of Cahiers du cinéma and the critics who wrote for it, including Rohmer, who first published in the magazine in the third issue, in June 1951.xi However, the story of Rohmer’s involvement with Cahiers

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du cinéma has been told elsewhere with varying degrees of detail.xii The many books on the nouvelle vague emphasize different elements of the phenomenon, as Vincendeau (2009) notes in her overview of the literature on the topic.xiii Some historians, like Marie (2003), Neupert (2007) and Sellier (2008), look at contemporaneous developments in French culture and society, while studying other films from the period. Marie (2003: 49–69) and Neupert (2007: 36–44) discuss industrial and economic contexts for the nouvelle vague. Crisp (1997: 418) discusses the industrial and financial mechanisms established in France in the three decades before 1960.xiv Higgins (1996) and Ross (1995 and 2002) write of the political background to the nouvelle vague. Atack (1999: 15) writes of the importance in post-war France of urbanization, secularization and decolonization, citing Jean Fourastié’s thesis that post-war France experienced an ‘invisible revolution’ between 1945 and 1975.xv Nowell-Smith (2008) documents the nouvelle vague’s influence, while Vincendeau notes its contribution ‘to the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline’ (2009: 9). In contrast, this book makes no attempt to contribute to the literature on the nouvelle vague. The first chapter identifies significant moments in the early part of Rohmer’s filmmaking career; the remaining seven chapters cover the 22 films he made after the nouvelle vague. Rohmer’s films build on the opportunities created by the nouvelle vague, but their interest lies beyond those origins.

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1 1950s and early 1960s – Beginnings Film criticism did not precede filmmaking for Rohmer, who made his first film in the same year that he began his career as a critic: 1948.1 Rohmer’s first film was the 30-minute Journal d’un scélerat (Diary of a Crook, 1949), now lost.2 Of significance to Rohmer’s work is its lead actor, Paul Gégauff. A writer and an actor, Gégauff was a friend of Rohmer’s, a member of the Latin Quarter Ciné-Club, who collaborated with Rohmer and Chabrol.3 Chabrol co-wrote several films with Gégauff, films which often dramatize their friendship through the recurrence of characters named Paul or Popaul and Charles. In 1972, Rohmer says of Gégauff: ‘he’s a spectator. The world amuses him – like an ant heap. He is completely independent of it, which is why he is a pleasant fellow who smiles and is decent but who is totally without compassion’ (Anon. 1972).4 Gégauff’s description of Rohmer is much-quoted: Rohmer was dead straight, un integer, a real prof. To us bums he constantly gave money but you always had to come up with your receipt, metro tickets as well as train tickets, even grocer’s bills. He gave us exactly the sum necessary. An organisational question.5 Rohmer modelled several male characters on Gégauff, including Pierre in Le Signe du Lion (1959), Jérôme in Le Genou de Claire (1970) and Henri in Pauline à la plage (1983). Rohmer’s second film was Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak, featuring a 21-year-old Jean-Luc Godard in the lead role of Walter. Filmed in 1951  on 16mm, Rohmer processed it on 35mm and added sound in 1960, when it became part of the ‘Charlotte and Véronique’ series. Rohmer has referred to its story of a man hesitating between two women as ‘the

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germ of the Contes moraux’ (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 6). Brody (2008: 27) notes that Godard paid for the film stock and helped Rohmer build the set in a photographer’s studio in Paris. He also writes that it offers an intriguing portrait of a young Godard: ‘In choosing Godard to play Walter, Rohmer had indulged in typecasting’ (Brody 2008: 27). In 1952, Rohmer directed his third film, his first attempt at a feature film, an adaptation of Les Petites filles modèles, a story by the Comtesse de Ségur.6 For his first feature film, Rohmer collaborated with a friend, Guy de Ray, co-financer of Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak, who acted as a production manager, and Pierre Guilbaud, a director of documentaries, who worked as a technical advisor.7 Rohmer filmed it in a château in Normandy in September 1952, but never finished post-production. Thomas (2005) reports that production came to a halt because of problems arising from the difference between Rohmer’s methods and the industrial methods of commercial filmmaking; for example, industry regulations stipulated that the heads of department (camera, sound, editing, art design, etc.) had to be people who held professional papers which qualified them to take such a position. Rohmer, who had wanted to work with his friends, Rivette, Godard and Truffaut, was unable to choose his crew.8 Once shooting began, disagreements arose between Rohmer and the crew, who doubted whether their director knew enough to direct and questioned whether the footage that Rohmer was shooting could be edited together. According to Thomas (2005: 41), the technicians mocked him on set. They finished the shoot, but the project collapsed when the film’s producer, a private financier, refused to pay for the completion of post-production. None of the actors or crew were paid and no trace of the negative has since been found. As Thomas notes, it is an indication of Rohmer’s precocity that he was making a feature film in 1952, before any of the attacks by Cahiers du cinéma on mainstream French cinema and before any of his younger cinephile friends began their filmmaking careers.9 Following Les Petites filles modèles, Rohmer returned to making short films. He made Bérénice (1954), an adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story, and La Sonate à Kretuzer (1956), from Tolstoy, starring Jean-Claude Brialy.10 Rivette worked as director of photography and editor on Bérénice and La Sonate à Kreutzer, while Godard produced the latter and paid for the film stock (Brody 2008: 42). Given Rohmer’s unfortunate experience with his first feature film, where he tried to work with a crew from and the rules of the mainstream film industry, we should note the importance of collaboration between these cinephile friends, who helped each other get started as filmmakers. An indication of this collaboration is the ‘Charlotte et Véronique’ series. As mentioned above, Rohmer’s second film, made in 1951, was Charlotte et son steak, with Godard in the lead role. In 1958, Rohmer wrote and directed Véronique et son cancre (1958), which Chabrol produced and which was, according to Le Roux (2005: 275), filmed in Chabrol’s

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apartment, using the professional crew that Chabrol had used for Le Beau serge (1958). Véronique et son cancre is about eighteen minutes long and it takes place in the room of a bourgeois apartment. Like Charlotte et son steak, it is a simple story, precise, accurate and amusing in its depiction of a struggle between an embattled homework tutor, Véronique (Nicole Berger), and her dunce, a naughty young boy, Jean-Christophe (Alain Delrieu), who does not want to do his homework. Le Roux (2005: 276) argues that Véronique et son cancre does not contain any ‘germ’ of later Rohmer films, and does not relate to Le Signe du Lion, which Rohmer directed the following year. She suggests that with Véronique et son cancre, ‘we are far from the respect for the authenticity of place that one expects of Rohmer’ (2005: 278). However, in its ironic humour, Véronique et son cancre is like Rohmer’s later work. After making Véronique et son cancre, Rohmer revived Charlotte et son steak, while Godard directed two contributions to the series: Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (1959), written by Rohmer, and Charlotte et son Jules (1960), written by Godard.11 Godard’s contributions to the ‘Charlotte et Véronique’ series differ from Rohmer’s. Rohmer’s Charlotte et son steak and Véronique et son cancre have a restrained simplicity, whereas the two films directed by Godard are jittery. In Charlotte et Véronique, the two young women are picked up by Patrick (Jean-Claude Brialy), who first chats up Charlotte (Anne Colette) in the park, then chats up Véronique (Nicole Berger).12 The story of one man and two women will become familiar in Rohmer’s scripts, but the style and pacing of Charlotte et Véronique, with abrupt editing and speeded-up footage, are unlike Rohmer’s. Noting the number of allusions to cinema in Charlotte et Véronique, Brody suggests that it ‘initiates the vast array of inside jokes, the personal museum of private associations, that would play a surprisingly large role in Godard’s major films to come’ (2008: 43). Brody also notes: ‘Rohmer was surprised and dismayed by the changes that Godard had wrought upon his script and ended their collaboration’ (2008: 43). Unsurprisingly, Rohmer made Véronique et son cancre on his own, as did Godard with the fourth instalment in the ‘Charlotte et Véronique’ series, Charlotte et son Jules.13

Le Signe du Lion (1959–62) As a cycle of films, the nouvelle vague was inaugurated in 1959 with the release of Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, and Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, which won the Cannes prize for best direction and became one of the most profitable French films of the decade (Williams 1992: 337). Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Godard’s A bout de soufflé

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(1960) soon followed. Williams (1992: 327–53) describes the early successes of the nouvelle vague and he points out that these films were financed by the directors themselves or by their families. For their first feature films, Le Signe du Lion and Paris nous appartient, Rohmer and Rivette received backing from Chabrol’s production company, AJYM, bolstered by the success of Le Beau serge and Les Cousins and by government subsidies. As Neupert (2007: 125) notes, between January 1959 and March 1960, Chabrol released four feature films. At the same time, he produced his friends’ first films.14 One of these was Rohmer’s second attempt at a feature film, Le Signe du Lion. However, as Williams notes, by the time Rohmer’s and Rivette’s films were released, in 1962 and 1961, ‘Chabrol’s enterprise was all but bankrupt’ (1992: 338). Unfortunately, despite gaining experience on short films after Les Petites filles modèles, by the time Rohmer made his second attempt at a feature film he had still not found the artistic independence and directorial authority to make films his way. Written and directed by Rohmer, Le Signe du Lion is about an unemployed American musician, Pierre Wesselin (Jess Hahn), who lives in Paris.15 Woken by delivery of a telegram that tells him his aunt has died and he is inheriting some money, Pierre celebrates. Too early, it transpires, for it is his cousin who inherits, not him. Misadventures and mistakes lead to decline, penury, homelessness and near-starvation. Pierre takes up with an accustomed tramp (Jean Le Poulain), who becomes his new friend and accomplice. They drink together, unconcerned by their appearance or activities. However, when Pierre’s cousin dies in a car crash and he discovers that he inherits after all, the film ends as it began, with him celebrating his inheritance and abandoning his new friend.16 Superficial, lazy, drunk, dissolute, admitting ‘I’ve always been excellent at laziness’ before he sleeps on the streets, Pierre is not a likeable hero and the actor who plays him, Jess Hahn, is neither photogenic nor possessed of an attractive voice. An American actor who appeared in French genre films, Hahn is not a typical Rohmer performer nor an actor favoured by the nouvelle vague, such as Trintignant or Brialy, both of whom Rohmer uses, although in his fiction films that immediately follow Le Signe du Lion, Rohmer casts friends or friends of friends. All that can be said of Hahn is that he was an American in Paris as the character is. Some parts of Le Signe du Lion anticipate Rohmer’s later work: the use of subtitles to announce dates, for instance – the film begins on 22 June and ends on 22 August – and the use of locations. As Rohmer says, ‘the script was written for Paris, so the film couldn’t have been filmed anywhere other than Paris, and even in certain areas of Paris’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 4), yet those Parisian locations are not as integrated as they are in his later films. The following of an individual and the expression of their consciousness are also things to which Rohmer returns; Le Signe du Lion communicates some sense of Pierre’s experiences; for example, his hunger

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as he walks near the Seine and sees people eating. The film attempts to convey the rhythm of Pierre’s existence, alone in Paris during August, without money, home or friends; but the film’s style does not express the character’s isolation. The film contains other problematic elements; for example, a bizarre sequence takes place after Pierre tries to retrieve some food from the Seine. First, the camera zooms back from him asleep on the riverbank, until it offers a view from a position approximate to the top floor of a building; then the set-up changes so that the camera can zoom back to a bird’s eye view of Paris, from where it cuts to a man driving too fast through the countryside. The car crashes; the driver dies; a close-up reveals his name: Christian Wesselin, Pierre’s cousin. Sudden changes in fortune occur in Rohmer’s mature work, but never again does he handle transitions as he does here; his later films control style with more discipline. Something that anticipates Rohmer’s later work and represents Le Signe du Lion’s weakest element is its music.17 Schilling (2007: 117) correctly draws attention to the moment when, outside a café, Pierre plays on the violin a few bars of the melody that features on the soundtrack. Rohmer’s later films explore music’s capacity to bridge the gap between fictional world and soundtrack. But, despite this, the film’s music is flawed. In 1996, Rohmer recalls: In my first feature film, Le Signe du Lion, Jess Hahn, who wasn’t a violinist at all, played the violin. I saw the difficulty that there was, and since then, if someone plays music, it is because they know how to play. (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 48) Indeed, the film cuts away from Pierre as he starts to play. However, the central problem is the use of the violin music to accompany the action. The use of music from outside the fictional world, imposed by the director to shape mood, is rare in Rohmer’s work. Le Signe du Lion’s external music begins during the credit sequence and continues throughout the film. There is far too much violin accompaniment to Pierre’s wanderings around Paris; in some sequences, it ruins the attempt to convey the character’s feelings. Unrestrained, the music distracts from rather than amplifies Pierre’s troubles. The scenes of Pierre walking along the Seine, looking up at the sun through the trees, attempt to convey his feelings; but the intrusion of the music wrecks the effect and, consequently, the film lacks the precision of Rohmer’s later studies of solitude. In summary, Le Signe du Lion lacks the emotional and moral ambiguities with which Rohmer becomes concerned and it lacks his characteristic tone of sympathetic irony. Convincingly staged, professionally shot, it nonetheless feels leaden; his first completed feature film is without doubt his least successful and the music makes parts of it almost unwatchable.

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Le Signe du Lion was neither an artistic nor a commercial success. Once he completed shooting, Rohmer could not find a distributor and he waited until 1962 for it to be shown at one cinema, La Pagode in Paris (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 6). In 1960, following Le Signe du Lion’s failure to find a distributor, Rohmer began to adapt Dostoevsky’s ‘The Gentle Maiden’ (1876). He was in a difficult situation and it was important that he produce more work. Chabrol agreed to produce Une femme douce, while Godard introduced Rohmer to Georges de Beauregard, who was interested in Rohmer making it. Rohmer envisaged Michèle Girardon, from Le Signe du Lion, and Philippe Leroy, whom he had liked in Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960).18 However, the banning of Godard’s Le Petit soldat (1960) meant that de Beauregard was in financial difficulty himself, so Une femme douce was not made until Robert Bresson made a version with Dominique Sanda and Guy Frangin in 1969. Rohmer’s first attempt at a feature film had been a failure, unfinished in 1952. He finished his second attempt at a feature film in 1959, but waited three years for it to be shown, by which time, his career at Cahiers du cinéma was ending, with Rohmer ejected from the offices of Cahiers du cinéma in June 1963. This must have been an unpleasant experience, but his ejection from Cahiers du cinéma benefited his filmmaking career in that it forced him to find work as a filmmaker.19 In 1963, aged 43 and with a family to support, Rohmer was unemployed: ‘[it was] terribly hard, because I had to start from scratch and make films in 16mm. After Le Signe du Lion, I was finished. No producer would back me’ (Rohmer 1977).20 The nouvelle vague, which he had helped bring into existence, had launched without him; his former colleagues at Cahiers du cinéma had evicted him. Yet, amidst these failures, Rohmer established the foundations of his later successes. To earn a living, he found work making programmes for schools television. It was to be his salvation financially and artistically.

Schools television Unlike Godard, Truffaut or Chabrol, Rohmer did not benefit from the publicity surrounding the nouvelle vague in 1958–63. In the long term, the circumstances proved fortunate: his 1950s experiences of working with professional crews from the film industry discouraged him from doing so again. Le Signe du Lion was shot in 1959 with a large professional crew, before he gained experience making documentaries for schools television, before his best short films and before the first two contes moraux. By the time he attempted his next feature film, La Collectionneuse, in 1967, Rohmer had done much more creative work. Making documentaries for schools television and short films with friends and tiny crews (sometimes

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just himself), Rohmer experimented with ideas and made what he wanted to make in the way that he wanted to make it. With considerable freedom, Rohmer did as much as possible himself, planning everything, doing all the research. After the failures of Les Petites filles modèles and Le Signe du Lion and after being ousted from Cahiers du cinéma, he was forced to economize. Consequently, Rohmer became a master of economy: he reduced the size of his crews and simplified his shooting style. Preparation, research and rehearsals enabled this.21 In total, between 1963 and 1970, Rohmer made 28 programmes for television, many produced by the Institut Pédagogique National for the schools television channel, Radio Télévision Scolaire. The wide range of subjects in these programmes gives a clue to Rohmer’s interests: there are programmes on writers (two films on Hugo, one each on Mallarmé, Pascal, Poe), on filmmakers (Dreyer, Renoir, Lumière), on architecture (including a programme about concrete, which interviews Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, founders of the Architecture principe group), on the environment, on the industrial age, on changes to landscapes, on art and film (including an adaptation of his 1950s articles ‘Celluloid and Marble’, which includes interviews with Virilio, composer Iannis Xanakis and artist Victor Vasarely). In his television work in the 1960s, Rohmer’s interests emerge in provisional form. By the time Rohmer achieved his first success in 1967, with La Collectionneuse, he was 47 and the original financial venture by producers with the youthful nouvelle vague directors was finished. Making documentaries for schools television provided Rohmer with an income, but the process allowed him to develop his artistic independence. As Pierre Léon puts it, ‘as a counterpoint to his fictional oeuvre, Rohmer constructs an edifice, in which the lines and spaces form little by little what will become a supporting framework for his critical thinking’ (2005: 21). Rohmer’s television work is a blueprint for his later masterpieces. For example, Rohmer declared his interest in artists and architects, indicating his support for Virillio’s ideas about architecture and the ‘oblique function’, the principle expounded by Parent and Virilio in their manifestos for Architecture principe.22 Rohmer’s interest in architecture, settings and space is revealed in his television work; for instance, he made a programme on Hugo’s architectural drawings.23 As Françoise Puaux (1995: 179) notes, Rohmer’s interest in space, the environment and architecture is multi-form and abundant, found in his critical essays of the 1950s, in his television programmes of the 1960s and 1970s and in his fiction films of the 1980s and 1990s. His literary interests also surface in his television work. He adapted two works that become important in later films: Don Quixote and Perceval, ou le conte du Graal. Perceval le Gallois (1978) would be his second attempt on the subject; the Six contes moraux refer to Don Quixote; Ma Nuit chez Maud and Conte d’hiver refer to Pascal. In 1963, Rohmer may have turned to schools television for financial reasons, but the experience allowed

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him to develop his interests; once his filmmaking career took off with La Collectionneuse and Ma Nuit chez Maud, he more or less stopped working for television. Looking back, Rohmer reflected that working for schools television was comparable with the work that other filmmakers do when they make commercials; he learnt a lot about filming while being able to research subjects in which he was interested; for example, of his programme on Hugo’s Contemplations, he says, ‘this wasn’t second-hand work, made from notes or memory. I wanted to confront Victor Hugo’s poems with the countryside which inspired them’ (Payen et al. 2004). Therefore, he went to Jersey on his own with a 16mm camera and filmed the shots that he wanted for his documentary. This desire to create something new using available resources becomes a hallmark of Rohmer’s methods. His television work takes diverse forms; for example, his ‘Entretiens sur Pascal’ (‘On Pascal’), broadcast in December 1965 as part of the series En profil dans le texte (Reading between the Lines), presents a conversation about Pascal between Brice Parain, an atheist philosopher, who appears in Vivre sa vie (1962), and Father Dominique Dubarle, a Catholic priest, writer and philosopher. As Léon notes (2005: 21), ‘Entretien sur Pascal’ is like an outline for Ma Nuit chez Maud, both theoretically and stylistically.24 Stéphane Mallarmé (1967) recreates an interview with the symbolist poet, played by Jean-Marie Robain. Rohmer plays the off-screen interviewer. The opening titles explain that the words spoken by Mallarmé are taken from an interview conducted by Jules Huret and published in L’Echo de Paris in 1891, or from letters and writings by Mallarmé; only Rohmer’s questions are fictional. As well as the interview, Rohmer has Robain read some of Mallarmé’s poems, shows images by Odilon Redon and plays snippets of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894). Rohmer’s second project for television was Les Métamorphoses du paysages, broadcast on 5 June 1964 in the series Vers L’unité du monde: L’Ere Industrielle (Towards World Unity: The Industrial Era). It is a 20-minute documentary on the industrial era, looking at buildings, transport and changes to the French countryside. As with his documentaries about writers and artists, Les Métamorphoses du paysages reveals Rohmer’s interests, focusing on industrialization; in his later fiction, these topics appear as a background to his focus on changing behaviour. Despite his environmentalism, the documentary does not reject industrialization; it looks at examples of integration between industrial buildings and the countryside, and comments on artists who have painted industrial buildings. It ends by celebrating examples of industrial architecture; the voice-over declares the beauty of the overground part of the Metro in Paris on the Boulevard de la Chappelle and admires the iron bridge over the Canal Saint-Martin and the two adjacent bridges, one for pedestrians and one for traffic, which rises on iron pulleys to let barges past.25 This documentary balances Rohmer’s admiration for architecture and for some industrial buildings with his concerns about the destruction of the

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environment. It talks of the beauty of industrial landscapes and compares windmills with machines; through it, Rohmer also expresses his Green agenda. Over sequences described by Léon as ‘lyrical montage, quasiEisensteinian’ (2005: 25), Rohmer describes slag heaps like volcanoes and films the building of the ring road around Paris, expressing fascination with architecture of all types. The first half of the film records the impact that the industrial era has had on the countryside, but the tone changes: Let’s go east towards La Plaine Saint-Denis, one of the most industrial areas in the region. It is a happy surprise to see that chaos is not the rule. Here, the hand of man, together with chance, makes for a rigid layout. The lines assert themselves – vertical, horizontal, curved or oblique – create contrasts, relations, rhythms, rhymes and parallelism. This could be a motto for Rohmer’s films, for Les Métamorphoses du paysages demonstrates the filmmaker’s ability to find interest and beauty almost everywhere; any setting has its role in someone’s life and, therefore, its potential role in a film. Rohmer also used the opportunity offered by schools television to explore the work of filmmakers he admired. His television documentaries on filmmakers include three episodes of the series Aller au cinéma: a discussion of L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), a discussion of Boudu sauvé des eau (Jean Renoir, 1932), and a discussion of the French film pioneer, Louis Lumière (1968), which features Renoir and the head of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, discussing Lumière’s work. Louis Lumière is captivating; it intersperses extracts from Lumière’s films amongst Rohmer’s off-screen questions, and Langlois and Renoir’s comments, working as an illustrated lecture from highly qualified specialists, yet also functioning as a historical document in just the way that Langlois proposes Lumière’s films do. Furthermore, as Léon observes (2005: 27), Rohmer introduces Langlois with a dramatic flourish. Seventeen minutes into the film, Rohmer says to Renoir that ‘cinema began developing historically from the moment that we discovered that the close-up was more expressive than the long shot’. Renoir responds to this, but then Rohmer says that he can see Langlois protesting; Renoir looks to his right and the camera follows his glance to reveal Langlois sitting in a chair. Bégaudeau (2004b: 32) notes that Louis Lumière has three subjects: Lumière’s films, Renoir’s comments about Lumière, and Langlois, so important to the nouvelle vague filmmakers. He also notes that Rohmer films Langlois as he films characters in his films, conveying his personality, the hint of a quick temper in a large man, who leans back and gestures. Pointing, encircling, emphasising, fiddling with a matchbook, rolling an unlit cigarette around his fingers, gesticulating with it once lit, Langlois, with his swept back hair and large eyes, impresses upon one his dominant, almost larger-than-life personality.26

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In addition to making programmes for schools television, Rohmer made six short films, the first two of which were La Boulangère de Monceau (1962) and La Carrière de Suzanne (1963), the first two Contes moraux. In these short films, whose production relied on friends rather than professionals, Rohmer develops his strategies for shaping viewpoint and tone. Rohmer describes them as ‘amateur films’, made without money and with borrowed 16mm equipment and film stock given to him (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 6). Barbet Schroeder recalls that there were three people on the crew of La Boulangère de Monceau: Rohmer, an amateur cameraman and Schroeder himself, the lead actor: ‘I was 22 or something like that. The first Moral Tale was in the lab but we were broke; so instead of finishing it, we went on and started the second one, shooting with the same system’ (Stein 1977: 52). Once he had completed the first two contes moraux, Rohmer failed to get them shown at cinemas, though they were shown on television and were released with Le Signe du Lion in 1972 for a run at the Panthéon cinema in Paris; in 1983, Rohmer says that this is the only time that they have been projected (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 6). He explains, ‘At the start, I thought of making one film which would be called Six Moral Tales, as in the collections of short stories which exist’ (Langlois 1969). In deciding to make them as separate films, he had a financial motivation: For the contes moraux, I would say that the idea of the series has helped me not only as a process of invention, but also, from a commercial point of view, to get them shown, so that people understood that I had very precise ideas, of a sort that no-one could say to me, ‘It would have been better if it had been a police thriller . . .’. For the public, it was double-edged: it could interest people and exclude others. (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 20) From the Hollywood directors he so admired, Rohmer learnt about film style and storytelling, but he also learnt from directors like Capra and Hitchcock a lesson in film industry economics: the way to stay viable in an industry that uses genres, series and sequels to maintain audiences is to promote oneself as a brand, the director’s name denoting subject matter and quality. The Six contes moraux enabled him to do this on a low budget. Rohmer wrote an outline for the Six contes moraux (except L’Amour l’après-midi) long before he filmed them, when he was the same age as the male protagonists: When all’s said and done, the moral tales aren’t in fact written directly for the screen. They’re adaptations of novels which I never quite managed to write, adaptations of novels which I sketched out a very long time ago and which were greatly modified, and only found their final form at the moment when I discovered the actual locations where I could film them. (Rohmer 1976)27

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The order in which he wrote the original stories was as follows: Ma Nuit chez Maud, Le Genou de Claire, La Carrière de Suzanne, La Collectionneuse, La Boulangère de Monceau and then, much later, L’Amour l’après-midi.28

La Boulangère de Monceau (1962) The film begins by establishing its settings with precision; the title, La Boulangère de Monceau, indicates a place.29 As if introducing a documentary, voice-over and images provide detailed descriptions of the area around the Villiers crossroads in Paris, near the market in Rue de Lévis and Parc Monceau, the verbal explanations matching close shots of road signs. The voice-over belongs to the hero, who tells of how he met his wife. Our nameless hero (Barbet Schroeder) describes his attraction to a young woman, Sylvie (Michèle Girardon), whom he often passes in the street. One evening, she returns his glances; he talks to her. They arrange to meet up the next time they bump into each other. Unfortunately, she disappears. During the next few weeks, the hero searches for her. He skips dinner to look for her. Then, when he gets hungry, he buys fruit from the market and biscuits from the bakery, where he meets Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier). His voiceover confesses his attraction to the bakery girl. She looks at him as if he attracts her. His next announcement is: ‘It didn’t take long to see that the pretty bakery girl liked me’. He tries to justify his ‘acceptance’ of the bakery girl’s advances by saying that he was thinking of Sylvie. Eventually, though, he offers to take her out to dinner and to the cinema. On the evening of the hero’s date with Jacqueline, he again bumps into Sylvie, who tells him that she sprained her ankle three weeks ago and has been unable to leave her apartment. He decides to ask her to dinner that evening and not meet Jacqueline: I could have put Sylvie off a day and kept my date with my bakery girl. But my choice had been above all a moral one. Having found Sylvie again, seeing the bakery girl again would be a vice, an aberration. One represented truth and the other a mistake, or so I told myself at the time. At dinner, Sylvie explains that her windows open onto the street: ‘I saw everything’, she says, ‘You’re terrible. You almost made me feel guilty. But then, I couldn’t exactly call out to you. After all, it’s your right to destroy your stomach with those terrible biscuits. . . . In short, I know all your vices’. It ends with him saying that they got married six months later and lived in the Rue Lebouteux. The conclusion leaves several elements unresolved. It is ironic that Sylvie lives opposite the bakery and saw him eating the biscuits, but her

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‘I know all your vices’ permits doubts about whether Sylvie saw him with Jacqueline. As Neupert asks, Was Sylvie just a passive prize at the end of the rainbow for the protagonist, or did she come down from her apartment because she realised that if she remained away any longer she might lose the narrator to Jacqueline? (2007: 259) The hero’s justification of his betrayal of Jacqueline (‘or so I told myself at the time’) also admits doubt, though he, a law student, does not confess the competition between his desire for the pretty working-class bakery girl and his idealization of the young middle-class woman who works in an art gallery. However, if the hero does not admit the relevance of social class to his choice of women, the film makes the contrast visible. It also builds irony into the hero’s comment to Sylvie, made when he first meets her, that he almost broke his neck by tripping on a pavement; she disappears from view because, unknown to him, she sprains her ankle. However, the defining moment of La Boulangère de Monceau occurs as he is searching for Sylvie, looking up at apartments, including Sylvie’s on Rue Lebouteux, opposite the bakery.

La Boulangère Monceau: Sylvie’s POV shot of him leaving bakery

After he buys his first biscuit, a high-angled shot shows him leaving the bakery. This shot, it transpires, is Sylvie’s viewpoint from her apartment.30 This is one lesson Rohmer learns from Hitchcock: a story that on first viewing seems to show events from one character’s viewpoint, the man’s (Thornhill’s in North by Northwest, Scottie’s in Vertigo), may on a second viewing or in retrospect reveal the viewpoint of another, the woman’s (Sylvie’s as she watches him leave the bakery, Eve’s in North by Northwest, Judy’s in Vertigo). Like Hitchcock, Rohmer stresses the discrepancies between

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viewpoints and, in doing so, emphasizes the follies of his male heroes. During the next shot, taken from behind the hero as he walks along eating his biscuit, he pronounces: ‘The biscuits were the same as at any bakery. They are factory-made. You find them everywhere. But here I could eat without being seen by Sylvie, who, in the crowded market, might appear unexpectedly’. The combination of the high-angled shot and the over-confident pronouncement highlights two areas of potential self-deception: the man’s lack of awareness of the viewpoint of the woman he idealizes and his readiness to find an excuse for returning to the bakery, an excuse which avoids admitting his desire for Jacqueline. This moment is a kernel of much of Rohmer’s development as a storyteller: the difference between the hero’s point of view, which is involving, and the film’s, which is separate from the hero’s and through which we judge him.31 Just 20 minutes long, La Boulangère de Monceau is a prototype for Rohmer’s later work, exploring the faultline between the fiction that the hero creates and the view that the film offers.

La Carrière de Suzanne (1963) La Boulangère de Monceau contributes to the beginning of Rohmer’s filmmaking career; the second of his Six contes moraux, La Carrière de Suzanne, works less well, though one can see the beginnings of some developments in its attention to locations, its intertwining of relationships and its restricted viewpoint. The depiction of the milieu and the characters is plausible, and the film functions as a portrait of middle-class Parisian students. If all that one expected of Rohmer were a snapshot of the manners and morals of young people in the early 1960s, then La Carrière de Suzanne would satisfy. Yet, one can also see Rohmer’s continuing experiments with construction and viewpoint. The story centres on the perceptions of one young man, Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen); everything shown is meant to characterize what he sees and feels.32 The film also contains a sub-plot concerning the theft of some money, which anticipates the missing necklace in Conte de printemps. As with his other short films, Rohmer’s friends helped out, either in the crew, in the cast or both. Jean-Louis Comolli, a colleague at Cahiers du cinèma, worked as assistant director on La Boulangère de monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne, as well as appearing in the latter. Another friend from Cahiers du cinéma, Jean-Claude Biette, appears as Jean-Louis (at one point, Biette dances with Suzanne and tries to kiss her, but she pushes him away); Pierre Cottrell, Rohmer’s co-producer on the last three contes moraux, and later of Eustache’s La Maman et la putain (1973), also appears in the film, while Frank, Suzanne’s new boyfriend, is played by Patrick Bauchau, about whom the following chapter says more.

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Bertrand’s voice-over opens the film: ‘The Café Luco on the Boulevard St Michel was where we met Suzanne. I lived above it in the Hotel de l’Observatoire. I was 18 and in the first year of pharmaceutical school’. The 50-minute film depicts the friendship of four main characters over a period of about six months: Bertrand, his richer friend Guillaume (Christian Charrière), the woman whom Bertrand admires, Sophie (Diane Wilkinson), and the young woman they meet in a café and whom Guillaume seduces, Suzanne (Catherine Sée). Young and independent, Suzanne lives with friends rather than parents. She works during the day and studies Italian translation in the evening. Guillaume uses Bertrand as a cross between a chaperone and an unwilling accomplice in his seduction of Suzanne; at the end of Guillaume’s party, for example, when guests are leaving, Guillaume asks Bertrand: ‘You’ve got to do me a little favour. When the others leave, the three of us will stay. It wouldn’t be decent for me to stay alone with her’. Guillaume engineers it so that Suzanne can stay, though he starts by letting her sleep in his mother’s room alone. But, as Bertrand comments, ‘having bowed to convention, he rushed to join her’. The sequence is a concise exposure of the hypocrisy and confusion surrounding what was considered socially acceptable in heterosexual relationships. In contrast to Suzanne is Sophie, whom Bertrand meets at Guillaume’s party. Bertrand idealizes Sophie, but spends more time with Suzanne. A series of scenes shows Bertrand hanging around with Suzanne and Guillaume. After some weeks, Suzanne and Guillaume separate. When they re-encounter her, Guillaume decides to let Suzanne pay for everything, including drinks, a meal and a trip to see Lawrence of Arabia. Bertrand explains: ‘For the next two or three weeks, we deliberately lived off Suzanne’. This continues until Suzanne tells him that she is broke. The solution to the minor mystery revolving around Bertrand’s missing 400 francs remains unknowable: either Guillaume or Suzanne could have taken the money; or both of them could have taken some of it. The conclusion withholds the truth. The money is a red herring, though, because Bertrand’s concern, or so he thinks, is Sophie. He is with her when he sees Suzanne with Frank, the man that Suzanne is going to marry, according to Sophie. The film ends with a scene on the delightful (now lost) Piscine Deligny, a floating swimming pool on the Seine. From the edge of the pool, they watch a boat; Bertrand’s voice-over expresses his miserable realization: ‘while I was failing my exams and losing Sophie, Suzanne was happy. Without even meaning to, she was mocking me. This girl for whom I’d only managed to feel a kind of shameful pity was beating us all to the finish line and showing us all up to be the children we were’. In other words, he ends up on his own, without Suzanne or Sophie. The film has some technical problems: as Neupert observes (2007: 265),

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the interiors are dark and the sound is often poor. The larger difficulty, though, is that of the lead males, similar to the problem that disables Le Signe du Lion. The male lead is split between Guillaume and Bertrand: the latter, who explains things in his voice-over, is attractive but wet. The film follows Bertrand and conveys his perspective on events, but it is hard to care about him. Furthermore, there is no ironic distance between Bertrand’s perspective and that of the story. Guillaume, on the other hand, is manipulative and misogynistic. In short, the film fails to generate either sympathy for or meaningful detachment from the men. Nevertheless, the sense of a slice of life captured has a documentary fascination and the experiment in story construction is a part of Rohmer’s history. Two final things merit a note. The first is La Carrière de Suzanne’s allusion to Don Juan. At the first party, Mozart’s Don Giovanni is playing in the background. When the guests leave, Guillaume and Bertrand pretend to make the table move and talk to spirits. As they conjure up the spirit of Don Juan, Rohmer inserts a shot of the score for Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Suzanne knows that Bertrand is pushing the table but goes along with Guillaume’s game, which ends when Guillaume pretends that Don Juan dictates ‘go to bed’ to him. Bertrand tells him, ‘that’s going too far’. Several Rohmerian men choose to imitate the Spanish seducer, including Guillaume. The second thing is the inclusion of a painting by the German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde on the wall of Guillaume’s apartment. As Rohmer (1990b: 113) says, it is not relevant to the story. However, the Nolde painting may signal the financial origins of the production. La Carrière de Suzanne was produced by Barbet Schroeder and the interiors were shot in his parents’ apartment.33 Neupert recounts how Schroeder came from a wealthy family and ‘his mother allowed him to mortgage one of her paintings by Emil Nolde to finance the start of his company’ (Neupert 2007: 256), to produce Rohmer’s first two Contes moraux. It would be typical of Rohmer’s playfulness if the Nolde painting in La Carrière de Suzanne were the painting which Schroeder’s mother allowed her son to mortgage to finance his film. Schroeder, future director and producer, was in 1961 a young cinephile who, at the age of 21, founded Les Films du Losange, running its office from his bedroom in his parents’ apartment. According to Neupert (2007: 255), Schroeder became friends with Rohmer at the Cinémathèque. Their collaboration was an important partnership for Rohmer, who donated his first two Contes moraux to Les Films du Losange. Schroeder remained head of production at Les Films du Losange until 1975, when Margaret Menegoz took over. Les Films du Losange produced most of Rohmer’s films and it remains a prestigious French production company. However, in 1964, the first two Contes moraux were the only films on its books; Schroeder needed another project for his company.

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Paris vu par (1965) Schroeder had the idea to make Paris vu par because all the directors were available (Payen et al. 2004). However, De Baecque mentions another reason for the selection of directors – whether they supported Rohmer during his quarrel at Cahiers du cinéma: Paris vu par . . ., made under the leadership of Rohmer and Douchet, produced by Barbet Schroeder, who had founded Les Films du Losange to finance the works of his master [i.e. Rohmer], presented short films credited notably to Rouch, Godard, Chabrol, Pollet, but deliberately ignoring the other side of the nouvelle vague, who remained at Cahiers: Rivette, Truffaut, Kast, Doniol-Valcroze. (2001: 86; 2003: 321) Rohmer confirms that the other directors ‘were chosen at my suggestion. They were filmmakers I found interesting and worthy of support. We also approached others who turned us down, in particular Jacques Rozier’ (Rohmer 1977). As they were making short films, each director applied for separate government finance, which Schroeder then combined to finance a feature film (Neupert 2007: 266). Made in 1964 and released in 1965, Paris vu par was successful, though it ‘remained Les Films du Losange’s only real asset until Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse in 1967’ (Neupert 2007: 266). Schroeder produced the six short films, assisted by his friend Patrick Bauchau. Each director wrote and directed his film, referring to an area of Paris. Ewa Mazierska argues that ‘geographical authenticity, especially the emphasis on representing various aspects of Paris, and the relationship between the character and his physical environment were major concerns for the directors of the French New Wave’ (2002: 224). However, Mazierska proposes that, in the subsequent decades, only Rohmer remained faithful to his original interest in the relationship between film characters and their geographical environment and continued to study in minute detail various French locations, hence his uniqueness with the original ‘Bazin’s circle’. (2002: 224) Yet only Rohmer makes complex use of his location: Pollet’s, Godard’s and Chabrol’s films could be set anywhere; Douchet’s and Rouch’s films make more use of their locations, but Rohmer’s film integrates locations and story. As he explains, The subject of the film came from the geographical structure of the Place de l’Etoile. What is there in this square? Cars and pedestrians. I chose

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the pedestrian. Walking is part of the place: it was necessary therefore to follow a certain trajectory. . . . But, in addition, the character could run, although it was necessary to justify this action. When one runs, above all in the street, it is because one is in a rush. However, no Parisian is in enough of a rush to run 400 metres continuously. My character had to be afraid of something. That gave me the idea of the scuffle with the man on whose foot he treads. (Douchet 1987: 193–4) Rohmer stresses the inductive nature of his preparation: he researched the location, then devised a story to fit his discoveries, letting the location determine the colours: Colour plays a precise role in this story: the traffic lights, which we see several times, dictate the tone of the film. It was not difficult, given that the dominance of Ektachrome is rather greenish: in comparison, red becomes highlighted. Furthermore, I had some luck because filming coincided with a visit by the president of Italy, for which the flag, as you know, is green and red. (Douchet 1987: 194)34 Despite this preparation, Paris vu par shows none of the directors at their best; all six films are slight, including ‘Place de l’Etoile’. Douchet’s ‘Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, which is first, begins in a quasidocumentary fashion, like ‘Place de l’Etoile’, with a voice-over describing Saint-Germain-des-Prés while the camera travels through the streets. Its story turns on a single pay-off: a young American woman sleeps with one man then discovers that she did so in the apartment of a second man, who also tries to pick her up. The mobile camera gives this sketch a rough feel, but the story is structured, somewhat like Rohmer and Godard’s Charlotte et Véronique, as a comic tale with a surprise ending. Rouch’s ‘Gare du Nord’ is more experimental; apart from its establishing and concluding shots, the film is one long take which follows a young married couple having breakfast and getting ready for work. Schroeder plays the man; the woman is Nadine Ballot from La Pyramide humaine and Chronique d’un été. Their breakfast discussion becomes an argument that ends when she slaps him and storms out. When she leaves in the lift, the photography responds to the available light, to the extent that at times the image darkens until nothing is visible. On the street, the camera follows her as she crosses the road and is almost run over; the driver gets out to talk to her. He offers her everything that she has accused her husband of lacking: riches, excitement, adventure. But he says that he has been thinking of dying and that unless she comes with him, he will die. The story ends with him jumping from the bridge onto the train tracks.35 ‘Rue Saint Denis’ by Jean-Daniel Pollet and Godard’s ‘Montparnasse et Levallois’ are the least interesting. The latter is billed as ‘un action film’, shot by Albert Maysles. The joke of Pollet’s film plays on the difference

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between the mature prostitute and the young inexperienced client. Godard’s film shows a woman’s confusion with two men, one a sculptor and the other a garage mechanic. Chabrol’s ‘La Muette’ condenses typical Chabrolian themes. Chabrol plays the grotesque father and the director’s wife, Stéphane Audran, plays the mother. The conclusion exploits the vein of black humour to which Chabrol often returned: the wife lies at the bottom of the stairs, alive but immobile and bleeding, maybe dying. With his earplugs in, the son hears nothing. As indicated above, Rohmer’s ‘Place de l’Etoile’ focuses on the location, and the use of intertitles to advance the story is something that Rohmer uses often in his later films. He also makes comic use of repetitions; for example, on the Metro a woman steps on the hero’s shoe and scuffs the leather with her high heel; on the street, he steps on a man’s foot and gets into a brawl with him. The hero, Marc (Jean-Michel Rouzière), worries that he has killed him with his umbrella. The intertitles tell us that he spends a few days avoiding the Place de l’Etoile and checking the newspapers for reports. As several critics note, ‘Place de l’Etoile’ contains a version of Rohmer’s characteristic illusion: the hero’s imagination transforms an everyday occurrence into a murder.36 The conclusion reveals the workings of the illusion: everything took place in the hero’s imagination. The last intertitle declares, ‘One or two months had passed, when, finally . . .’. A cut to the Metro enables a view of Marc seeing the man with whom he fought; outside on the street he opens his umbrella and bumps into a woman who is doing the same. Paris vu par functions now less as a film about the importance of Paris and more as a record of collaboration. In addition, on Paris vu par Rohmer first met and worked with Nestor Almendros, whom he asked to shoot ‘Place de l’Etoile’ after quarrelling with his original cinematographer. This was Almendros’s first director of photography job in Paris and the beginning of his association with Rohmer, for whom he shot seven feature films over the next 18 years, also working with Truffaut and Schroeder. Almendros is an important collaborator for Rohmer because he came from outside the French film industry; in him, Rohmer found someone willing to adopt his methods. After Paris vu par, Rohmer got Almendros some work for schools television and they worked together on Rohmer’s next short film, Nadja à Paris (1964).

Three documentaries A central achievement of Rohmer’s films is the density with which they integrate locations and actors with themes and motifs. Locations provide sources of material, which the films present as organized patterns. In the mid-1960s, Rohmer made three documentaries about women’s relationship

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to space, environment and setting. These three films anticipate his best work, of the 1980s and 1990s, those films which present studies of contemporary women.37 The first, Nadja à Paris, follows a student around Paris. Her voice-over describes her visits to parks, cafés and art galleries. She says that she likes to get away from people and visit a park ‘at the end of Paris’. She says this as she looks down from the cliffs in Buttes-Chaumont park: ‘I like this place because it’s empty and wild. I know that the streams are artificial and the rocks are cement but it doesn’t matter’. She explores the nearby suburb of Belleville.38 In the early 1960s, a number of Parisian suburbs were being renovated, including Belleville. Pirot (2006: 49) argues that just by filming Nadja in a working-class bar in Belleville, in which the patrons talk to her, Rohmer was putting on screen a social class not often seen in cinemas. The combination of location filming and voice-over resembles Rohmer’s first two Contes moraux and there are moments of charming lightness during Nadja’s explorations. The same is true of his second documentary about a young woman, Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui, also shot by Almendros. With a voice-over by Antoine Vitez, Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui is a documentary about the increase in women attending university, for, in the 1960s, university education grew in France: ‘in 1968, five times more degrees in Lettres (liberal arts) were awarded than in 1958’ (Sowerwine 2009: 328). Rohmer’s documentary combines footage showing the rhythm of daily life for one female science student with the voice-over that provides statistics and describes student life. Another approach is found in Rohmer’s third documentary, La Fermière à Montfaucon (1967), of which he says: It’s a film of which I am proud because I did everything myself. I had a 16mm camera, I went to the farm on a Vélosolex, in all seasons. As I didn’t have any sound, it was necessary to make some sound effects, which we did ourselves, with Jacqueline Raynal, who helped me with the editing. It was commissioned by the wife of a senior civil servant in the Quai d’Orsay [home of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs], who wanted to make a series on women in France; within this framework, I filmed Nadja à Paris, Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui and Fermière à Montfaucon. (Frodon 2003: 81)39 La Fermière à Montfaucon (1967) follows the experience of a young farmer, Monique Sendron, in Montfaucon, in Aisne, 50 fifty miles east of Paris towards Reims. The farmer’s voice-over is present throughout the film. She explains, ‘after my studies, I worked as a teacher for a year. Then I married a farmer. But I know what it was to have a farm; I grew up in the countryside’. Like the other two documentaries about the experiences

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of contemporary women, La Fermière à Montfaucon matches voice-over and images: Sendron says that the farm has to be run as a business and that every animal has its own index card in the file; a hand draws a picture of a cow and writes a name underneath it, ‘Margot’. At one point, Sendron says that she prefers autumn best, when all the big jobs are complete; various images show husband and wife knocking down apples from a tree. Later she comments, ‘winter in our region is bleak’ and the film shows her walking across snow-covered fields, taking coffee to workers. ‘It is necessary to have an outside interest’, she says, and Rohmer shows her working as a local councillor. The film ends with her commenting ‘the danger is to retreat inside yourself, because lots of farmers have no contact with the exterior’. This film, like its companions, represents an individual woman’s life, yet hints at a shared experience. All three films reveal Rohmer experimenting with methods, working out subjects and rehearsing locations.

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2 First successes The word ‘moral’, if I may say so, is used with a certain irony; it’s a pejorative term. Morality is, if you like, out of fashion these days. Obviously if one wrote straightforward moral tales, no one would buy them. I’m not in the least interested in moralising. So, there was a fair amount of irony intended. And in fact even if the moral tales aren’t exactly immoral, they have no brief for any particular morality. In the last analysis, virtue is not rewarded. And you may well wonder whether the people in these stories who believe themselves to be the most moral are not in fact the most immoral, and whether the actions that they consider the height of morality are not in fact the very reverse. If we’re talking about the moral tales, I think you have to put ‘moral’ in inverted commas. The people you take for angels are not at all angelic. Their actions are always ambivalent. But in the end there’s no such thing as amorality since any problem you confront could be termed a moral problem, which is to say a problem of ethics, of choice, a choice, if you like, between what you ought to do, what you have to do and what you’d like to do. (Rohmer 1976)1 I think that in modern times, it would be more accurate to say that women do what they like and men do what they ought to do. What I’m trying to say is that in my moral tales the men are prone to moralise, they have a moral view of the world, they’re not at all spontaneous, whereas the women are much more natural and say quite simply I shall do what I please, I shan’t follow any particular rules, I shall just trust my feelings. Anyhow, that’s how I see the moral tales. (Rohmer 1976) Of course, the audience isn’t interested in the girl he chooses but in the girl the film is about and who gets abandoned at the end. So right off, the audience is at odds with the narrator and it’s this tension that I find interesting. (Rohmer 1977)

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In Ma Nuit chez Maud, one can say that Trintignant would have been better to choose Françoise Fabian rather than Marie-Christine Barrault. Having said that, in the Contes moraux, one always sympathises with the woman who is refused. (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46) Five of the six titles that comprise the Six contes moraux refer to the woman who is refused: the bakery girl, Suzanne, the collector (Haydée), Maud and Claire. The sixth film, L’Amour, l’après-midi, continued this theme when it was released in America translated as Chloé in the Afternoon, instead of Love in the Afternoon. 2 The six films apply different material to similar plot devices. For a Hitchcockco-Hawksien like Rohmer, this was normal. Both Hitchcock and Hawks repeated story structures and plot devices, combining these with available settings and actors.3 Rohmer filmed his man-and-two-women story in different settings and with different actors. He researched the settings and incorporated this research into his films. He used his actors as if they were famous stars with strong screen presences, moulding characters around them, just as Hitchcock and Hawks did with James Stewart and Cary Grant. When he began making films, the people he had around him were friends of his and his collaborators.

La Collectionneuse (1967) The success of Paris vu par allowed Les Films du Losange to make La Collectionneuse. Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder produced it, shooting in June 1966.4 Two things forced Rohmer to make La Collectionneuse before Ma Nuit chez Maud, both of which epitomize Rohmer’s refusal to compromise on casting or creative decisions. First, Rohmer was waiting for Jean-Louis Trintignant to be available for a winter shoot on location in Clermont-Ferrand. Second, Rohmer insisted on making Ma Nuit chez Maud in black and white. Schroeder says they wanted to film Ma Nuit chez Maud first, but they could not raise enough money (Stein 1977: 53). Therefore, they made La Collectionneuse first, gambling that, being in colour and set in the South of France, its success would allow Rohmer to make Ma Nuit chez Maud as he wished (Langlois 1969).5 Its commercial success makes La Collectionneuse a milestone for Rohmer, but it has artistic importance too because it was the first time that he collaborated with actors using what would become his typical method. La Collectionneuse carries the credit ‘With the collaboration for the dialogue of Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff and Daniel Pommereulle’, and Rohmer explains: La Collectionneuse was based on a story I wrote a long time ago, before

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1950. It was very old. The only thing I kept was the structure, and in particular the bit about the Chinese vase. I changed the characters completely. In the film, they were based on the actors portraying them. I used the actors I had to hand. They were Barbet Schroeder’s friends, and I found their personalities really interesting, both the two men and Haydée, and I thought I could fit them into the story. I had the story but I had to modify it to include them. One character was difficult to modify, the narrator, Patrick Bauchau. That’s why his character was completely my creation and likewise his dialogue was written by me. He had little input on dialogue and insisted on keeping the character’s name, which in the story was Adrien. Whereas Daniel Pommereulle’s character was much less defined, so the character in the film could become Daniel Pommereulle. His dialogue about painting, about women, are his own words. I found his statements interesting so I said ‘let’s keep them’. It was true cinéma vérité. (Rohmer 1977) Rohmer’s title for his original story was The Broken Vase (Rohmer 2010: 84); he kept the vase central to La Collectionneuse’s plot, but to it he added summer in the south of France and Schroeder’s young friends.6 Rohmer insists that they rehearsed before shooting: ‘the film was very carefully planned and in no way improvised. I wrote the dialogue myself with the actors, sometimes only the evening or the morning before we shot the scene. But the fact remains that the dialogue was written’ (Nogueira 1971: 120). Patrick Bauchau, who had had a small role in La Carrière de Suzanne as Frank, Suzanne’s fiancé, plays the lead role, Adrien, in La Collectionneuse, and Daniel Pommereulle is the other lead male. Pommereulle was an important influence, described by Rohmer as ‘the spirit of the film’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19).7 The director discussed the subject with the actors and recorded these discussions on a tape-recorder, the first time that he used his interview method.8 Bauchau remembers: ‘I fell into acting just by being around . . . carrying film cans . . . talking into Rohmer’s Nagra’ (Walker 1998: 42). He and the others talked into Rohmer’s tape-recorder in the office of Les Films du Losange, which was still in Schroeder’s mother’s apartment. Through Schroeder, Rohmer met a group of artists and filmmakers who were more than 20 years younger than him and who have become known as the Zanzibar group. They included Pommereulle, Serge Bard, Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clémenti and Sylvina Boissonnas, an heiress who studied art history and financed films.9 As Sally Shafto records (2008: 178), several people on La Collectionneuse were connected to the Zanzibar group, as was Zouzou, with whom Rohmer worked on L’Amour, l’après-midi. Jackie Raynal, who edited La Collectionneuse, edited and directed films with the Zanzibar group and Schroeder appears in Serge Bard’s Fun and Games for Everyone (1968).10 Friends of Schroeder’s, Bauchau’s and Pommereulle’s

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play smaller roles; for example, the art critic seen in the second prologue, discussing Daniel’s razor-blade sculpture, is Alain Jouffroy, who worked on the Zanzibar film Détruisez-vous (1968, Serge Bard) and with Godard and Garrel. A friend of Bauchau’s, Eugene Archer, plays the art collector, Sam.11 Haydée’s lover, Charlie, is played by Denis Berry, son of the filmmaker John Berry, who moved to Paris after being blacklisted in Hollywood.12 In the café scene, filmmaker and artist Donald Cammell plays the man in a white jumper who embraces Haydée.13 Rohmer filmed this group of young people, whom he got to know through Schroeder. In responding to them, he updated his story from the 1940s to the late 1960s, so that the film became more about the changing dynamics in heterosexual relationships. Shafto calls it a pre-1968 film, ‘a prophetic film of the period’ (2007: 178), because several of the people who worked on or who appear in La Collectionneuse were involved in the May 1968 demonstrations, yet the film also represents their world view; in Pommereulle’s case, it represents his frustration with art collectors and the art market. For Shafto, ‘if the Rohmer film does not exactly fall under the Zanzibar heading, it is nevertheless very close’ (2007: 178). However, there was some tension between Rohmer’s agenda and Pommereulle’s. Bauchau recalls, ‘I felt he had taken our material and turned it into a Rohmer thing. Daniel, too, felt he made fun of us. But I was arrogant. It was a movie in which I didn’t have to bow down to anyone else’s standards. I should’ve been more pleased’ (Walker 1998: 43). A central part of Rohmer’s creative process first achieves success in long-form fiction in La Collectionneuse: he absorbed material from people whom he observed and with whom he conversed; he then wrote roles for them. He combined his research into people and places with his story about male desire. After the failures of Les Petites filles modèles and Le Signe du Lion, La Collectionneuse is the first time that Rohmer merges a prolonged depiction of a group of people and a milieu with a story (born of influences from Murnau and Hitchcock) that is all his own. Rohmer had begun to explore Hitchcockian themes of male voyeurism, desire and hypocrisy in La Boulangère de Monceau, but they first find their full expression in La Collectionneuse. The opening introduces the theme of voyeurism. The first prologue, a photographic portrait of Haydée walking along a beach in her bikini, invites a desiring gaze and anticipates Adrien’s desire for her; but her pose suggests youthful confidence and her face expresses something unknown. Her prologue invites voyeurism, but the fragmented presentation of Haydée also confronts us, so that one wonders why she is filmed in this way.14 The subsequent two prologues develop the theme of looking and objectifying, combining these with the theme of dandyism, first with Daniel and then with Adrien, both men who regard themselves as separate from society. Daniel’s prologue, during which he and Jouffroy discuss art in Daniel’s studio, establishes the notion of the dandy

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as artistic rebel, the alienated artist as potential revolutionary. Jouffroy expounds upon the qualities of Pommereulle’s Objet hors saisie (1965). It is a can painted yellow, red, green and blue with razor blades stuck on to it, a work of art, but one designed to cause pain to those who attempt to hold it.15 Jouffroy cuts his finger, yet admires its perfection; Daniel listens, and takes off his yellow jumper, allowing us to see that his jumper’s yellow matches his yellow tie and the yellow of his Objet. The yellow paint can with razor blades is as provocative as the artist, who declares ‘I want other people to get cut, not you’. Like the valuable Chinese vase, which Sam buys and Haydée breaks, Pommereulle’s tin can with razor blades is a work of art, yet one that differs from the vase and that may hold no value for Adrien’s bourgeois collector, whom Daniel insults. Shafto argues that Jouffroy and Pommereulle’s conversation encapsulates the mood of the late 1960s (2007: 179). Jouffroy, Shafto writes, ‘seems here to offer an excuse for violent action’, something he continues in Serge Bard’s Détruisez-vous the following year. Shafto also cites Jouffroy’s last comment to Daniel: ‘You yourself are the can of paint surrounded by razor blades, as was Saint-Just. Razor blades are words. They could be silence. They could also be elegance, a certain yellow’. The last phrase, ‘a certain yellow’, makes Daniel smile. The patterns in colours are noticeable, but more pertinent is the connection La Collectionneuse makes between Haydée and the various art objects picked up by men: Daniel’s sculpture, Objet hors saisie, designed to hurt those who grasp it; the Chinese vase bought by Sam and broken by Haydée; the Japanese vase given to Haydée by Adrien; and the two nude bronzes picked up by Adrien in his prologue. The third prologue establishes Adrien’s pretensions and his limitations. He is a connoisseur, flirting with art and anarchy, but choosing safety. On holiday, he rises at dawn and exercises; Daniel lies around, listening to a record of Tibetan chanting and smoking marijuana. Adrien is too conservative for this; and he is irritated when the young people disturb his sleep. Approaching 30, he is part dandy aesthete and part conservative middlebrow. Therefore, the third prologue continues the themes of voyeurism and male dandyism, beginning as it does with a discussion of style and beauty, and a portrait of Adrien that emphasizes his similarity to Daniel. However, it also introduces the two women who belong to the film’s structure: Adrien’s girlfriend, Mijanou, and Haydée.16 From the opening framing of the women disagreeing about beauty, Rohmer pans to find Adrien contributing: ‘a man may be ugly yet have immense charm’. Handsome and confident, Adrien reclines in his yellow chair, with legs crossed and right arm lifted high on the back of the chair; as he leans back, his long dark hair falls away from his face. He wears a pale blue tie with a pink and white striped shirt and a dark suit. The background is a rose garden of pinks, reds and greens. Adrien has his back to the women and he turns over his shoulder to direct comments at them. A portrait of

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studied elegance, the framing expresses the character of the man to whom this prologue is dedicated, someone convinced of his own irresistible charm. His hair is less unkempt than Daniel’s, more shaped, a conservative compromise between long (rebellious) and short (conventional). In his prologue, Adrien and his girlfriend discuss their separate holidays. Brigitte Bardot’s sister, Mijanou Bardot, married to Bauchau, plays his character’s girlfriend. In La Collectionneuse, the married pair appear as the epitome of upper-class elegance. A friend from the 1960s recalls them as a couple: He was urbane, stylish, handsome. But it was his intellect, coupled with grace, that gave him access to film and literary circles, if he wanted, and social circles, too – though he moved without an agenda. He and Mijanou were like Fitzgerald characters . . . cool, chic. Late-night dinners, afternoons at movies . . . Chez Castel after midnight . . . seeing friends in the cafés at twilight. He was the envy of many. All the young men wanted to be Patrick.17 Whether accurate or not as a description of Bauchau, it encapsulates Bauchau’s dilettante character, Adrien. The couple’s conversation about holidays develops the film’s plot: she is going to London for five weeks for a modelling job. She invites him, but he refuses, saying that he has to meet a collector who might finance his gallery. Their behaviour establishes that they are in a relationship, but not yet at the stage where going on holiday together is automatic. When she walks away from him in the garden, saying ‘in that case’, the film stays with Adrien as he watches her depart. The last thing he says to her anticipates its reversal at the end of the film. She asks, ‘why don’t you come to London?’ He replies: ‘I already told you, I can’t’. The film ends with him phoning Nice airport to ask about the next flight to London.18 He will have concluded his business, but that business, not acknowledged by him during the prologue, is the decision he had to make about commitment to his girlfriend, not the dealings with Sam. The remainder of the prologue develops this theme of Adrien testing his commitment. In the upstairs rooms of Rodolphe’s rich country house, he searches for distraction and finds it, first with two small bronzes of naked women, then, as he has wandered into a bedroom, with a young couple making love. Haydée is lying naked under a young man, whose face is not visible, but whom one assumes is Rodolphe. Haydée sees Adrien, but says nothing. He walks out with a smile on his face and closes the door. Suspense in Rohmer’s Six contes moraux derives from the tension between the parts of the films that establish the experiences of the central male character as attractive and involving, and the parts of the films that alert us to the hero’s self-deception. Things that draw us close to Adrien include the voice-over and the amount of time we spend with him. After

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the prologue, La Collectionneuse continues its pleasurable depiction of a world whose events absorb us. Adrien’s languid behaviour is alluring: the film shows him ambling down to the Mediterranean for a morning swim, the light hazy with heat; his voice-over describes his holiday plans while the cicadas chirp in the trees. Close-ups of rocks and seaweed as Adrien talks invite us to share his viewpoint.19 The seductive portrayal of an idyllic holiday helps secure our interest in Adrien. The holiday setting adds a further dimension to the working out of the symbolic drama. Summer holidays allow people to escape from their normal routines, although they may adopt other forms of routine. Holidays are a version of returning to nature, escaping from society and leading a simpler life. They are also occasions when nothing urgent presses on us, allowing us to indulge impulsiveness. Rohmer uses holidays as opportunities to dramatize situations where people might try unusual experiences. Rohmer’s characters do not go on package holidays or to Club Med-style resorts; the group holiday produces a different genre – the broad, often slapstick comedy.20 Rohmer’s characters do not go on Club Med holidays, not because they are all upper class, but because his holiday films are often about boredom, a period of waiting or a search for something. Rohmer’s five holiday films focus on people taking the opportunity to step out of their routines, and revise their social lives and relationships.21 Furthermore, although in Rohmer’s holiday films the traditional long family holiday still takes place, with a country villa accommodating visits from friends and relatives, of the characters in Rohmer’s five holiday films only Marion in Pauline à la plage and Jérôme in Le Genou de Claire know Jullouville and Annecy well; Adrien in La Collectionneuse, Delphine in Le Rayon vert and Gaspard in Conte d’été are all strangers to the places in which they stay. La Collectionneuse combines its portrayal of an appealing holiday environment with stylistic and thematic patterns that communicate attitudes towards and evaluations of the hero’s feelings and experiences. As the film progresses, it increases its emphasis on Adrien’s self-deceit.22 Things that distance us from Adrien’s posturing include the organization of dialogue, framing, colours, costumes and comportment, all of which warn of the contradiction between Adrien’s words and actions; for Adrien denies his attraction to Haydée and she is right to call him a hypocrite – he is a bad faith egotist. He tells Daniel, ‘If I find a book, say Rousseau, I’ll read Rousseau, but I could just as well read Don Quixote. If a pretty girl fell into my arms, I’d take her, though at the moment I have no desire to get involved’. A close-up of Daniel signals Rohmer’s attention to Daniel’s prescient reply: ‘What if Haydée crawled into your bed?’ The references to Rousseau and Don Quixote offer further clues about the self-deceiving egotists who make up the heroes of the Six contes moraux.23 Particular moments claim attention; for example, during Adrien’s first visit to the beach, an amusing shot shows him standing in front of the sea

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with his shirt off and hands on his hips, like a giant surveying his territory. There is a similar humour in the presentation of Adrien’s hand holding out Rousseau’s complete works. Costumes emphasize contemporary fashion and the traditional dandy, but Adrien’s outfits are sometimes absurd. He wears a pink and white flowery dressing gown, but it is so small on him that his arms poke out from its sleeves. One prominent shot marshals framing, posture and costume. After Daniel and Adrien tell Charlie to leave, Adrien’s commentary states: ‘a newly docile Haydée brought no more guests to the house’. The following scene, filmed in one shot, emphasizes Adrien’s sense of superiority. He reclines on the terrace wall in black trousers, espadrilles, with his tanned torso exposed by an open blue shirt, leaning back on one elbow, one leg down, the other up and bent, hair swept over his head, blowing smoke into the dusky air. The double doors that open onto the terrace frame him; the low sun casts shadows behind him. In the foreground are the red hexagonal ceramic tiles of the summer villa; in the middle, on the threshold, sits Haydée, using the telephone; in front of her are a blue and white striped deck chair, an iron table with remnants of a meal and Adrien, who watches her on the phone as he smokes, teasing her with ‘Yak, yak’. This shot conveys Adrien’s attitude to Haydée and is the first of a pair, for the film closes with an ironic reprisal of this framing when he phones the airport to book a flight to London.24 This scene, with others, expresses Adrien’s arrogance towards Haydée, whom he assumes is attracted to him. When they first go to the beach together, he unzips Haydée’s jeans while his voice-over boasts that he had made their relationship clear: ‘simple friendship. I knew she would have liked exactly the opposite, a courtship of equal parts insolence and devotion’. In a quiet spot in the woods, he tells her ‘I don’t like you running after me’; she replies ‘I’m not’ but he ignores her: ‘You’re too attractive. We both carry the same cross’. Later, Adrien calls her ‘une collectionneuse’ but she replies ‘I’m not a collector’, saying: ‘You make no sense. You criticise me for taking anything but you brag about doing it yourself’. His confidence allows him to ignore her rejections of him. Adrien may call Haydée the collector of the title, but she rejects this appellation.25 When she confronts Adrien at the end, she says ‘I wouldn’t want your morals’. Earlier she states that she wants ‘to have normal relationships with people. Somehow I always mess things up’. Adrien treats her as a plaything, but she retains her dignity while he loses his. Adrien accuses Haydée of being a collector, like Sam, and the film uses the two vases to express the ambiguity of their relationship and to bring to the fore Haydée’s rebellion against the men who treat her as an object, to be exchanged like a precious antique. As Heinemann (2007: 74) points out, Adrien’s prologue compares Haydée as the third ‘object’ of Adrien’s view with the two bronzes of naked women that he picks up. To this, one could add that Rohmer acknowledges the connection between fragmentation and objectification by linking the prologue’s fragmented presentation of Haydée’s body with the broken fragments of the Song vase. Sam and Adrien

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both objectify Haydée. She is an object for them both and they try to catch hold of her. Neither man succeeds and the film links their inability to hold her to the two bronzes that Adrien picks up during his prologue, to Daniel’s object that is designed not to be held and to the two vases. In a film in which there are two vases, one of which is an expensive tenth-century Song vase, which Haydée breaks, what happens to the other

La Collectionneuse: Adrien asks Haydée to be the bonus

vase is noteworthy. Adrien gives the Japanese vase to her because he thinks it worthless. Her use of the vase offers a clue about her feelings for Adrien. Whereas Sam buys the Song vase and displays it as a valuable object, Haydée uses the worthless vase for flowers. Rohmer shows Haydée’s vase in the important scene, following Daniel’s departure, when Adrien comes into Haydée’s bedroom to persuade her to spend the night at Sam’s villa. The scene has five shots. The first shows Haydée from behind, with a towel around her, looking in the mirror applying make-up, her face reflected. The second shot has Adrien entering her bedroom. Then begins an unusual shot/reverse-shot sequence. The third shot offers a fascinating close-up of Haydée looking at the mirror. Her face is visible on the left in profile and on the right in full in the mirror. Adrien, comes into the shot by walking behind her and into the reflection, saying of Sam: ‘He insists we spend the night at his place. I can’t. I have an important appointment in the morning’. We know what he has just said to Sam about Haydée being ‘easy’. Here, the film offers a close view of her reactions to Adrien, though it remains difficult to determine her thoughts and the mirror increases the sense of indeterminacy. Haydée knows what Adrien is doing, but the most one can say is that disappointment flickers across her eyes. Shot four, of Adrien, contains the vase. As he explains that ‘in business one has to

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create a certain climate’, the camera follows him around the room, first as he approaches the window, then as he sits on her chair between her bed and a small corner table. The vase remains visible throughout this shot, first on the left of the frame, then on the right, a visual reminder of their relationship. Haydée reacts to Adrien’s proposal by recalling his description of the vase he gave to her. He had told her that he got her vase as a ‘bonus’ with the Song vase; now she tells him, ‘so, I’m the bonus for the vase’, the sweetener for the deal. Not just the vase, he replies; Sam is a potential investor in his art gallery. She agrees to play along, though, despite the charade. The scene ends by returning to the shot of Haydée in the mirror, saying ‘I feel safer with him than with you’. Besides the symbolism of the two vases, Rousseau figures as a further indication of Rohmer’s purpose. La Collectionneuse’s reference to Rousseau alludes to ideas about society corrupting a natural freedom of expression.26 Haydée lives according to this ideal; Adrien reads about it. On holiday, he thinks he is living in a natural spontaneous idyll, but he is more like Don Quixote, which he mentions as an alternative to Rousseau. Haydée is free and liberated, her destiny in her own hands. Adrien, with his little car, believes he is free, but he clings to convention. He assumes he can sleep with Haydée whenever he wants, but he does not consider that she may be withholding herself from him because she mistrusts him, until the end, after she breaks the vase. Adrien tells Mijanou that his business is the Chinese vase; but Haydée breaks this and, in laughing about it, severs the link between propriety and economic value; she cares little about its financial worth.27 Spurred on by her freedom, Adrien acts, but her subsequent spontaneity (stopping to talk to her friends) terrifies him. The result is a hasty flight back to conformity, London and Mijanou. The build-up to the breaking of the vase begins when Daniel leaves. The boredom of the holiday asserts itself in Daniel’s irritation when he kicks his foot against the floor as he stares at himself in the mirror. His aim appears to be to annoy Haydée.28 She tells him to stop, but he continues. Daniel’s tirade against her is vicious, though she appears unmoved by his insults. He leaves the next day, after insulting Sam, saying, ‘I’m fed up with these phoney nonconformists’.29 After the angry departure of the artistic dandy, the true revolutionary, the bourgeois art collector replaces him in the triangle formed with Adrien and Haydée; from that moment on, the pleasurable holiday liberty disintegrates into monotony. Adrien is the middleman between artist and collector: when the artist leaves, our distance from Adrien grows. Daniel represents spirited rebellion but he is replaced by Sam, whom Eugene Archer plays like the ‘old villain’ Adrien calls him, ready to seduce a young woman with trips on his yacht and visits to the casino. After leaving Haydée at Sam’s, Adrien regrets it, divulging ‘for the first time since I’d arrived, I was bored’, his boredom expressed by the repeated shots of attractive young women he watches in town. En route to

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Sam’s house, he takes out his annoyance on a lost tourist. That evening, holiday excitement degenerates into bleary-eyed drunkenness; the mood turns aggressive. Sam accuses Adrien of justifying himself, which he does, in hollow assertions: ‘I’ve always been sorry that I wasn’t rich. But if I were, my dandyism, as you call it, would be too easy, lacking any heroism whatsoever, and I can’t imagine a dandy not being heroic’. After this speech, Haydée breaks the vase and Sam slaps her, though we judge her breaking of the vase to be just, given that he was chasing her and touching her legs. When Adrien and Haydée talk and kiss in the bathroom, where she attends to her slapped mouth, La Collectionneuse hints at a genuine feeling of warmth and attraction between the couple. To reinforce this, Rohmer reprises his use of the mirror. In the scene’s striking opening shot, the film proffers three views of the enigmatic Haydée, one from behind and two in the mirror. The mirrored reflections emphasize the way in which Rohmer keeps Haydée’s true feelings mysterious: we never know what she wants. As they kiss, and she suggests they return home, Adrien may judge his seduction a success; her thoughts are unknown, but her physical tenderness with him indicates some kind of rapprochement: she touches and looks at him as if she desires him, as if she has been waiting to decide whether he is worthy of her attention. Adrien is still in denial about her, though; he sees her as someone he can have a fling with; his commentary states, with astonishing egotism, ‘an affair so totally circumscribed in time and space met my definition of total adventure’. The chance meeting with her friends saves Haydée; the road is blocked and he drives away from her, feeling pleased with himself for making the ‘right decision’. When he abandons her without a word, having been about to sleep with her, the difference between Adrien’s self-regard and the film’s presentation of him promotes condemnation of him as selfish and self-deceiving. His voice-over declares, ‘I was overwhelmed by a feeling of exquisite freedom. Now I could do whatever I wanted’. However, once back in the house alone he cannot sleep; he claims a desire for independence, but craves company. When he goes into Haydée’s bedroom, takes a cigarette and looks at her clothes, he starts to appear cruel and idiotic to abandon Haydée. Rohmer includes an ironic image of the emptiness and starkness that faces Adrien: two empty iron chairs on the terrace, which recall the missing friends, who were there at the start of the three weeks, when it was fun. Adrien declares his longing to live apart from society, but once achieved he cannot maintain it. In the last shot, he sits on the threshold by the double doors and does what Haydée earlier did, uses the telephone to organize his personal life. La Collectionneuse offers a fascinating portrait of an era and a sensibility; Rohmer is as interested in what the dandies of ’68 are saying as he is interested in how these young people talk, behave and interact with each other. The tangled links between intellect and emotions fascinate Rohmer,

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as much as the counter-cultural atmosphere of holiday dandyism. Yet if La Collectionneuse is Rohmer’s first artistic and commercial success, it judges its male hero severely. Exposing his hypocrisy ensures we care less for him than for Haydée; but the film focuses far less on her; she remains an enigma, unlike the eponymous Maud of his next film.

Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969) Ma Nuit chez Maud combines a plot written by Rohmer in the 1950s with his research into places, people and weather. Rohmer says that in the original version of Ma Nuit chez Maud, ‘there were neither Catholics nor Communists, which one finds in the film’ (Blumenfeld 2007) and the setting was Paris not the provinces (Rohmer 2010: 84). He presumably developed the roles of the Catholic and the Communist because of the period in which he made the film, 1967–8, when politics and religion were contentious topics in France, as elsewhere. One line of Rohmer scholarship has investigated the religious dimensions of Rohmer’s films and has often used Ma Nuit chez Maud as a case study.30 Yet Ma Nuit chez Maud is not a religious or spiritual film; it shows how religion functions in society. Ma Nuit chez Maud’s examination of ethics speaks to the context in which Rohmer made it, that of a France becoming increasingly secular in the post-war period, above all amongst young people, for whom attendance at Mass fell during the 1960s.31 As Maurice Larkin writes, the 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the ‘baby boomers’ of the immediate post-war years – a generation which had no personal memories of the fears and privations of war, and whose attainment of adult independence coincided with a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, when nothing seemed out of reach. The development of the contraceptive pill not only favoured growing sexual permissiveness – in an age still ignorant of AIDS – but it put women on a closer par with men. All this seemed to proffer a vision of bliss that was a safer bet than that of a heaven without tangible proof of existence. (Larkin 2003: 222–3) Ma Nuit chez Maud dramatizes the complex interactions between a hypocritical Catholic man, a mature free-spirited liberal divorced woman, a committed Communist university professor and a timid guilt-racked young Catholic woman who has had an affair with a married man. Through these interactions, the film connects to contemporary debates about religion and politics. Ma Nuit chez Maud premiered at Cannes in May 1969; a year earlier, while Rohmer was preparing the film, there were strikes and protests in Clermont-Ferrand, as there were throughout

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France.32 For some, Ma Nuit chez Maud may appear irrelevant to urgent political events, but Rohmer responded in his own way.33 Far from ignoring political debates in France, Rohmer’s inductive working methods meant that he absorbed and then expressed ideas through character and story. The May 1968 events resulted from a long build-up of political tension, related to the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, and the subsequent return of many veterans into civilian life.34 Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher (1969), contemporaneous with Ma Nuit chez Maud, uses the thriller to address this precise subject, with Popaul (Jean Yanne) returning from France’s colonial wars; in doing so, Chabrol exposes a seam of violence in la France profonde, the heart of France. Rohmer uses the ironic comedy, but his treatment of la France profonde resembles Chabrol’s treatment of social tensions, with Maud (Françoise Fabian) a sister to Le Boucher’s Hélène (Stéphane Audran). Rohmer and Chabrol both incorporate details of the places in which they set their films, linking their characters to and taking inspiration from the settings. Ma Nuit chez Maud is about life in a typical regional French town in a province far from the capital.35 The young counter-cultural rebels of La Collectionneuse do not appear in ClermontFerrand, but the relations between the four characters who hold such disparate worldviews make Ma Nuit chez Maud resonate with its historical circumstances. Their differing behaviour and attitudes echo the off-screen context of intense political debate and activity in France, during a period when analysis focused on the power of the dominant class and repressive state action, both at home and abroad.36 What makes Ma Nuit chez Maud such a vividly microscopic examination of attitudes and values in 1968 France is the filming of this story with particular actors in particular places. Emotions, moral choices, confidences exchanged via gestures or expressions: these things are of vital importance and Rohmer brings them to life. Religion and politics are important in the film, but so are the weather, the locations and the qualities of the performers. The film’s humour and vibrancy develop in equal parts from the plot and the embodiment of that plot. Yet whereas La Collectionneuse credits its actors as co-authors of their dialogue, Rohmer wrote the dialogue for Ma Nuit chez Maud, except the sections that he re-wrote for Vidal, the Marxist philosophy lecturer played by Antoine Vitez: At the time I was writing the script, I was in the middle of directing a TV programme on Pascal for educational television, which was an interview between Brice Parain, a pro-Pascalian, and a Dominican, a specialist in the history of science, who was violently hostile to Pascal. But the idea of a Marxist Pascalian was given to me by Lucien Goldmann. It then happened that when I asked Antoine Vitez to talk about Pascal, he confessed to really liking Pascal. So I removed everything inspired by Goldmann and replaced it with things from Vitez. (Langlois 1969)37

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Rohmer wrote a complete script for Ma Nuit chez Maud, without collaborating with the actors, yet he wrote the part of the hero with Trintignant in mind and he waited for him to become available.38 Several critics have identified as important to Ma Nuit chez Maud Trintignant’s reserve, which suits the conformist conservative tendencies of the hero, who plans to marry someone because he takes her to be an ideal of Catholic womanhood.39 For Françoise, the young Catholic woman, Rohmer searched for two years until he chanced upon a picture of Marie-Christine Barrault in a newspaper.40 Trintignant, who had come to fame in Vadim’s Et dieu créa la femme (1956), was 38 when he made Ma Nuit chez Maud and had starred in many films by the time he worked with Rohmer. His character is 34 years old. Françoise is 22 years old; Barrault was 24 and Ma Nuit chez Maud was her first film. In contrast, Françoise Fabian, who plays Maud, was 35 when she appeared in Ma Nuit chez Maud and she is playing her age. Fabian had acted in several films by the time she worked with Rohmer, who cast her after seeing her in Belle de jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967). As Marion Vidal writes, Fabian gives ‘her authority, her intelligence and her beauty’ to Maud (1986: 50), opposed to which are Françoise’s youth, timidity and demure prettiness, the latter chosen by Trintignant’s hero. All six contes moraux construct an ironic perspective on their male heroes; the divergence between the viewpoints of the protagonists and that of the films produces their suspense and their humour.41 Rohmer consistently explored themes and used techniques similar to those found in Hitchcock’s films. The ironic humour of Ma Nuit chez Maud operates against the protagonist, much as the humour of Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) operates against Brandon (John Dall).42 Both films draw attention to patterns, repetitions and variations of which the characters remain unaware; in doing so, they detach us from the characters and their viewpoint. Talking of his use of conflicting viewpoints in the contes moraux, Rohmer says: the characters see things in a certain manner, recount them in a certain way and then it isn’t so much that the images contradict speech, but that what they do or say. There is an opposition between the off-screen commentary and the dialogue. Where is the truth? (Burdeau and Frodon 2004: 18)43 The title ‘My Night with Maud’ promises a first-person account: the hero’s voice-over is heard near the beginning and at the end of the film. He is in every scene and the film shows his experiences from his point of view. Furthermore, Trintignant’s character is unnamed, like Joan Fontaine’s character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). In both Ma Nuit chez Maud and Rebecca, the voice-overs and the namelessness of the protagonists indicate the influence of source material written in the first-person.44 Nonetheless, Ma Nuit chez Maud presents a distanced perspective on its

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hero. It depicts events in the hero’s life, from his point of view, but the film also establishes what George Wilson describes as ‘a contemplative perspective that stands outside the limits’ of his outlook (1992: 126). The film follows the hero’s actions, but the hero does not tell the story and the film’s irony arises from its separation of his viewpoint from that of the film. The organization of patterns and motifs in Ma Nuit chez Maud creates the separation of viewpoints. Snow and ice, for example, are the equivalent of the two vases in La Collectionneuse, objects or events that connect to the story of desire and modify our perspective on that story. For Rohmer, developing the visual and metaphoric potential of snow enabled the transition from literature to cinema: Ma Nuit chez Maud is a subject I had been carrying in my mind since 1945. Since then it has undergone enormous modifications. A character locked in a room with a woman by some external circumstances is the primary dramatic idea. But it was a question of the curfew during the war, and not snow. . . . Snow is for me the passage from the ‘tale’ to directing. Snow has a great cinematographic importance for me. It makes the situation stronger in the cinema, more universal than the external historical circumstance of the occupation. (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 117) As the journeys and the snow were important to the story, Rohmer chose to set the film in Clermont-Ferrand and its environs in the Auvergne; he wanted a town at the foot of the mountains (Langlois 1969).45 Clermont-Ferrand represents a typical regional French town and it supplies the snow that forces a man and woman to spend a night together, but Rohmer integrated the total complexity of the setting into his film, referring to geographical, sociological, historical, architectural and political features of Clermont-Ferrand. Things associated with Clermont-Ferrand that the film refers to include the church, the cathedral, the university, the Michelin headquarters and Pascal, born in Clermont-Ferrand, for, as Tom Milne observes, Pascal is not important to Ma Nuit chez Maud, ‘only what his characters make, or think they make, of Pascalian theory’ (Milne 1974: 42). Another film from the same year as Ma Nuit chez Maud also uses Clermont-Ferrand to tell a story about la France profonde: Marcel Ophuls’s La Chagrin et la pitié (1969), commissioned by French state television, but not shown on French television for more than a decade, its revelations considered too shocking.46 La Chagrin et la pitié reveals collaboration in Clermont-Ferrand, which, as Powrie and Reader note, ‘could have been virtually any other French city’ (2002: 31). Ophuls’s and Rohmer’s films are both black and white and they use the same city landmarks; for example, the first image of ClermontFerrand in Le Chagrin et la pitié is the view of the city taken from the same hill on which Françoise and the hero talk. Leah Vonderheide (2008: 27–40) studies the links between Ma Nuit chez Maud and La Chagrin et

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la pitié, suggesting that the opposition of a conservative Catholic and a Communist university professor in Clermont-Ferrand alludes to divisions between fascists and leftists in the city, which is, she points out, the largest near Vichy. Vonderheide writes: ‘The film’s mise en scène of the cathedral invokes the collusive relationship that once existed in Clermont-Ferrand between the Catholic Church and the Vichy regime’ (Vonderheide 2008: 29). The hero’s choice recalls the choice citizens of Clermont-Ferrand had to make about whether to collaborate with or resist the Vichy regime: ‘Trintignant is less like the Nazis and more like the puppet fascists of Vichy’ (2008: 32). In the same year, Ma Nuit chez Maud and La Chagin et la pitié both examine people with left-and right-wing politics in Clermont-Ferrand. Ma Nuit chez Maud’s opposition of Catholic and Communist is a fictionalization, but one that alludes to off-screen political divisions, both those of its immediate context of the late 1960s and those of the Vichy period documented in La Chagrin et la pitié.47 Watching the two films together now brings out the political dimensions of Rohmer’s film, although in 1969 more assertive forms of politicized cinema were calling for attention. Ma Nuit chez Maud’s meticulous construction combines Rohmer’s pre-existing plot with the things he discovered in Clermont-Ferrand. The film maps out the hero’s routine movements through Clermont-Ferrand. He first approaches Françoise in Place de Jaude, the city’s largest square, just in front of Frédéric Bartholdi’s statue of Vercingetorix, whose name is visible on the statue. He attends Mass in Notre Dame du Port and, when he leaves the church, he follows Françoise through the narrow lanes around it. The film shows the Cathedral in the centre of the city as he is driving down from the hills to go to church on the first Sunday morning. The hero’s first conversation with Vidal, in the café Le Suffren in Place de Jaude, turns to Pascal; Vidal, the Marxist who likes Pascal, teaches at Clermont-Ferrand’s University, which is named after Pascal. Clermont-Ferrand’s snowy winter provides the film’s visual setting (and there is a beautiful shot of the snow from Maud’s window when they first realize it is snowing outside); however, the dramatic function of the snow and ice is to cause the hero to spend the night of 25 December chez Maud, and then the night of 26 December chez Françoise. On both nights, he stays, yet while we see the parallel between this pair of occasions he does not.48 Rohmer needed dramatic motivation for two journeys that cannot be made. Both the hero and Françoise commute into Clermont-Ferrand and there is expressive potential in their independent means of transport; she has her motorized bicycle (an earlier title for the project was ‘The Girl on a Bicycle’) and he has his car.49 The weather ends their journeys and forces them together, thus contrasting the hero’s decisions to stay with the death of Maud’s lover on an icy road. The first topic of conversation, in the canteen at Michelin, concerns driving on icy roads. When Maud tells the hero of her lover’s death in a car crash on icy roads, she speaks of him as a great

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love. To underline this, Rohmer gives Fabian a four-minute long close shot for her speech. Her voice thickens and there are tears in her eyes when she changes the subject to ask ‘Is it still snowing outside?’ A reverse-shot explains her question: the hero has walked away from her to look out of the window, as if avoiding an emotion that disturbs him. The film’s monochrome colour scheme relates to Clermont-Ferrand’s snowy weather and to the hero’s way of seeing things in black and white, though he rejects devout piety.50 The film makes other uses of the black and white contrast, however, exploiting, for example, the visual potential of the whiteness of the snow and the blackness of the local volcanic stone, which is visible in the city’s architecture. The cathedral, for example, is made with the local stone and it stands starkly in the background when the hero and Françoise talk on the hill, a reminder of their avowed ideals. As they confess their previous lovers, though neither tells the whole truth, the black symbol of religion stands out behind them in the snow. The difference between the two women also relates to the black and white imagery: Maud has dark hair; the idealized Françoise is blonde.51 The hero spends a night with each and behaves according to the assumptions he makes about them, though his assumptions about Françoise turn out to be false. The film’s ironic humour emerges once one knows the cause of Françoise’s anxiousness; she was Maud’s husband’s lover. Examples of this irony abound. In church on his own, the hero allows a pretty woman to distract him from his prayers.52 Maud tells the hero she had a lover and that her husband had a mistress, ‘a young upstanding Catholic, very sincere’, a description that fits Françoise well. When the hero meets Françoise, her timid response to his casual questions seems misplaced, unless we know the truth about her. When they attend church together, Françoise looks worried during the sermon, particularly when she and the hero look at each other while off-screen the priest and the congregation recite: ‘Deliver us, we pray thee Lord, from every evil past, present and to come’. When they bump into Vidal, the hero asks, ‘You know each other?’ They both answer ‘Yes’. Neither Vidal nor François reveal how they know each other, but a close-up of each reveals reserved expressions, implying that Vidal knows the truth and Françoise knows he knows. Later, the hero misinterprets her uncomfortable shifting, asking her what she has against Vidal. On the hill, Françoise confesses ‘I have a lover’. ‘Now?’ he asks. She says, ‘I saw him just before you and I met’. This means that she spent the night with Maud’s ex-husband at the same time as he spent the night with Maud. The film uses this form of ironic humour to reveal the hero’s contradictions.53 He seeks the self-discipline of religion, Lent, mathematics, Pascal and work, the routine of which Rohmer emphasizes by filming his arrival at and departure from Michelin. He desires a simplification of life’s uncertainties and believes marriage would help him resist temptation, but he appears oblivious

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to his own duplicity. He states to Maud, ‘If you’re really in love with one girl, you don’t want to sleep with another’, but moments later, when Maud asks ‘where were we?’ he inches further onto her bed. The film exposes his insecurity; for example, he looks for Françoise, but lies to Maud and Vidal about seeing a married couple in church, not a single young woman. This is sharply conveyed when Trintignant squirms as Maud and Vidal tease him at dinner, until he concedes, ‘OK she was pretty’, though he still lies about seeing the wedding rings of the imaginary couple. He talks to Vidal in the abstract about the probability of meeting someone by chance, yet he must be thinking of Françoise, whom he has followed in his car and is looking for in the café. On Christmas Eve, he attends Midnight Mass with Vidal and looks in vain. She is with Maud’s husband, which is why Maud has her daughter with her and Vidal and the hero cannot visit her. Rohmer also shows that the hero is attracted to Maud, but judges her as immoral. As Jim Hillier notes, the rigid morality he imposes on himself ‘limits his perception and experience, and is in fact a defence against experience’ (1970–1: 18). He chooses Françoise as a symbol of Catholic womanhood, idealising her as a chaste young woman, but we can see, as Norman King notes (1990: 236), that the protagonist, for all his declared religious principles, spends most of his time chasing Françoise. He changes his mind about going to the concert when Vidal says that there will be ‘lots of pretty girls’ there. For the hero, the church and concert are equivalent social occasions: at both he looks for Françoise. The concert is one example of Rohmer’s effective use of music. Besides the opening of the first movement of Mozart’s ‘Sonata in B flat major, K.378’, we hear the hero’s radio playing a 1960s pop song, the singing of hymns in church and the romantic jazz playing in the background of the bar when Vidal talks about Maud, on Christmas Eve, after they have been to Mass. The saxophone plays a mournful tune, backed by strings, which underscores Vidal’s regretful description of his friendship with Maud. Vidal is honest about both his attraction to Maud and his lack of opportunity with her to form a relationship; the attractiveness of that honesty is emphasized by Vidal’s speech, the long close-up Rohmer uses of him and the jazz playing in the background. Maud and Vidal’s later interaction confirms that she is not attracted to him and at the start of the dinner scene there is a poignant moment of rejection. They are talking about the provinces. Maud says that she likes them. The camera frames her as she lights a cigarette, sitting on her bed, with cushions behind her. Off-screen, Vidal asks ‘But you want to leave Clermont?’ She replies: ‘Not the place, the people: I’ve had enough of the same old faces’. On this line, the camera pans right to find Vidal looking at her; ‘even mine?’ he asks, leaning forward to rest his hand on hers as he asks this. She withdraws her hand, then replies: ‘I’ve decided to go; if you love me, follow me’. He jumps onto her bed, landing on all fours: ‘What if I did?’ The camera pans left with him as he jumps. Maud is leaning away from him, reclining on her elbows: ‘I’d be very upset’. He puts his arms around

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her, laughing as he lies down on her bed, but she pushes him away, saying ‘Is this any way for a professor to behave?’ He gets off her bed with ‘Very well, let’s be serious’. This revelation of the status of Vidal and Maud’s relationship is witty and touching, the first of the evening’s series of small rejections, which culminate with Vidal’s dignified departure after Maud insists that our hero stay the night. In his honesty, Vidal counterpoints the hero, just as Maud does Françoise.54 In bed in the morning, Maud preserves her integrity in the moment that Trintignant’s hero squanders his. Maud is more mature and honest than either Françoise or the hero. He did not know what to expect from Maud; her directness disarmed him. He thinks that he knows what to expect from Françoise. She, however, does not fulfil his expectations. She reveals that she has had an affair with a married man; yet he does not judge her as immoral; he has made his decision to marry a young blonde-haired Catholic woman, whom he takes to be innocent, unlike Maud, and he will stick to it. At the start of the dinner chez Maud, Rohmer films the hero’s excitement at being with a beautiful intelligent woman who listens to him with interest. Trintignant’s boyish charm is as present as Fabian’s authority and Vitez’s melancholy in this scene. As remarkable as the delicious thrill Rohmer films in the hero’s first meeting with Maud is the deep resonance given to his meeting with her at the beach, five years later. The film’s ending offers a trenchant final revelation for the hero, which several writers have celebrated.55 Rohmer’s decision to jump from winter to summer delivers a surprising visual and dramatic force to the ending, conveyed through props, costumes, sound effects and imagery. One marvellous feature of this scene is its use of the quintessential summer sound of skylarks. Throughout the conversation with Maud, skylarks can be heard in the background, an aural contrast as vivid as the beach is a visual contrast to snowy Clermont-Ferrand. The contrast is not just between summer and winter; it is also between the two women. Maud wears a vest dress, her dark hair loose over her tanned shoulders; she still looks beautiful, relaxed and reconciled to life. In contrast, Françoise’s hair is tied back in a headscarf; she wears an unflattering prim belted shirt dress with a buttoned-up collar. Seeing the two women together reminds us that the Catholic hero has made a conservative choice to marry a woman twelve years younger than him, whom he takes to be pure, Catholic and virginal. The hero seems still fascinated by Maud, but Françoise is horrified. Before Maud tells the hero, ‘it was her’, Françoise tugs the child away, leaving them to talk. As they do so, both Maud and the hero play with their bags, the hero tugging on the straps of his duffle bag in a wonderful gesture combining polite hesitation with prudishness as he refers to their ‘evening’ together. Maud corrects him, ‘Evening? Night, you mean. Our night’. Though he shrugs off her correction, she asks ‘Has she mentioned me?’ When he says no, Maud refrains from telling him about Françoise. All she

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says as they part is ‘Hurry up. Your wife will think I’m telling awful stories’. Down on the beach, the film ends with his lie to Françoise: ‘the morning we met, I’d come from a woman’s house. I slept with her’. As his voice-over explains, he has realized Françoise was Maud’s husband’s lover and that she fears the revelation about her past. The last shot shows them swinging their son towards the beach, past another family playing on the sand.

Ma Nuit chez Maud: The hero fiddles with his bag

Ma Nuit chez Maud opposes the divorced single mother Maud to the young, apparently devout Catholic woman; Rohmer’s ironic scrutiny of this opposition undermines appearances. The hero’s perception of Françoise is based on his fantasy. Rohmer describes it thus: What happens is against the wishes of the character, it’s a kind of disillusionment, a conflict – not exactly a failure on his part, but a disillusionment. The character has made a mistake, he realizes he has created an illusion for himself. He had created a kind of world for himself, with himself at the centre and it all seemed perfectly logical that he should be the ruler or the god of this world. Everything seemed very simple and all my characters are a bit obsessed with logic. They have a system and principles, and they build up a world that can be explained by this system. And then the conclusion of the film demolishes their system and their illusions collapse. (Petrie 1971: 41)56 The hero tries to commit to religious values by making a calculated decision to get married because he has reached the appropriate age; but his commitment fails and the film suggests that these values are unsustainable. That depiction of a confused conflict between desire and morality responds to the changing values of the period.

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Yet, although their marriage is based on a lie, the final shot suggests that they seem happy or capable of pretending to be. One of Jim Hillier’s many insights is that Françoise and the hero suit each other because they share a guilty secret about their past. At the end of the film, we may resent the hero’s conservative choice of Françoise; as Hiller writes, ‘Maud remains honest and open to experience, but we have to recognise what this means in terms of her rather unsatisfactory life’ (1970–1: 20). Maud discloses that her second marriage is not going well ‘at the moment’. The protagonist, in contrast, appears happy with Françoise, even if their mutual happiness depends on what Hillier describes as ‘an open and joyful acceptance of concealment’ (Hillier 1970–1: 20). They both appear to have a commitment to Catholic values and they both behave in ways that contradict those values. Ma Nuit chez Maud undermines the Catholic values that Françoise and the protagonist are supposed to embody and the final image of the hero’s family running towards the sea is a mirage created by keeping their own dishonesty secret. Yet they do appear happy with each other. Maud’s spontaneity might be more attractive than Trintignant’s calculation, but, as Pascal Bonitzer notes, ‘Maud is also lovelorn, and even if she has more dignity, she doesn’t appear any less unhappy at the end of the film, in contrast with the familial happiness shown by Jean-Louis and Françoise’ (Bonitzer 1999: 59). As Hillier puts it: ‘If her moral choice involves spontaneity, honesty, a refusal to compromise, it also involves fragmentation, frustration, changes of direction’ (1970–1: 18). Rohmer leaves judgement to the viewer.

Le Genou de Claire (1970) Le Genou de Claire opens with Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy) driving his boat under ‘The Bridge of Love’, as he names it to Aurora (Aurora Cornu), before telling her: ‘I don’t look at women anymore because I am going to get married’. The rest of the film then shows Jérôme doing what he claims not to do. As in La Collectionneuse and Ma Nuit chez Maud, Le Genou de Claire illustrates the self-deceptions of its male hero by punctuating closeness to Jérôme with moments of separation from him. Rohmer’s fifth moral tale tracks its protagonist for a month, with written intertitles indicating the dates, beginning on Monday 29 June. He is in every scene apart from the final scene and there are various visual emphases underscoring his point of view, but the film holds him at a distance in several ways. Ranged against Jérôme’s perception are the film’s patterns in settings, colours, clothing and behaviour. The links between these things help establish the ironic perspective on Jérôme’s actions, foregrounding the contradictions between what he says and what he does.57 The film’s structure is based around Jérôme’s interactions with the women he encounters on his holiday: Aurora, the writer whose ideas about Jérôme’s life appear to

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prompt some of the film’s developments; Laura (Béatrice Romand), the young woman whom Jérôme kisses on top of the mountain; Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), the woman whose knee Jérôme craves to touch; and Madame Walter (Michèle Montel), Laura’s mother, engaged for her third marriage. Absent and represented by a photograph is Lucinde, Jérôme’s fiancée. As the film documents Jérôme’s holiday experiences, it maintains a point of view on its world that is close to Jérôme’s, but not identical with it. On Tuesday 30 June, Jérôme and Aurora look at the frescoes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at his house. Her comments about the paintings function as a motto for Rohmer’s Six contes moraux: ‘The heroes of a story are always blindfolded. Otherwise, they’d attempt nothing. The plot would stall. But no matter. Actually, everyone wears a blindfold, or at least blinkers’. Each of the Six contes moraux heroes deceives himself as to his true desires and Don Quixote functions as an allegorical figure for the themes of illusion and self-deception. As Rohmer acknowledges: The character of Jérôme is a sort of Don Quixote figure, to the extent that he takes part in the game in order to become a character in a novel. He wants to make himself interesting to the novelist. What he really enjoys is not so much his own adventures – anyway there aren’t any of those – but the possibility of telling the novelist what happens afterwards. (Rohmer 1976) Rohmer’s comparison with Don Quixote is meant to indicate that ‘ultimately everyone in this film is simply wrong, about some basic fact’ (Rohmer 1974: 65).58 Like Don Quixote, the heroes allow their imaginations to guide their actions. They do not hallucinate, but their emotions steer them, despite their intellectual pronouncements. The films reveal how the men hold illusions about themselves, seeing themselves as gallant knights, not tawdry dragueurs; they expose how the men elevate some women to idealized positions, as models of feminine beauty and goodness, and opportunities for chivalrous seduction. Reading too many tales of chivalric romance confused Don Quixote’s mind; Jérôme’s friendship with an author encourages his flights of imagination. Aurora’s statement about Don Quixote describes the blindfold hero of Le Genou de Claire, his perception of the world fixed by his imaginings. Yet Rohmer is aware that, as Thomas Love Peacock writes, ‘We are most of us like Don Quixote, to whom a windmill was a giant, and Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own imagination’ (Peacock 1947: 77). Similarly, in Chance, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow describes how Young Powell might have felt that life was something ‘in the nature of a fairy-tale’. Conrad then summarizes: ‘we are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible theories’ (Conrad 1974: 240). Le Genou de

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Claire indicates Rohmer’s sympathy for our predicament as ‘dupes of our own imaginations’ and ‘creatures of our light literature’. As he says: One of the reasons these tales are called ‘moral’ is that they are effectively stripped of physical action: everything takes place in the narrator’s mind. The same story, told by someone else, would be quite different, or might not have been told at all. My heroes, somewhat like Don Quixote, think of themselves as characters in a novel, but perhaps there isn’t any novel. The presence of a first-person narrator owes less to the necessity to reveal innermost thoughts – which are impossible to transpose, either visually or through dialogue – than to the necessity to situate with absolute clarity the protagonist’s viewpoint, and to make this viewpoint the target at which, as both author and director, I am aiming. (Rohmer 1993: 133) Rohmer’s films warn us about, yet acknowledge the inevitability of, submitting to our imaginations, though daydreams not nightmares influence his characters, who while they remain aware of their own follies are not people who suffer torment or are gripped by irrepressible symptoms. How we imagine ourselves as central to our own stories is at the heart of his work. Aurora, the writer who claims to be a fortune-teller (‘My coffee grounds predicted an encounter, but it was only you’), is a stand-in for the director, who has built the film with her diary entries, using intertitles that mimic handwritten dates. Aurora’s purpose as a stand-in for the filmmaker becomes apparent when she twice prevents Jérôme revealing his forthcoming wedding and then tells him that Laura is in love with him, claiming that Laura said so herself. She encourages him to flirt with Laura, but she predicts, correctly, that ‘She’ll pull back at the last moment’. Aurora and Jérôme’s discussions of his story, which Aurora may or may not write up, echo the film’s telling of its own story concerning Jérôme’s testing of himself before marriage.59 Thus, Rohmer connects his tale of a middle-aged man imagining seducing two young women to a parallel tale of a storyteller’s invention of intrigue about a character who imagines these events. Furthermore, Aurora hides her own impending marriage from Jérôme until his departure, responding to Jérôme’s question about her love life with ‘it’s going nowhere’. To stress further Jérôme’s blinkered perception, the scene in his garden, when Aurora has returned from Geneva with another man, opens with Jérôme asking: ‘Is that all you’re going to tell me?’ The final scene confirms the superiority of Aurora’s perspective over Jérôme’s. He departs on Wednesday 29 July, but the film continues after his departure. Before he leaves, Aurora reveals that the man who drove her back from Geneva is her fiancé. After this revelation, the film shows that Jérôme was mistaken about Claire and Gilles (Gérard Falconetti). Jérôme’s departure is followed by Gilles’ arrival. From her balcony, Aurora watches the young lovers reconcile, after Gilles informs Claire, unprompted, ‘I

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ended up not going to Grenoble’. The film displays their reconciliation with a travelling point-of-view shot that calls attention to Aurora’s viewpoint from her balcony, the camera following the young couple through the leaves of the cherry tree, until they sit on the bench. The film highlights the contradictions between Jérôme’s words and actions, and it draws attention to his self-deception, but he remains sympathetic. He becomes obsessed with touching Claire’s knee, but, as Pascal Bonitzer writes (1999: 76), Jérôme does not want to sleep with Claire; touching her knee has symbolic value as an index of possibilities. The difference between our understanding of Jérôme and his understanding is large, though, because, as Monaco points out, ‘Jérôme’s passion is not only momentary but also slightly absurd and certainly abstract’ (1976: 298). Rohmer’s comic film explores middle-aged male desire in a way that is sympathetic to human weaknesses. As Bonitzer argues, the depiction of male obsession in Le Genou de Claire is almost innocent of sexual connotations; Jérôme chooses the knee partly to minimize the likelihood of failure (1999: 114). The heroes of the contes moraux are charmers not Don Juans: ‘what they seem to try to obtain is some sign that their charm operates’ (1999: 116). Jérôme is not a fetishist, Bonitzer observes, not a hero of Nabokov or Bunuel: ‘this is not a story about sexual obsession; it’s the story of a challenge, and more profoundly, of a conjuration, in both senses of the word, an enchantment and a conspiracy’ (1999: 113).60 Rohmer wanted Jérôme to appear typically male: He dreams of a woman who has a special kind of lightness and slightness and fragility. But this is exactly the kind of woman who is not for him. You have the impression – as far as you can tell from Lucinde’s photograph – that he’d get on much better with a woman of more force and personality. . . . It’s a common enough thing in men: the contradiction – even within desire itself – between what is purely desired and only desired, and what is possessed. (Nogueira 1971: 121) The film explores what motivates Jérôme desire’s to touch Claire’s knee; as Bonitzer argues, he seeks a sign that his charm still operates and he is fascinated by her physique. We perceive his duplicity, therefore, when he touches Claire’s knee while consoling her about Gilles.61 To this story of male desire, Rohmer adds geographical and historical exactitude, with settings providing motifs and imagery, and actors bringing conviction and complexity. Rohmer had the outline of the story, but ‘the script only found its definitive form when I saw the locations’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 4). Le Genou de Claire draws inspiration from Lake Annecy, summer and Rousseau: I had written Le Genou de Claire without knowing where I was going to film, then the idea of Annecy came to me; because of the lake I decided

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the places where the characters would live, the fact that they would move around in a boat, rather than by car. (Carcassonne and Fieschi 1981: 30)62 On the verge of getting married, Jérôme takes his last holiday at Lake Annecy, site of his childhood holidays, before selling his house and emigrating. Both Lake Annecy and Jérôme’s means of travel around it are suggestive. Once in the boat with Jérôme, the young women he picks up cannot get off unless he decides to let them off. On the lake, Jérôme believes he is free to come and go as he pleases. Yet if Jérôme’s boat offers him freedom to move around, the lake symbolizes how limited is that freedom. As David Heinemann notes, Rohmer’s characters often find it hard to settle: Physical movement expresses spiritual movement. The characters’ restlessness betrays a dissatisfaction with their lives, a longing for something more. It reveals (and causes) an insecurity, a feeling of being out of kilter, and leaves them open to adventures, to taking risks. (Heinemann 2000: 54) The holiday setting is one in which the characters can take risks. For Rohmer, Jérôme’s holiday is ‘a kind of halt, a respite, a breathing-space, a parenthesis in his life, a moment for taking stock. What interests me are the thoughts that fill his mind at that particular moment’ (Nogueira 1971: 119). Of the holiday in Le Genou de Claire, John Fawell suggests, Rohmer’s characters enter into their vacation with pride and presumption, confident that they will find there the solitude and spiritual relaxation that they have sought and been denied all year. What they find instead is loneliness, boredom, thoughts that continuously stray too far, an increased sense of self-consciousness and anxiety. Summer (and particularly summer vacation) confronts his heroes with a disquieting openness – an openness of sexuality that makes them more self-conscious about their bodies, more prone to self-doubts and vain fantasies, and an openness of time and schedule that strengthens their already existent tendency towards inertia and directionlessness. (Fawell 1993: 777–8) Lake Annecy led Rohmer to Rousseau and the cherries. One source for Le Genou de Claire is Rousseau’s Confessions (Book IV), in which Rousseau records an incident in a cherry orchard during which he kisses the hand of a Mademoiselle Galley: I thought of Rousseau in Le Genou de Claire because Rousseau lived in Annecy and he told the story of the cherry tree. He once went with some young girls to pick cherries, and he went up in the tree and threw the cherries down on the young girl’s breasts. (Barron 1972: 9–10)

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Crisp highlights the allegorical importance of Rousseau’s influence: ‘both Rousseau and Gaugin are associated with a quest for liberty, self-knowledge, self-definition, as is Jérôme; though in Rohmer’s world, such attempts can never result in other than ambiguous failure’ (Crisp 1988: 63).63 Rohmer chose colours that evoked Gaugin’s paintings of Tahiti and their associations with exotic freedoms.64 A striking instance of this colour scheme occurs when Laura and Jérôme wait for Aurora to bring their fruit juice. The frame is divided into tiers of colour of mountains, lake and lawn, with the red table and chairs on it. Laura is in a red mini-dress, which stands out against the green and blue blocks of colour behind her. Another example of the Gaugin influence comes when Jérôme looks into Laura’s bedroom. A single shot reveals the bedroom’s careful design: on the wall is a poster of Paul Gaugin’s Nafea faa ipoipo (When will you marry?), a painting of a Tahitian mother and daughter, the title and subject of which relate to Laura. A beaded necklace hangs above her bed, which is covered with a pink and red blanket, and two pink cushions. The resemblance between Annecy and Gaugin’s paintings of Tahiti is also marked by Aurora’s long flowery dresses. In contrast, Laura and Claire have one colour each, red for Laura and turquoise blue for Claire. Jérôme, on the other hand, presents himself in a series of overdone and affected outfits, all of which contrast, as John Fawell notes, with the ‘youthful insouciance of Claire and her friends’ (1993: 778).65 For example, on Monday 20 July the young people are playing volleyball in the garden. Jérôme and Aurora watch from the shade. As usual, he is overdressed in straw hat, white shirt and blue cardigan. As he watches them, he talks about Claire’s beautiful figure being his ideal; she wears only bikini bottoms and a fitted blue t-shirt. In instances like this, differences in clothes highlight differences in age. Jérôme is not a stuffed shirt, but he is older and conservative, in that he has decided to marry the woman with whom he is involved because ‘experience has shown that I can live with her’. Jérôme is, Fawell argues, an excellent example of the ‘jealousy, and ultimately viciousness, that age feels towards youth in the summer, a season where the irretrievability of youth is most acutely felt’ (Fawell 1993: 778). The film is, Fawell concludes, ‘a gently cruel one’ (1993: 778). The central sequence of three short scenes confirms Jérôme’s transfer of interest from Laura to Claire: the cherry picking, the Bastille Day dance and the tennis scene. The first time Jérôme looks at Claire’s knee he is helping her and Gilles collect cherries.66 Unselfconscious in his shorts, Gilles has climbed one side of the stepladder and Claire the other side. He feeds cherries to her, while Jérôme gazes up at the bent knee hugging the stepladder. As he does so, Laura walks towards him. She notices Jérôme staring at Claire’s leg and interrupts his reverie by comically pushing the basket towards him. Laura catches him out: she looks at him, looks at what he is looking at and then looks back at him. She says nothing but her action indicates that she knows what he is doing: she’s caught him looking and he knows it. The cherry-picking scene

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ends with Vincent (Fabrice Luchini) and Laura giggling, as the former says ‘I don’t like beards’, just before Rohmer cuts to the bearded Jérôme, looking crestfallen, excluded and feeling his age. From there, the film cuts to the Bastille Day dance. After Claire declines to dance with him, Jérôme stands at the side, sulking. The film segues into the scene in which Jérôme watches Gilles and Claire after tennis. He is hanging around the courts in white shirt, trousers, shoes and hat (a signature outfit for middle-aged men ill at ease with youth’s casual indifference). ‘Are you not playing?’ asks Gilles. ‘No, today, I remain a spectator’, replies Jérôme with an irony of which he is unaware, for moments later he stares voyeuristically at Gilles’s hand on Claire’s knee. Following this, Jérôme sits down with Aurora and reminds her: ‘You know I’m through running after girls’. Aurora guesses that Claire’s physique attracts Jérôme, who gives in: ‘Yes, the way she looks, since it’s all I know about her’. Jérôme is not yet married and his dalliances with Aurora, Laura and Claire are holiday flirtations. His vanity and pride make it hard to take him seriously. He yearns to prove that he is still attractive to women and he is self-obsessed. Not many would share his longing to touch Claire’s knee; more might share his melancholy awareness of the difference between his middleaged composure and the energy and spontaneity of Laura, Claire, Gilles and Vincent. Jean-Claude Brialy’s Jérôme in Le Genou de Claire is an egotist, yet Brialy endows Jérôme with a comical good-natured charm that surpasses Trintignant’s shifty evasiveness in Ma Nuit chez Maud. Just as Rohmer prepared Ma Nuit chez Maud for Trintignant, so he developed Le Genou de Claire for Brialy, whom he decided upon three years before shooting.67 However, if he developed the script for Brialy, his most important discoveries on Le Genou de Claire were Béatrice Romand and Fabrice Luchini.68 Luchini enters Rohmer’s world with Romand, larking about in a red canoe, the same colour as Jérôme’s boat but a younger version (the film reveals this to be a point-of-view shot from Jérôme’s position on the bench). Luchini and Romand go on to become two of the most important performers in Rohmer’s films; the highlights of Le Genou de Claire are the scenes with them, as, for instance, during the scene on Saturday 11 July, when Luchini and Brialy sit under a tree. Jérôme encourages Vincent to approach Laura, but Vincent thinks he is not her type at all; she likes athletic types. Luchini insists that they are just friends, although he confesses he has some affection for her. Laura marches up to them and stands in front of them in her bikini. She invites Jérôme and Vincent to swim, but the older man replies that it is too cold. More probably, Jérôme does not want to strip down to his bathing trunks in front of the active young people. What delivers a dramatic punchline, though, is the nonchalance in Luchini’s gestures as he walks away from the camera, removing his denim shirt as he goes, circling it over his shoulder. The moment has its place in the film’s system of Jérôme watching the young people and feeling excluded, but Luchini and Romand’s work makes it vibrant.

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The refocusing of Jérôme’s attention from Laura to Claire changes the tenor of his fantasising. Once Claire replaces Laura as the object of his interest, Jérôme’s behaviour becomes more absurd. Some erotic tension exists between Jérôme and Laura, but none between Jérôme and Claire, as the film establishes by contrasting his interactions with them. Romand’s Laura and Brialy’s Jérôme begin their interaction when she arrives from school. David Heinemann (2007) shows how this scene exemplifies the film’s means of distinguishing Jérôme’s view from the film’s. The presentation of Laura’s arrival is done so that it almost corresponds with the axis of Jérôme’s vision of her. First, he looks off-screen right, distracted from his conversation with Madame Walter. Then, the film cuts to a reverse-shot of Madame Walter, who follows his gaze. The camera pans left to find Laura in a long shot walking towards them. As she approaches the table, it pans back to those seated; however, now it has travelled back to incorporate Jérôme’s left shoulder. He stands to greet her; then, when he sits down, the camera tracks forward into a close shot of Laura as she talks to Jérôme. His voice continues off-screen, until Madame Walter asks him about the house and Rohmer cuts back to Aurora and Jérôme. As Heinemann notes (2007: 74), there is a subtle metaphorical weight to this shot of Laura which is not Jérôme’s point of view, but which expresses his attraction to Laura. Their relationship develops when Laura storms off after hearing him talk about his upcoming marriage. Encouraged by Aurora, he goes to talk to her. They talk and then walk off together, holding hands like a couple. The following day, Saturday 4 July, they continue getting to know each other. This sequence is an important one. Jérôme arrives in his boat. Laura is in a bikini sunbathing. She stands up to talk to him from the shore and picks up a red and blue towel as she does so. Romand’s movements with the towel are wonderfully expressive. As she approaches the lake, she hangs it over her right shoulder, hesitating, unsure whether to cover herself. Her hesitation persists as the wind buffets the towel around her. Walking along the lakeside, while Jérôme motors down, she pulls the towel behind her, like a child’s security blanket, as if self-conscious about her body: she holds it in front of her, screens her legs and hips with it, and wraps it around her as she leans forward. The film then cuts to a closer shot of Jérôme in his boat, turning round to talk to her before cutting to his view of her. To call attention to the second-rate nature of Jérôme’s interest in Claire, the film compares the scenes of his meeting the two women on the lawn. In outline, his first meeting with Claire, on Wednesday 8 July, repeats the earlier scene, when he finds Laura sunbathing. Again, he arrives in his boat and finds a young woman sunbathing. However, the differences between the scenes emphasize the differences between Jérôme’s encounters with Laura and with Claire, from whom Jérôme gets a cool reception. First, Jérôme acts differently when he sees Claire from his boat. Instead of pulling up alongside the shore and remaining in the boat as he does with Laura, he slows down and looks at Claire, rising from his seat to do so. He parks the boat and gets out for a closer look. Meanwhile,

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the film cuts to a slow-moving forward-tracking shot on the lawn, which shows Claire standing up and slinking insouciantly towards Jérôme, without fussing with a towel as Laura does. Initially, this shot represents Jérôme’s point of view, but the camera detaches itself from his vision as he walks into the frame to talk to Claire. Therefore, the film presents him from behind as he talks to her. She stands before him wearing a pale blue bikini that emphasizes her tan. She projects confidence and indifference. He, on the other hand, seems stunned by her physique. Gilles arrives while they are talking; he is young, tanned and handsome. As Claire and Gilles kiss, Rohmer cuts to the 37-year-old Jérôme watching them, isolated against lake and mountains, overdressed in black trousers and white shirt, his jumper on his shoulder. Disappointed, he leaves without a goodbye. Rohmer films Jérôme’s departure in his boat and the last frames show him looking back at Claire as he drives away. This amusing moment separates us from Jérôme, but allows us to perceive his feelings. In contrast to Claire, Laura’s fiddling with her towel expresses her shyness, but that expressiveness is also honesty about her puzzlement about what is appropriate for her interactions with Jérôme. Her hesitation about how to hold the towel indicates a deeper level of engagement with him than Claire’s lack of interest. If anything, Laura’s fidgeting suggests a nervousness caused by her attraction to Jérôme. Furthermore, her initial wariness combines with an intellectual maturity and an emotional boldness that make her far more interesting than Claire. Despite Jérôme’s protestations that Gilles is inferior to Claire, the film suggests that Claire is also pretty but dull, suited to Gilles. For all his intellectualising with Aurora, the film makes plain that Claire’s physique holds his attention, not her personality. Laura, on the other hand, is shown as more of an equal to Jérôme.

Le Genou de Claire: Laura by the lake

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In the scene of their meeting at the lakeside, Rohmer includes a shot of Laura from Jérôme’s point of view.69 The frame bounces around to reflect his position in the boat. The red towel is around her waist and visible are her flowery bikini top, her strong arms, her dark hair blown by the wind, the tall green tree and the blue sky behind her. The shot embodies Laura’s energy and communicates Jérôme’s attraction to her. He invites her to his house and she agrees: ‘hold on I’ll go and get dressed’. A surprising cut shifts from Jérôme looking up from his boat to Laura standing framed by the posts of the bed behind her. She is looking at the photograph of Lucinde: ‘She is very beautiful, but a little hard’. Laura wears a red and black top and black skirt; in front of her are three red books and a black table; behind her and associated with her through the visual rhyming is the red bedspread. The scene with Claire ends with Jérôme looking at her from a distance, but the scene with Laura ends by cutting from his view of her by the lake to her standing in an intimate space of his talking about his fiancée. He tells Laura his reasons for marrying Lucinde: ‘in six years of knowing her, I’ve never tired of her, nor she of me, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue like that’. Laura replies: ‘I don’t call that love; it’s more like friendship’. A remarkable shot/reverse-shot sequence conveys their conversation; it includes some long takes of Laura talking, static medium shots of her, which show Béatrice Romand as a vivid commanding presence. Her animation as she talks is affecting and she projects an arresting intensity. Romand was 18 when she made Le Genou de Claire. She looks younger, but as she talks one can tell that she is 18 not 15. Seen within the context of Rohmer’s career, Le Genou de Claire now seems more about Béatrice Romand and Fabrice Luchini than Jérôme, Aurora and Claire.70 One senses Rohmer’s attraction to Romand and Luchini, the excited discovery of two actors who would become vital collaborators for 30 years. They are the first two ‘Rohmer stars’, joined by others after Perceval le Gallois. Claire forms the object of Jérôme’s obsession, but between Laura and Jérôme there is genuine attraction, unlike the one-sided myopic fantasy that is Jérôme’s interest in Claire. At the time, Rohmer acknowledged Romand’s importance: There is something about her. . . you don’t meet girls like her every day, maybe once every five or ten years. I don’t know how the character [Laura] would have worked out if I hadn’t found her: I know Laura would have been less interesting. I developed the character for her. And I’m sure she can play very different types of role from the one I gave her here: she is more conventionally beautiful in real life than she looks in the film, because I had to make her seem a little younger. I see her perhaps as a Dostoevsky or a Chekhov heroine – very touching. But she can play anything, and whatever she does she will bring an extraordinary power to it. (Nogueira 1971: 121)71

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After Le Genou de Claire, Romand acted in five more of Rohmer’s films, taking the lead in two, Le Beau Mariage (1982) and Conte d’automne (1998); her role in Le Rayon vert is short but important, and she has brief appearances in L’Amour, l’après-midi (1972) and Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1987). Le Genou de Claire is all about a man dealing with middle age and letting go of his youth, but for the 50-year-old Rohmer it was all about the discovery of two young actors who would move to the centre of his work.

L’Amour, l’après-midi (1972) L’Amour, l’après-midi examines the link between adultery and male mid-life crises; its protagonist, Frédéric (Bernard Verley), husband to Hélène (Françoise Verley), who is pregnant with their second child, imagines another life. The social world explored in this film is bourgeois Paris in the period following the political upheavals and social changes of the 1960s. Like the earlier contes moraux, L’Amour, l’après-midi acknowledges the changing roles of women in French society, taking marriage and male responsibility as topics. It is a film about the difficulty of marriage in a society where marriage has lost its status as a social, legal or religious pre-requisite for a sexual relationship.72 In France during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were many debates about women’s roles. Before 1965, the basis of French marriage law was the Napoleonic Civil Code. This had been modified since it was written in 1804, but, as Claire Duchen writes, ‘marriage law still sanctioned the existence of the hierarchical patriarchal family with the husband as head of household’ (1994: 98). Various recommendations were made throughout the 1950s, but French marriage law did not change until 1965. The new law was a breakthrough in French women’s emancipation, bringing increased equality to marriages. However, despite the legal changes, women’s groups protested that the new law did not go far enough because it maintained the essential inequality of marriage.73 Yet it was a small first step towards later changes in the power relationships between husbands and wives: in 1970, a new law changed paternal authority to parental authority, and in July 1975 the divorce laws changed.74 The period in which Rohmer made L’Amour, l’après-midi was also the period when the French women’s movement began to campaign for women’s rights.75 In addition to campaigning for the right to choose contraception and abortion, French feminists campaigned for, amongst other things, equal pay and equal rights to work. In December 1972 there was a change in the law about equal pay, though not much changed in the workplace. During the 1970s the number of women going to university increased and the

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number of working married women increased; in L’Amour, l’après-midi Hélène works and Fabienne states her intention to continue working after getting married. At the same time as marriage law changed, there was a cultural shift in the French perception of motherhood. In Mitterand’s 1965 presidential campaign, he supported the legalization of contraception; in December 1967, the so-called loi Neuwirth allowed the contraceptive pill to be prescribed. There had been a shift in post-war France towards secularization, but in 1967 the Catholic Church opposed legalization of the pill, though government ministers supported it. Opposition to the law meant that contraception provision was restricted; there was minimal public information about it and doctors often refused to prescribe it (Laubier 1990: 50). Abortions had been illegal in France since 1920; only in the 1970s was abortion legalized and contraception made available. Throughout the late 1960s, according to Duchen, ‘everyone was talking about women and their changing role in French society’ (1994: 117). Magazine articles, television and radio programmes and social studies focused on women’s roles: ‘everyone agreed that the image of the ideal woman was in flux’ (Duchen 1994: 117).76 However, although women made legal progress and started to combine paid work with having a family, subtle shifts kept women out of male-dominated areas, such as political and economic elites, and kept women in subordinate roles, as one sees with the two secretaries in L’Amour, l’après-midi whom Frédéric says that he hired because they were pretty. As Rohmer shows, Frédéric and his colleagues feel free to ogle them. Rohmer’s Six contes moraux refer to the everyday issues that were the concerns of young people, women in particular.77 They do not have female protagonists, but they look at heterosexual relationships during a period of profound social change in France. Furthermore, they all portray their female characters as more mature, morally and emotionally, than the timid, proud or vain heroes at their centre, and they depict women in a variety of roles: the bakery girl, the university students, the divorced single mother who is also a doctor, the devout Catholic student who has had an affair with a married man, Hélène, a secondary school teacher, who is also a wife, mother and PhD student, and Chloé, a headstrong single woman who wants to have a baby. The methods Rohmer used when preparing his films enabled him to use contemporary subject-matter, about gender equality for example, as rich sources of material. L’Amour, l’après-midi is a post-1960s film about the return to routine: Zouzou’s Chloé could have participated in the protests that took place four years earlier. In 1972, in her late 20s, she has an urge to settle down. Rohmer wrote L’Amour, l’après-midi after recording conversations with Zouzou, but, in addition, by casting Zouzou he drew on the associations of a well-known French woman; for instance, Chloé was a model before she went away, like Zouzou.78 Zouzou is attractive, but also unconventional enough to tempt a husband to discard a

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stable marriage. Frédéric’s wife is attractive, but Zouzou promises an escape from the normalcy and routine of his middle-aged, middle-class life. The prologue establishes Frédéric’s frustrations with his marriage and his everyday life, which appears dominated by the rhythms of work and commuting. It also introduces the gap between Frédéric’s imagination and his life, over which Rohmer builds the majority of the story. The first shot initiates this process: Frédéric prepares to leave for work by taking a book from the shelf, a choice of reading matter that appears prompted by his baby crying off-screen. On the commuter train between Saint-Cloud and Paris, a close-up reveals his chosen book: Bougainville’s Voyage around the World (1771). The French general and sailor visited Tahiti for eight days in 1768 and described the experience in his book. As Michael Charlesworth writes, in this relatively short but forcefully expressed account Bougainville created what might be termed the myth of Tahiti, which, as we shall see, endured for a long time (and perhaps is still with us). The myth follows Bougainville’s emphasis, forgetting the cannibalism and human sacrifice to concentrate on free love, the existence of happiness, and easy living. While his expedition failed in every other respect, he salvaged from it the invention of a tropical Garden of Eden presided over by Venus. (Charlesworth 2008: 133) Frédéric loses himself in Bougainville’s myth of free love and world travel while he commutes on the train. As Rohmer remarks: What Bougainville was surprised to find in Tahiti was polygamy, so the main character, Frédéric, in his reading is already interested in a society which is not the western, occidental society. (Barron 1972: 10)79 Frédéric’s interest in Bougainville’s encounters with polygamy sums up his feelings about the new social climate which comprises L’Amour, l’après-midi’s setting. In the era of free love, Frédéric discovers he is already occupying a position in a bourgeoisie whose restrictions he now resents. Free love, the counter culture, hippies, feminism, women’s liberation, contraception and the weakening of religious strictures about sexuality and marriage: these form the background for Frédéric’s wandering eyes and mind. The contrast between Frédéric’s daydreams about other women and his life of work, commuting and family is the film’s central subject; the prologue relates his routine to his fantasies about the women he sees in public.80 Frédéric’s voice-over justifies his reveries about seducing women; looking at a woman in a café, he explains: ‘marriage closes me in, cloisters me, and I want to escape’. He likes Paris and its crowds because it enables him to satisfy his voyeuristic tendencies anonymously. As he watches women, his voice-over recounts, ‘I feel my life passing me by, as other lives unroll next to

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mine, and it frustrates me not to be part of their lives, not to have held each of these women, even for a moment, in their hurried walk to some unknown job, to some unknown pleasure and I dream’. Frédéric is a conformist whose imagination compensates for the monotony of his daily life, though it is a moot point whether he discovers, by the story’s conclusion, that his frustrations are also imaginary; as he confesses to Chloé in the restaurant, ‘your real problems distract me from my imaginary anxieties’. The prologue climaxes with the fantasy sequence, which is itself terminated by Béatrice Romand’s feisty rejection of him. Frédéric’s voice-over introduces his fantasy: ‘I delight in a daydream that grows clearer and more detailed by the day’. This sequence widens Frédéric’s voyeuristic fantasies of seduction so that it becomes cinematic, for the re-introduction of the women of the Six contes moraux alerts us to Rohmer’s awareness (like Hitchcock’s) that daydreaming and fantasising are like making and watching films. Frédéric’s desire is cinematic because it is voyeuristic, but also because in this mode he imagines himself to be character in a film. Legrand describes Frédéric’s desire for Chloé as ‘cinematic’ (1972: 121) and the film links Frédéric’s imaginary seductions with Chloé’s appearance. When Part One begins, on Monday 3 January, Chloé is waiting for Frédéric in his office, as if his imagination conjures up her appearance. The effect is strongly reminiscent of young Charlie’s (Teresa Wright) summoning of Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943): she prays for a miracle, wishes something exciting would happen and then, right on cue, her handsome but deadly uncle arrives.81 The influence of Hitchcock’s tendency to treat his male heroes with scepticism is apparent in Rohmer’s treatment of Frédéric, who states in his voice-over near the beginning: ‘since I’ve been married I find all women beautiful. In their most mundane tasks, I grant them that mystery I used to deny them’. These are the words of a married man feeling trapped by marriage; they recall the fear of the ordinary that Jefferies (James Stewart) exhibits in Rear Window, causing him to perceive marriage as a provocation to murder and dismemberment. Reading Bougainville’s account of the South Pacific is for Frédéric what taking photographs from the roof of a jeep in Pakistan is for Jefferies, reduced as he is to daydreaming while peeping from his rear window. Both themes and motifs in L’Amour, l’aprèsmidi reveal Hitchcock’s influence on Rohmer: the fantasy sequence, the spiral staircase shots, the focus on male voyeurism and the use of mirrors and clothes, the last two of which the finale links.82 Rohmer shot most of his film on location, but he chose to have Chloé’s loft room and Frédéric’s office constructed in the Boulogne studios (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7). Both sets use double rooms to create separate and conjoined internal spaces: his office has an outer office, where he interacts with the two secretaries and his colleague; her loft room has a bedroom/ living room and a kitchen/bathroom. One advantage of Chloé having two

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doors is that she can let him in while she is in the shower and he can sneak out unobserved by her.83 Décor links Frédéric’s office and Chloé’s loft: both sets include fireplaces with mirrors above them. The similarities (the doubleroom layout and the mirror above the fireplace) connect the spaces and schematize the characters’ actions in them: Frédéric’s office symbolizes his ordinary life; Chloé’s loft room holds the promise of an escape from that life. The mirror behind Frédéric’s desk sits across the marble mantelpiece; it is big enough, therefore, for Rohmer to frame one or both characters in it at important moments. Filmed mirrors often present doubled images of characters; showing two images of characters can be a means of suggesting narcissism, indecision, self-scrutiny or split personality. The mirror image can represent an alter ego or an imaginary version of a character. In its capacity to reflect an imitation of life, the filmed mirror also presents a frame-within-aframe that echoes the camera frame. Frédéric’s double life is reflected in various mirrors and Rohmer adopts the method used by Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) to separate the actual from the imagined by means of a mirror. When Keaton steps through the mirror, he does so as if stepping into a film, which he also does.84 Through the use of the mirror motif, Rohmer’s film underlines how much Frédéric, like Keaton’s detective, leads a dream-like double life, absorbed in a continuous fantasy of imagining himself as a cinematic hero. The mirror features in the many scenes in Frédéric’s office, where he meets Chloé, and in the two scenes in her loft, but several other mirrors contribute to the pattern. When Frédéric buys the plaid shirt, a triple mirror encloses him in the changing room with the persuasive young shop assistant (Irène Skobline). In the first of her new rooms, which Frédéric visits with Chloé, a mirror stands on a table behind the landlady, who assumes that Frédéric is renting a room for afternoon love-making with Chloé. In the expensive restaurant, a mirror rises up behind their bench seat. Two noteworthy uses of the mirror occur next to each other. In the café, after he tells her how much he depends on her, he kisses her on the cheek. As they leave, they pause at the top of the stairs and he again kisses her, nuzzling her neck. Embarrassed by his actions, he tries to make light of his behaviour: ‘If she could see us’. Chloé replies, ‘Who? Your wife or your secretary?’ Throughout this framing, a large oval wall mirror is visible behind them; after they exit the shot, the scene ends by showing their mirrored reflections departing. This ending matches the beginning of the following scene, which opens with Frédéric at his desk, his reflection visible in the mirror behind him. Chloé bursts into his office, initiating an important example of Rohmer’s use of the office mirror. Chloé explains that her restaurant job prevents their meeting in the afternoons; she asks to see him on Wednesday evening. When she enters his office, Rohmer prolongs the framing of Frédéric’s desk, fireplace and mirror. Chloé stands in front of his desk to greet him, but the film presents her as a mirrored reflection. Frédéric then gets up from his desk and walks into the mirrored space. The two mirror images embrace each other and he

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offers her tea, at which point she turns to sit on his desk. The background of the shot comprises the reflection of the space behind the camera; this eye-catching framing merges background and foreground, off-screen and on-screen space, the reflection and its model. It visualizes the degree to which Frédéric is moving towards leading a double life. Frédéric rationalizes his afternoon meetings with Chloé, but dithers about meeting her in the evening. Meanwhile, their growing familiarity with each other is conveyed by the confidence with which she sits on his desk when she steps out of the mirrored space, as if leaving his imagination and entering his life. She tries to persuade him to meet her in the evening, while the camera moves forwards for a closer framing of her on his desk as he stands in front of her. When Fabienne brings in tea (her knock at the door prompting the first cut of the scene), she notices Chloé’s position on the desk; in an earlier scene, Chloé gets down as the secretary enters. When Frédéric considers Chloé’s request for an evening meeting, which will force him to lie to his wife, the mirror reflects images of Frédéric and Chloé leaning on the mantel (they repeat this posture in her loft room). Thus, at the point when he agrees to lie to his wife, the film shows us two images of the man, his visual doubling reflecting the psychological split. The clothes motif connects to the mirrors, and it too features in various scenes. Fabienne’s and Martine’s short skirts attract attention from Frédéric and the other businessmen. As Frédéric and Chloé become more intimate, Hélène grows more pregnant at home, appearing in a frumpy pink nightdress or dressing gown that emphasizes her maternal role. Chloé buys clothes for the new baby and for Ariane. Frédéric gets Chloé work in a clothes shop, where a customer mistakes him for a shop assistant. He plays along, helping Chloé out and demonstrating his willingness to assume other roles. Downstairs, she tries on a dress and he turns away, but when she removes the dress she stands before him in her slip. He touches her thigh and they are about to kiss when he pulls back. She tells him that she is in love with him and says of his relationship with his wife: ‘what’s crazy is to pretend you love someone whom you live with’. Chloé’s clothes vary considerably and Zouzou recalls that Rohmer chose all of her character’s clothes: One by one and colour by colour . . . He decided that beige would be ideal for my complexion since my skin was beige and that way just my eyes and hair would be seen. Then he chose a particular plaid shirt (I had several of them but there was only one that suited him, nobody knows why, but Rohmer certainly does!) The colours were as neutral as possible so that I would be more noticeable. He really did take a very special care of my clothing . . . he came [to my house] at least ten times . . . to go through my wardrobe . . . He had me take everything out, try things on, walk around, put them on, take them off. (Cottrell 1972: 21)85

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Rohmer chose a particular shirt because its colours and pattern resemble Frédéric’s plaid shirt, which he wears at different times in the film; for example, when Chloé tries on the dress in the cellar and tells him that she wants him to father her child. Chloé wears her plaid shirt once, when Frédéric first visits her loft room. They embrace and as she leans between his legs, he lifts her shirt to stroke her back. Chloé’s plaid shirt alludes to his susceptibility to the attractive saleswoman who sold him something he did not want. Besides the plaid shirts, the other notable items of clothing are Frédéric’s polo-neck jumpers, which are of a consistent style, drab and conformist, despite their various colours.86 He wears red, cream, pale blue and navy blue; his wife wears a purple polo-neck jumper and Fabienne wears a red one. Chloé also wears two similar jumpers, beige and red, though of a coarser knit than Frédéric’s. The most important jumper is the navy blue one that Frédéric pulls over his head, first when he makes fun for Ariane and Hélène and then in the final scene between Chloé and Frédéric. Before their last meeting, clothes and mirrors combine in the scene of Frédéric’s playful proposal to Chloé. Once Part Two begins, after the baby is born, and Chloé misses their Wednesday evening appointment, the concatenation of scenes strengthens. The film cuts from Frédéric seeing the au pair (Suze Randall) naked at home to him sitting at his office desk in front of the fireplace and mirror. The back of his head is in the mirror and Chloé, in a pale blue suit and white shirt, is reflected in it as she leans against the opposite window: he complains that she left without a word. The scene ends with Chloé joking about deciding to seduce him and him replying by saying that he has a baby boy. The film cuts to the scene in which Frédéric entertains his daughter by poking his face through the neck of his jumper. One shot shows him walking through the trees around his suburban apartment.

L’Amour, l’après-midi: Mirror in shop

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Then he is clothes-shopping with Chloé. After she buys some jeans, the use of the mirror to evoke an imagined life becomes explicit. Frédéric and Chloé stand in front of the mirror admiring their reflections. He begins, We do make a nice couple, don’t we. A perfect couple. Chloé, do you want to marry me? You’re married. In my life, yes. But in another? A double life? Not necessarily. You never dreamt of living two lives at once, simultaneously but also in a complete and perfect way. Impossible. A dream. His proposal to Chloé in the mirror constitutes the film’s fullest acknowledgment that Frédéric’s desire for Chloé grows from his voyeuristic pleasures and his imagining of multiple sexual relationships. In Chloé’s loft room, they discuss polygamy and they do so in front of the mirror: ‘You’ll be unfaithful one day. Not necessarily with me’. He responds: ‘in a polygamous society, I’d be polygamous and I’d get on quite well. But in a society such as ours, I won’t base my life on lies. I hide too much from my wife as it is’. He walks away from the mirror and Chloé follows him, asking him how he knows that his wife does not hide things from him: ‘I saw her with someone the other day’. Frédéric accepts that: ‘I do think one of her colleagues is taken with her. He’s bright, witty. She likes his company. He makes her laugh’. Then he adds, over-confidently, ‘But I doubt she has any physical interest in him’.87 The metaphorical use of clothes and mirrors culminates in their final meeting. Frédéric arrives with a plant, finds her in the bathroom and dries her as she stands naked before him. Chloé tells him, ‘You can kiss me. Water doesn’t stain’. This phrase echoes his wife’s opening comments about his raincoat, when she embraced him and, like Chloé, was wrapped in a towel in a bathroom. As he was about to leave for work, Frédéric opened the bathroom door and found his wife naked with her back to him. For a film about a husband almost having an affair, it is a striking introduction to his wife. In between Frédéric’s vision of Hélène and Chloé naked comes his accidental view of the au pair.88 The repetition of the bathroom setting, the dialogue and the fact that both Hélène and Chloé are wet and naked could suggest that for Frédéric they are interchangeable. The context of Hélène’s nakedness was domestic, though, whereas that of Chloé’s is exotic. Frédéric desires her and they look as if they are about to sleep together. But removing his sweater, so the polo neck frames his face, makes Chloé

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smile, as it made his wife smile in his children’s bedroom. The film cuts from Frédéric’s face to a medium shot of Chloé naked on the bed, returning his gaze and waiting for him, then returns to Frédéric, who still has his arms raised to his jumper. He moves to the right to look at himself in the mirror. His face expresses no emotions, but he yanks his jumper down, pauses, as if thinking of an escape, and turns on the tap, so the noise of the running water masks his retreat. As he leaves the flat, three shots show him scuttling along the corridor like someone trying to leave a maze. Then the film cuts to an overhead shot of the spiral staircase, down which Frédéric flees, descending all five floors in 30 seconds. The long static shot of the staircase (with its allusion to Vertigo) conveys the full sense of his panic. Seeing his mirror image prompts his escape, and his appearance in the mirror appears to remind him of the earlier occasion with his wife and children. However, as Robic (2002: 91) points out, when Frédéric looks in the mirror the film does not verify what he is thinking about. The mirror reflects his confusion, his split self, but it also symbolizes a reconciliation of his desires, revealing the self to the self. L’Amour, l’après-midi ends, as it begins, on Frédéric’s sofa, which has been associated with him throughout the film. The suburban sofa symbolizes the bourgeois comforts to which he retreats and it recalls the occasion when he lied to his wife about having to work on Wednesday evening, when he was sitting in the same corner of the sofa. Ironically, Frédéric’s decision to meet Chloé in the evening comes to nothing. She fails to keep their appointment, forcing him to lie to his wife again. He dines alone and one shot of him conveys his frustration: sitting in the kitchen, smoking, an empty bottle of wine in front of him. The film then cuts to a shot of him asleep on the living room sofa, a book beside him, daylight coming through the window. The ending on the sofa does not confirm whether Hélène is upset because she feels remorseful (as if she has almost had an affair). Chloé tells Frédéric that she saw his wife with a man and Hélène could have been hiding something from him. As Pascal Bonitzer (1999: 106–7) notes, maybe Hélène, like Frédéric, has almost committed adultery.89 Nothing confirms this, though. All that the end confirms is the limited perspective (Frédéric’s) that the film has shown. Hélène may cry because she has noticed her husband’s remoteness from her and now feels relief from silent anxiety. It is noticeable that the second dinner party ends with her observing Frédéric’s distracted air. His unexpected visit home mid-afternoon and their embrace on the sofa may trigger a release of tension. There has been a crisis in their marriage, unspoken but experienced as distance from each other. A long take shows them embracing on the sofa as she sobs on his shoulder. They kiss. She says, ‘let’s go into the bedroom’ and, in a calm consoling gesture, the camera pans to the window. Daylight illuminates the antique table, large hardbound book, magazines, an expensive table lamp and porcelain cup, all framed by the curtain and window.90

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The ambiguous conclusion makes it impossible to judge whether Frédéric makes the right decision. Denying us the security of firm judgement, Rohmer refuses to simplify his story with an affirmation that Frédéric returns to Hélène because he loves her. We do not see enough of Hélène to know her or to know whether their reconciliation is appropriate. 91 On the one hand, his betrayal of Chloé is cowardly and priggish, as if he acts from guilt or to preserve a cosy lifestyle, not out of love or passion for Hélène. His return to his wife is selfish because Chloé does not know, though she may suspect, that Frédéric has been hedging and prevaricating, hiding his intentions from her. His behaviour encourages Chloé; his desire for her is tangible. He may return to his wife because he fears either loneliness or the loss of the middle-class security that comes with his position as a wellestablished businessman and family man. In these terms, the film is not optimistic about marriage, suggesting that the diminishing of desire forever haunts it. Not much is positive in Frédéric’s return to his wife. When he abandons Chloé, he drops a developing relationship. Neither Frédéric nor Chloé rush into this; it is neither a drunken one-night stand nor a holiday romance, but a steady enlargement of their mutual affinity over five months, from 3 January to 15 May.92 Chloé’s feelings for Frédéric are those of a growing love, and Frédéric walks a tightrope between friendship and love affair. The film does not oppose lust for Chloé and companionship with Hélène; it shows that Frédéric’s desire for Chloé derives as much from conversation as from physical desire. He gets on well with Chloé and tells her that he and his wife do not confide in each other, but instead play the roles of husband and wife without conviction. Something more than Chloé and Frédéric’s mutual desire is aroused and acknowledged; but guilt, fear of a lonely old age and a wish to maintain bourgeois comforts guide Frédéric’s actions. These conflict, the film contends and Chloé states, with his instinctual human passions. He may not love Chloé, but flirt with her because she is available. Yet she is prepared to devote herself to him. Frédéric’s desire for Chloé is understandable; Hélène is pretty, but she does not have Zouzou’s striking beauty. Furthermore, as Muriel Zeleny comments, Chloé is more fragile that Claire, Haydée or Maud, and Frédéric more dim-witted than the heroes of the other Six contes moraux (1973: 11).93 They do not deceive the women as much as Frédéric deceives Chloé, and more is at stake for her: she has reached an age where she wants to have a child; she tells Frédéric that she loves him; and she is ready to make love with him as an expression of that love. On the other hand, Frédéric’s anxiety about destroying his marriage is understandable. Having regretted his actions with Chloé and remembered his wife, he acts to save his marriage. Frédéric and Hélène may have been passionate before; they may be so again. He may be making a sane and mature decision not to substitute the temporary gratification of a physical

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craving for long-term companionship. Interpreted this way, his decision to seek rapprochement with Hélène is commendable. The married couple have two children to think about in addition to their own happiness. Frédéric is a busy middle-aged father of two with his own expanding business, who commutes to an office job from the suburbs and is adjusting to his routine. The film shows him coming to terms with middle age and marriage by testing his commitment to his wife. He may recognize that he needs to stop obsessing about other women, acknowledge his wife’s beauty and intelligence and accept that in lasting relationships companionship is as important as sex; as Chloé tells him, passionate love cannot last. Whatever one’s interpretation, the uneasy resolution means the film does not exult in or offer a paean to married life. Frédéric and Hélène are going to make love in the afternoon, but without reassurance that they are going to find future happiness. Molly Haskell describes Frédéric in words that are hard to improve: Frédéric is at his most appealing in the beginning, but gradually the crevice appears. We begin to perceive the ironic distance between what he says and what he does, what he thinks he is and what he is. The moral primness of the hero provides the film with its humour, but also its aridity, and his spiritual parsimony, in the face of two such glorious women, becomes almost sadistic. The ‘morality’ by which Frederic returns to his wife . . . is particularly ironic. Home becomes the alibi for his own cowardice, and morality the rationalization of his actions rather than the key to understanding. (Haskell 1972)94 The film explores marriage and its discontents, ordinary day-to-day life and the imagination of a middle-aged husband trying to preserve his freedom. The disturbing conundrum of L’Amour, l’après-midi’s conclusion is pessimistic and gloomy; it provokes despondency, though the ending is cheerless not tragic, for it ends where it began, with possibly nothing changed. Unencumbered by work or children, husband and wife return to each other, aware of the crisis they have experienced; their marriage may improve. Although society’s moral guardians may applaud the husband’s principled decision to return to his wife, Rohmer’s film celebrates nothing.

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3 Two period films Die Marquise von O. . . (1976) The Six contes moraux responded to French society during the last part of France’s ‘30 glorious years’, the post-war period of social change and economic expansion. Following this, Rohmer made two period films; not until the 1980s did he again show contemporary France.1 At first glance the period films appear far-removed from the politically charged context of 1970s Europe, but the first film has links to its time, for Rohmer made Die Marquise von O. . . (1976), based on Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella, during a period when politicized adaptations of Kleist were popular on stage and screen.2 He followed this with Perceval le Gallois (1978), which drew on contemporaneous ideas about Chrétien’s text. Both period films reject the spectacle of the heritage genre and approach their subjects through the prism of contemporary sources. Of the first, Rohmer says: I wasn’t very busy at this time; I was working for TV on the programmes on architecture [Ville Nouvelle, 1975]. I had the Perceval project well under way, a subject that I had already made for educational TV, but I was waiting for Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, which finally proved to have nothing in common with my future film. Meanwhile, I was interested in the German language and I discovered around this time Kleist’s novels, works that I didn’t know. What piqued my curiosity was a phrase by Roland Barthes, who said ‘I wrote S/Z about a book by Balzac, but if I had been a Germanist maybe I would have written it on La Marquise d’O. . .’. I read it and I had the idea of doing this film before Perceval and in German. I spoke to the producer Klaus Hellwig, who had bought the Six contes moraux for German TV, and, enthusiastic, he found the money very quickly. (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7)

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Rohmer shot the film in Germany in July 1975 (Gauteur 1975: 10), using German actors and re-learning German.3 Three of his lead actors, Bruno Ganz, Edith Clever and Otto Sander, were members of the Schaubühne theatre collective in Berlin. Founded in 1970 and led by director Peter Stein, the Schaubühne group were renowned for their left-wing politics and their strict respect for the text of plays. According to Michael Patterson (1981: 172–6), between 1967 and 1974, Ganz and Clever appeared together in six Stein productions. Together with Peter Lühr, the Marquise’s father in Die Marquise von O. . ., Ganz and Sander also acted in Stein’s 1972 production of Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg. Stein cast Lühr, a member of the Munich Kammerspiele, as the authority figure in Kleist’s play. Therefore, in casting Ganz, Clever, Sander and Lühr, Rohmer took a ready-made acting troupe with experience of Kleist. Patterson describes Stein’s work on the staging of The Prince of Homburg (1981: 90–6), in which Ganz took the title role of the battlefield hero condemned to death by the elector, played by Lühr. He writes: The major thrust of the acting, however, was to establish the idealized, dream-like quality of the piece so that the Prussian military ethos could be unmasked as a dangerous illusion. Not only was Homburg to be portrayed as somnambulistic, but the world he inhabited became a dream-world of sleepwalkers heading for the abyss. (1981: 94) The Prince of Homburg and Die Marquise von O. . . share a thematic emphasis, and Rohmer’s film includes the two most prominent cast members in similar roles. Stein’s 1972 production may have influenced Rohmer’s film. Whether or not Rohmer saw the Schaubühne’s Prince of Homburg, he did not adapt Die Marquise von O. . . in a vacuum.4 Rohmer did not change Kleist’s story that much. Kleist describes speech or reports on actions and events. Rohmer adapted this indirect style by giving Kleist’s reported speech to characters as dialogue, changing indirect speech to direct speech.5 Rohmer’s film mostly presents the story as it is written, to the extent that he often uses Kleist’s descriptions to prompt the blocking of action, as for example with the departure of the Count’s officer with his despatches (Kleist 2004: 80) or the doctor’s dropping of his glove. Overall, the film remains faithful to the novella’s actions and its tone. Kleist tells the story in the third person, maintaining an omniscient position. The tone is ironic and deadpan, and, from the beginning, the novella offers clues about the Count’s behaviour: the dash, his red face, replacing his hat, his reluctance to name the attackers, his calling out ‘Giulietta, this bullet avenges you’ as he is shot (not included in the film), his eagerness to marry. Kleist wants readers to know before the family do that the Count raped the Marquise soon after rescuing her. Once we know the answer to the mystery (and the effect is heightened on repeat readings or viewings), we can study the characters’ reactions to the scandal.

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Rohmer allies his method of storytelling to Kleist’s, transposing the author’s mode of detached comic irony and building tension by maintaining a flat unvarying pace until the conclusion. Hilda Brown notes that, in contrast with the story’s emotional subject, Kleist’s Die Marquise von O. . . has a comic tone, which comes from, she writes, ‘the narrator’s irony which is established very early on, when the reader is made privy via the narrator to information – namely the identity of the perpetrator of the rape – which the characters, apart from the perpetrator, themselves do not possess’ (Brown 1998: 207). In film and novella, comments resonate ironically, beyond the characters’ awareness. Therefore, up to a point, Die Marquise von O. . . allows us to share the viewpoint of a rapist, the dashing sensitive and remorseful young Count played by Bruno Ganz. We understand what the family do not when the Count comments: ‘the only dishonourable act I have ever committed has been kept secret and I’m about to make amends for it’. We also understand his desperation to marry and his refusal to explain his haste. A good example of Rohmer highlighting the Count’s secret occurs when the brother tells him that his sister is pregnant and the Count looks uncomfortable. The brother may interpret the Count’s uneasiness as the response of someone disturbed by the break from propriety; we understand his guilt. Ganz’s Count expresses nothing to the brother about his responsibility, but he embodies Kleist’s description of ‘turning pale for a moment’ as he listens to the brother’s account of her ‘dishonouring the family’. Throughout novella and film, we judge the characters’ responses, noticing the irony in their statements.6 A striking instance of this occurs at dinner, when the family discuss what to do when a stranger arrives the next day; the mother thinks a ‘bumpkin’ would not have replied to the advertisement. The brother replies, ‘But it’s very much in the style of our gallant Count’. Without knowing it, he intuits the truth. The Marquise’s indignant reaction is revealing: though she was leaving the room, she tells her brother to ‘Shut up’, insisting ‘the Count is the one person beyond suspicion. How dare you!’ Her brother replies: ‘If you feel so sure’. The Marquise argues: ‘it’s not a question of “feeling”, but of logical deduction. One cannot rescue a woman and take advantage of her at the same time. You cannot fight a fire all night long and also prowl around my bed. Whoever shows up tomorrow, it cannot be the Count’. She then slams the door and leaves. Rohmer invented this scene of the Marquise defending the Count, which increases the contrast between what she says and what she feels. She claims that logic dictates that it cannot be the Count, but, as her brother suspects, her feelings for the Count motivate her. Rohmer’s new scene highlights her preference for the idealized rescuing Count, not one driven by base animalistic sexual urges; as Alan Spiegel notes, ‘her exalted version of the world will filter experience only in terms of inflationary and absolutist categories’ (1981: 324). Kleist’s filtering of experience through consciousness drew

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Rohmer to the story: ‘a subject such as this one, where there is an ambiguity between good and evil and an absence of clear-cut judgement, I like very much’ (Pruks 1977: 125). As Hilda Brown notes of the novella, the ‘Marquise’s fixation on an idealized image of her “rescuer” is arguably the most important point in the whole story and the source of most confusion to the reader’ (1998: 211). Kleist provides clues about the Marquise’s desire for the Count, a desire founded on a fantasy of a heroic rescuer, but, as Brown remarks: ‘the placing of the Graf on this kind of remote pedestal sets up a barrier in her mind towards any conception of him qua husband or sexual partner’ (1998: 212). She concludes that ‘the Marquise shares the tendency evident in other Kleistian heroines to hold fast to her illusions and ideals’ (1998: 213). Such an addition as the Marquise’s outburst exemplifies Rohmer’s inventiveness in adapting the novella to his requirements while preserving the spirit of Kleist’s text. The director’s handling of the flashback is exemplary in this regard. The novella begins with the explanation that the Marquise was the widowed daughter of the Commandant and that she had gone to live with her father. It chronicles the circumstances of the war, leading up to the night of the Russian attack on the citadel. It reports the loss of her husband and the Russian attack as one account. The flashback begins with ‘about three years earlier’. However, film does not offer the same possibilities. Therefore, Rohmer begins his film with an intertitle, adapting the first line of the novella: ‘In M. . ., a town in Northern Italy . . .’. He then uses the framing device of men in an inn talking about the advertisement. One of Rohmer’s innovations is to move part of this scene from the middle of the story to the beginning; like Kleist, he includes Giulietta’s brother in the inn. As two strangers converse, they supply the background information which Kleist provides. The film then cuts to the brother turning to listen when one of the men says ‘a lady of unblemished reputation’. Having picked him out, the film returns to the man describing the Marquise, until it cuts to a closer shot of the brother; off-screen, one of the men says, ‘Suddenly the war . . .’ and the film fades out on the brother and fades in on a room in which the Marquise is cowering with her mother and children during the attack. While the opening scene in the inn establishes that everything we will see has already happened, on a first viewing we do not know that the man listening is her brother and that the return to this point in time will come halfway through the story, when the count arrives at the inn, finds the brother there and reads the Marquise’s advertisement in the newspaper, shown to him by the brother. Everything in between is a flashback, although not from a character’s viewpoint. By giving Kleist’s reported description to the men in the inn, Rohmer emphasizes public reaction to the Marquise’s advertisement: the first man laughs; the second man defends her; the brother listens as the strangers react to the scandalous publicising of a private family matter.

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A further innovation of Rohmer’s and another method of converting Kleist’s indirect descriptions is the film’s use of the Marquise’s voice-over, which is heard after the Commandant insists that he keep the Marquise’s children and she refuses to give them up. The strength of her resolution is important, as an intertitle declares: Having learned how strong she was through this courageous act, she was able to raise herself out of the deep abyss into which fate had cast her. A shot follows of her in a landau with her children, then another intertitle: Her reason had been strong enough not to crack under the strain of her uncanny situation and now bowed to the holy and inscrutable laws of the universe. Then comes a long shot of her sitting by a tree in a garden. A close shot of her shows her knitting. She looks up into the distance, as if reflecting. Then her voice-over begins: I know it is impossible to persuade my family of my innocence. I know that I must resign myself to it, if I don’t want to be destroyed. I have decided to withdraw into myself entirely, to concentrate all my energies on the education of my two children. As for God’s great gift of a third child, I will lavish it with all my motherly love. The last part of this voice-over is heard during a shot of her daughter playing with some flowers. Rohmer then returns to the shot of the Marquise by a tree, looking radiant. The voice-over changes to a monologue, as if her speaking continues her thinking: One thought I cannot endure, what if this young being conceived in the purest innocence should bear a stigma in society? I am mad! How can I tie myself to a man who took advantage of me? He is the scum of the earth. Wherever I imagine he is, he could only have sprung from the blackest and filthiest mire where he belongs. The next scene shows her writing the advertisement. In Kleist’s novella, this scene is one paragraph: it describes the Marquise’s actions and her reflections. The paragraph ends with her giving instructions, ‘for the insertion in the M— news-sheets of the extraordinary announcement quoted to the reader at the beginning of this story’ (Kleist 2004: 94). Rohmer’s film does not address viewers with a comment like this or with, on the following page, the brother ‘narrated the events with which our readers are already acquainted’ (2004: 95). Such interventions are not

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unusual in nineteenth-century novels; but this form of intervention is rare in film. Rohmer, like many filmmakers, chooses not to have a voice-over address ‘the viewer of this film’; yet he preserves the sense of an omniscient storyteller by using four techniques to adapt one paragraph: intertitles, voice-over, speech and filmed action. Furthermore, he adapts Kleist’s flashback by having the Count’s arrival at the inn function as the closing parenthesis of the two scenes that frame everything that has taken place during the past few months. The film fades out on the Marquise’s writing; a fade-in reveals the Count’s carriage outside the Commandant’s town house. Inside, he waits, the equivalent of Kleist’s ‘Meanwhile Count F—’ (2004: 94), which follows the long paragraph detailing the Marquise’s decision. The biggest difference between Kleist’s version and Rohmer’s is the depiction of the circumstances that lead up to the rape. In the film, the Count returns the Marquise to her servants and children. He offers to call a doctor, but, off-screen, a servant replies that a sleeping potion is all she needs. The Count leaves and rejoins the battle.7 He returns later and finds her in a deep, drug-induced sleep. In Kleist’s story, however, the Count rescues her and she loses consciousness; Kleist uses a dash to interrupt the sentence: ‘Then – the officer instructed the Marquise’s frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting’ (Kleist 2004: 70). The Count does not see the Marquise again until he asks her to marry him a few weeks later. Rohmer, therefore, added the sleeping potion and the Count’s return that night.8 Kleist describes the Count’s actions after he returns to battle, and only the dash indicates an ellipsis. Into Kleist’s tiny grammatical elision, Rohmer pours all the charged symbolism of his re-imagining of the story, yet he preserves Kleist’s intentions by strengthening the connection between dreaming and waking. The story’s essence is the Marquise’s discovery that the man whom she found attractive, courageous and courteous is the same man who raped her while she was asleep. Rohmer says, There certainly is an exchange here, an exchange and a transfer of guilt. The woman is horrified by the possibility that the man whom she thought of as an angel might be a devil. But at the same time you might well suppose, as I allow you to, that she has dreamt about the count, that she has dreamt that he made love to her, and at this moment she feels, in a certain way, guilty. And then she’s even more horrified to think that he might have done something which, although she may have dreamt of it, she’d never thought him capable of committing. So, if you like, her erotic dream is satisfied, but at the same time her moral sensibility is deeply wounded. (Rohmer 1976) Giulietta may have dreamt erotically of her handsome rescuer, but she is understandably shocked when she realizes what happened. Therefore,

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like other Rohmer films, Die Marquise von O. . . explores the ambiguous relationship between imagination and consciousness. Rohmer accentuates the link between dreaming and waking by connecting Kleist’s story to paintings by contemporary artists. The film alludes to work by JacquesLouis David (e.g. his Madame Récamier, 1800), Fragonard, Girodet and Fuseli.9 Working at the end of the eighteenth century, these painters visualize the unconscious in erotic and fantastic form; paintings like Fuseli’s Queen Katherine’s Dream (1781) depict dreaming women’s fantasies, while Fuseli and Theodor Von Holst also drew sexually explicit scenes. For Rohmer, the central visual source was Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781).10 By drawing on The Nightmare, Rohmer expresses his interpretation of Die Marquise von O. . . in a way that logically extends Kleist’s novella. Fuseli’s famous painting depicts a woman asleep while on her chest sits a creature who could be assaulting her or could represent her dream. Rohmer also took inspiration from another painting, Fragonard’s The Bolt (1778).11 Fragonard’s painting shows a man bolting a door on the inside with his right hand while holding a woman in his other arm. The woman leans her head back, either in ecstasy or despair. Their embrace occupies the right half of the painting; the left half of the painting is dominated by a huge bed, covered in plump white pillows, with large red satin drapes billowing from the ceiling. On a small beside table is an uneaten apple; on the floor lies an overturned chair. This sexual scene is redolent with suggestions of domination and submission, yet the meaning is uncertain. The woman may be pushing the man away or about to accept his embraces. Jennifer Milam emphasizes how important this ambiguity was in contemporaneous literary works which described female sexual desire, for example in Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and in Laclos’s Les Liasons dangereuses (1782). One way to read The Bolt is as a portrait of adults involved in a game of seduction, where a woman’s rejection of sexual advances is an accepted part of the process. As Milam observes, ‘infused with highly erotic potential, The Bolt leaves not so much the outcome but the reasons for the woman’s final submission in doubt’ (2006: 123). The exact nature of the woman’s compliance is indecipherable, and both Kleist and Rohmer tap into uncertainty about how much the Marquise may have welcomed sexual advances from the Count if she had been conscious. Fundamental to both The Nightmare and The Bolt, and incorporated by Rohmer into Die Marquise von O. . ., is the drapery. Mary Sheriff describes the ‘beautiful disarray’ in Fragonard’s painting as an artful calculation often found in interior scenes: Beau désordre . . . can be associated with that aspect of negligence analogous to the suggestive dishabille [déshabille] of the coquette. The room artfully disarrayed not only pleases the viewer’s sight, it also provides the occasion for erotic imaginings. (Sheriff 1990: 129–30)

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The twisted drapery on and around the bed in The Bolt ‘entices the viewer to imagine what is not seen and cannot be seen: the preliminary events, the causes of the upheaval’ (Sheriff 1990: 130). Rohmer incorporates the drapery found in Fragonard’s The Bolt and Fuseli’s The Nightmare to suggest, as they do, a visionary and mysterious eroticism. In the sixteenth century, in settings where one would not expect to see drapery, artists painted in folds of draped cloth behind sitters as a way of introducing drama into a painting. Curtains and drapes became visible as imaginative additions to paintings. Bunched-up cloth is hung around beds for practical effect – curtains keep out drafts and light – but it also introduces drama and evokes luxury and abundance. The Bolt’s red curtains hang as if they surround the bed, which is covered in white satin. The woman wears a white and yellow silk dress whose fabric twists away from her, connecting her with the bed. In The Nightmare, the red curtains hang behind the sleeping woman, who wears a clinging silk nightdress that allows the outline of her body to show. As Anne Hollander says of Fuseli, The long, flowing Neo-Classic but unearthly clothes create a nimbus around the nude body, a flow of extra electric charge. It has a strong erotic power . . . This veil of lines, indicating drapery, but emphasizing nudity, does so by tracing the edges of the muscles and the joints; and when it is absent, it can thus still seem to be there. (1993: 119–20) For his depiction of the sleeping Marquise, Rohmer uses both the hanging red drapes and the clinging white nightdress. Asleep, draped in satin, with sweat on her face, the Marquise breathes heavily as she lies across the bed, her left arm dangling onto the floor, her right hand touching her forehead, her ankles crossed as she moves her head, tilts her hips and rubs her legs together. Her posture, her place on the bed and the clinging white satin emphasize the curves of hips, breasts and belly across the dark red patterned bedspread. Drapes of red satin hang behind her; on a table covered in green velvet, a candle burns. Her movements, the noises she makes and the décor’s emphasis on soft voluptuousness all imply that she is having an erotic dream, with the candle by her head hinting at passion or feverishness.12 When the Count enters, he too carries a candle in a lantern. In both images, the candle is used for practical and dramatic effect. When Rohmer cuts from Giulietta to the Count standing in the doorway, we see that his lips are parted, his eyes wide open and his head tilted as he stares at her. The camera pushes in closer to frame the look of bewitchment on his face. The shot then fades out.13 From the fade-out on the Count, the film cuts to the next day when his general decides that the Marquise’s attackers will be shot, though, with his own guilt in mind, the Count appeals for leniency.14 Rohmer then cuts to another erotic image of the sleeping Marquise, sweaty

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in satin, red drapes bunched behind her, a shiny copper bucket completing the frame. The rifle shots wake her, the sounds of the men who tried to rape her being executed. She sits up and her silk nightdress slips from her shoulder; she pulls it up and takes her knees towards her. A servant tells her that poppy seed tea prevents bad dreams. She sits in bed holding her toes. The scene fades out on a shot of Giulietta deep in thought. The film elaborates its theme of the dreamt experience in the breakfast scene. The Marquise has her eyes closed, drifting off to sleep, holding her coffee cup as if she has forgotten it. She tells her mother: ‘I just felt the same way as I did when I was expecting my second daughter’. Her mother laughs: ‘Perhaps you’ll give birth to a fantasy’. Giulietta replies: ‘The father will be Morpheus or one of his pageant of dreams’. Irony comes from the fact that she did indeed become pregnant while she was asleep, but what she took for fantasy was close to truth: while she dreamt of having sex with the Count, he was raping her. The Marquise’s reference to the Greek god of dreams (found in Kleist’s novella also) further evokes the unconscious sexual drives that Rohmer emphasizes in his depiction of the dreaming Marquise by emulating The Nightmare and The Bolt. The Marquise was given a sleeping drug and slept heavily; yet her pose indicates fantasies that her waking self would repress. Unthinking and unknown except during sleep, the Marquise’s fantasies of arousal and orgasm with the Count would be inadmissible in 1808. By replacing Kleist’s dash with an elaborate staging that alludes to Fuseli and Fragonard, Rohmer interprets the story in a post-Freudian mode, taking The Nightmare as his cue in that Fuseli’s painting of a dreaming woman is a visualization of a pre-Freudian concern with female sexual desire. The picture may show a woman experiencing sexual pleasure: both the intruding horse and the malevolent staring imp symbolize the animalistic drives that lie close behind civilised appearances.15 Freud owned a print of Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which hung in his study above his desk.16 Rohmer re-imagines Kleist’s tale with a twentieth-century awareness of the links between the unconscious and consciousness. He does not distort Kleist’s novella because he takes the dominant visual motif from the same period; Fuseli first painted The Nightmare in 1781, but it was so popular that he painted several other versions during the next decade. Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands, of engraved reproductions circulated, as did satirical versions by artists like Gilray. As Christopher Frayling notes, All these prints distributed the image across Europe and America until it became the way of visualising bad dreams, the design for depicting monsters of the night – still the most celebrated (and most often travestied) image of terror, apart possibly from Munch’s The Scream (1893), in the visual lexicon. (Frayling 2006: 13)

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By the time Kleist published his novel in 1808, The Nightmare was well known and its links to the Romantic movement apparent.17 However, Rohmer makes an additional connection between Fuseli and Kleist. The story was published during the Napoleonic wars, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a period when anxieties about the spread of revolution were affecting the dominant classes of Europe. During this period of Fuseli and Kleist, the upsurge of powerful forces could be sexual and primitive, or class-based and violent.18 As Frayling (2006: 15) observes, through transcription Fuseli’s The Nightmare became associated with fears about the French revolution.19 Both Kleist and Rohmer stress the arbitrariness of society’s disapproval of the Marquise, using the father to represent the strict conservatism that judges the Marquise’s behaviour as sinful. The morality of the established order is shown to be rigid; the Marquise’s family reject her because she is a pregnant unmarried woman. Rohmer says: I think that the most important thing for Kleist is the decision the woman makes to take charge of her own destiny, in spite of everyone, in spite of everything and everyone. I think it’s more the notion of liberty which is important in this situation. This woman is defying all the moral conventions of the time when she places that announcement in the newspaper. It was an absolutely scandalous thing for her to do. It made her appear both ridiculous and shameful, and I think that that is the central theme of the story. (Rohmer 1976) The story’s title comes from the Marquise’s signature on the newspaper advertisement, which Rohmer shows on screen in a close-up. That signature symbolizes the public admission of her anonymous pregnancy, the separation from her family and the moral outrage that would have erupted in her society.20

Die Marquise von O…: Marquise signs her name

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As Hilda Brown (1998: 209) points out, Kleist concentrates on the family’s concern for propriety when the Count asks the Marquise to marry him. She notes the observed social convention when the Marquise’s opinion is not asked for, the decision resting with her father. Rohmer also highlights the importance of etiquette during the family’s interaction with the Count; like Kleist, he contrasts public politeness with private rage and the loss of control that characterizes the family’s reaction to the Marquise’s pregnancy. Both Rohmer and Kleist use the crisis to lay bare the transgression of social codes; as Brown notes, ‘Kleist probes beneath the façade of social conventions’ (1998: 210). The Count does not confess because social convention requires from him a large degree of polite etiquette. Furthermore, as Brown remarks, the family do not guess the truth ‘because of the Graf’s social status, his impeccable credentials, and his aura of chivalry’ (Brown 1998: 214). The advertisement is the turning point; as Rohmer says, her decision to act alone is an act of strength by the Marquise and a defiance of social convention. By using Fuseli’s The Nightmare, Rohmer increases his criticism of moral absolutes, the allegiance to which forces the father to condemn his daughter, his anger reinforcing the social and legal order at a familial level. The family banish the Marquise because they suspect she has had sex outside of marriage. By revealing the power of prejudices and the family’s fear of social ostracization, the film exposes how unjust these conventions are; it criticizes religious rules that stipulate that women should not have sex outside marriage. A century after Kleist, in 1908, Freud condemned this inflexible moral code in ‘“Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, arguing that strict rules concerning male and female sexuality were psychically damaging. Social expectations tacitly condoned prostitution and confirmed a double standard, the existence of which was, for Freud, ‘the plainest admission that society itself, which has laid down the rules, does not believe it possible to comply with them’ (Freud 2002: 96). He concludes that modern nervous illness is caused by the repressive demands of civilization’s ideal of the renunciation of and refusal to satisfy powerful sexual urges, except in unique unions approved by the Church. In 1808, Kleist attacks this repressive morality by showing its workings; in 1976, Rohmer does the same. In this respect, Die Marquise von O. . ., although a period film, is not that far from the Six contes moraux, which are set in contemporary France: the tendency in all the films is to criticize moral absolutes drawn from a zealous adherence to outdated religious rules. Moreover, although it is about a woman becoming pregnant after being raped, it ends more positively than either Ma Nuit chez Maud or L’Amour, l’aprèsmidi. Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O. . . dramatizes Kleist’s moral problem about whether the Marquise is right to forgive the Count; the film does this by preserving and extending Kleist’s ironic tone. I hesitate to describe as proto-feminist a film that ends with a happy marriage between a woman and her rapist, but Rohmer pulls off a convincing ending. The Count asks

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her to marry him because he feels guilty, yet he loves her. The film ends with a coordinated flourish as the mirror catches the Count in the hallway when he hears the Marquise crying. Their kiss releases the tension of their relationship and the film then ends. Rohmer’s use of a sudden release for a film that has been so ironic makes the conclusion tender and moving.21

Perceval le Gallois (1978) Rohmer’s source for Perceval le Gallois was Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, or the Story of the Grail, preserved in manuscripts since the late twelfth century and one of the founding texts of Arthurian romance, important in Western literature for over 800 years. The myths and legends concerning King Arthur are some of the most durable stories in history; their tropes, events and characters remain popular to this day. Cultural fascination with the medieval period and Arthurian legends began, writes Umberto Eco, as soon the Middle Ages ended.22 Renaissance poets returned to tales of knightly adventures, and a fascination with remnants of the medieval era was sustained through the centuries until the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century.23 Rohmer adapted Chrétien’s text, aiming to convey its verse with maximum fidelity. As with his adaptation of Kleist, he did not work in isolation; he researched scholarly approaches to medieval dramatization and adopted staging strategies that were contemporaneous with his work. Rohmer’s transposition of Chrétien’s verse resulted in an unusual film.24 Comparing Rohmer’s filmic interpretation of a medieval source with other medieval films reveals just how unusual is Perceval le Gallois. David Williams (1990: 7) attempts to put medieval movies into two broad categories of films that show either a dirty or a clean Middle Ages, a choice between representing the medieval world or medieval ideas. Perceval le Gallois is one of the few medieval movies to communicate medieval ideas; it does this by using the stylized forms of medieval art.25 In preparation, Rohmer studied miniatures in illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows, research which influenced his decisions about décor, costumes and gestures.26 As he says, My respect for the original text and my concern for period detail led me to make a special choice about décor and location. I could have done the film in natural settings in lovely castles, but they would have been ruined castles! I could have tried to refurbish them, but that would have cost millions. So I tried to recreate the Middle Ages as they were seen by the miniature painters of the day. I decided to show very little, but to make sure it was beautiful. My castles are gilded, the trees in the forest are stylised, the costumes are sumptuous. My updated Middle Ages come

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straight out of twelfth and thirteenth century engravings. Everything is stylised. I’ve devoted a lot of time to art research but it wasn’t easy getting the world of miniatures across on screen. We had to reinvent everything. This is why the whole film was shot in the studios. My trees are the height of a man, my castles have towers as high as an ordinary room, my men and horses can only just get through the archways, and my décor is simplified but retains all the wealth and richness of the period – and this is how I hope I’ve recaptured the spirit of medieval art. (Anon 1978: 22)27 I am not trying to show the Middle Ages as we would see it if we could go back in a time machine and photograph it; I am searching to rediscover the vision of the medieval period as it saw itself. (Tesich-Savage 1978: 51) The film’s décor was inspired by the simple design and bright primary colours of twelfth and thirteenth century stained glass windows (later stained glass windows have more intricate designs), the opposite of the drab and dreary colours one finds in most medieval films. The designs of Perceval le Gallois’s tunics, hoods, chainmail, cloaks and voluminous sleeves are visible in high medieval art. A French medievalist inspired Rohmer’s approach: I have always loved this text. I loved it when I taught it to my students at the lycée. . . . Perceval was not usually among the chosen excerpts, but it was available in a special collection of Petits Classiques, translated word for word in verse by a medieval scholar, Gustave Cohen. So I would have them read the translated excerpts by Gustave Cohen, and this gave me a great desire to read Perceval in the original, which I did. (Tesich-Savage 1978: 51)28 Rohmer further explains his preparation: I had seen performances of Patelin, which is much later than Perceval, and Robin et Marion, staged by some of the troupe from Perceval, under the direction of Guy Robert [who wrote the music for Rohmer’s Perceval]. I read Gustave Cohen’s book on theatrical staging in the Middle Ages. All that gave me ideas about how to reconstruct the Middle Ages. (Delavaud and Montaville 1981: 85) As well as being a medieval scholar at the Sorbonne, Cohen was a promoter of medieval culture who created his own theatrical troupe with his students, the Théophiliens.29 Helen Solterer describes how, from 1935 onwards, Cohen and his Théophiliens went on tour around Europe performing

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miracle plays (Solterer 1996: 362), aiming to revitalize the French medieval repertoire as ‘a pedagogical and critical exercise’ (1996: 364): The Théophilien project as he conceived it was no mere reconstruction of past theatre. By piecing together with his students a replica of medieval stagecraft, Cohen worked to incite these young people into seeking a spirit of the Middle Ages. (Solterer 1996: 366) As Solterer explains, ‘miniature by miniature, they reproduced the stances of the various characters, the idiosyncrasies of their body language, every aspect of every scene’ (1996: 367). Rohmer adopted the methods of Cohen, whose preparation for the direction of plays like Miracle de Théophile and Robin et Marion began with research into medieval stained glass and miniatures in illuminated manuscripts. Rohmer, like Cohen, based his filming of Chrétien’s texts on the iconographical detail of extant medieval art, from which he derived ideas for sets, costumes and gestures. Rohmer acknowledges Cohen’s influence, but former Théophilien and French medieval specialist Paul Zumthor distinguishes filmmaker from scholar: At the linguistic level, Rohmer sticks to the original text, from which long passages are modernised only in pronunciation; here and there, a syntactic or lexical obscurity justifies the substitution of a term or a phrase. Only a priggish pedant would quibble over some details. At least nothing here recalls the annoying theatrical adaptations produced long ago by Gustave Cohen. Cohen, certainly, like Rohmer, preserved the octosyllabic couplet and some terms of the period: the intention was approximately the same one. But Rohmer has talent. The language of his Perceval is noticeably historical and yet perfectly audible, immediately comprehensible, and the musical quality of the verse is maintained almost constantly. (Zumthor 1980: 121–2) Zumthor’s emphasis on Rohmer’s successful transposition of Chrétien’s verse is unsurprising given Zumthor’s scholarship on the performative dimensions of medieval literature.30 Rohmer wanted more people to appreciate Perceval as a performed work. The musical quality of the spoken verse was, therefore, crucial. He rehearsed with his lead actor, Fabrice Luchini, for a year: In this film one is not free vis-à-vis the text, one cannot misplace a word, or mispronounce it; every syllable counts. The text demands a control and a long apprenticeship; an actor must know the text so well that he says it as if it were a daily conversation. For this film I needed the abilities of a professional actor, something that was not necessary in my

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other films where I could take someone off the street and have them play themselves. (Tesich-Savage 1978: 54)31 Nevertheless, Rohmer made a significant change to the text he adapted by eliminating the role of a single storyteller, of the kind who would have performed the piece for medieval audiences. Rohmer kept the storyteller’s third-person perspective by distributing the lines to different characters. Therefore, Perceval le Gallois combines direct speech and indirect speech, so that some characters describe their actions in the third person. All of it is in verse, either sung or spoken. Combining indirect or third-person descriptions with direct or first-person speech allows Rohmer to maintain the sense in Chrétien’s verse of simultaneous storytelling and dramatic enactment. At times, the characters refer to themselves in the third person, describing their actions as if they were delivering dialogue. Some of the rhyming couplets represent dialogue, such as the exchange between Perceval and the first knight; one person says the first line, the second person says the second line, giving a pleasing rhythm to the verse. Sometimes the transition from one to another is managed across a single line.32 One example is the first scene with King Arthur, which begins with a woman singing: ‘King Arthur at the head of the table, lost in thought’. Off-screen, a man says: ‘and all the knights laughed’. The knights start laughing, as if someone has shouted ‘action’. The camera moves along the table, facing the seated knights while Gawain (André Dussollier) finishes the sentence, ‘and made merry’. Then Perceval rides in: ‘Vassal, tell me which one is the king’. The effect is as if someone is reading out stage directions. The moment in which the knights start laughing after the spoken description illustrates the film’s difference to most adaptations. Rohmer includes Chrétien’s indirect descriptions, which most adapters would translate into action or dialogue. He gives the words of Chrétien’s storyteller, who would have spoken to audiences directly, to a range of characters. Another example of characters speaking or singing third-person accounts of their story occurs when Perceval meets Gornemant. The latter asks him how he got his arms. Instead of Perceval describing events we have just seen, two attendants step forward and sing: ‘so he told him a tale we already know. To tell it once more would be a bore’. While they sing, Perceval and Gornemant remain still; afterwards, they finish their conversation, but now in the third person: Gornemant says, ‘the worthy man asked him if he’d mastered his new horse’; Perceval replies; ‘I gallop through hill and dale, as easily as on the horse I had when I lived with my mother’. The two men then sing a description of Perceval’s long practice with lance and horse. Similarly, when Perceval fights Anguingueron, we hear: ‘I won’t relate how each man fared or describe the battle blow by blow. It lasted long and the blows rained hard and fast’. Or when Perceval fights Clamadieu, a singer recounts:

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They fought at length. I could describe each blow. But is it worth your time and mine? One word’s as good as twenty. This is unusual for a film, yet one becomes accustomed to the technique as the actors say and sing the rhyming couplets exceptionally well. Early music also inspired Rohmer and, throughout the film, a group of musicians and singers – five men and three women – perform as a chorus, commenting on events. In addition, the musicians and singers play several small parts. A specialist in medieval music, Guy Robert, composed the film’s music, basing it on tunes from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.33 The music occurs often, but one musical highlight is the scene of Perceval’s first meeting with Blanchefleur (Arielle Dombasle). A strum on a lute introduces Blanchefleur, who sits on a bench in a floor-length red dress. On her left are the four women of the chorus; on her right are the three men of the chorus. All the women have long plaits hanging down the front of their bright-coloured dresses, tight waists, full skirts and long hanging sleeves. As Blanchefleur steps forward into a close-up, a soprano (Catherine Schroeder) sings of her beauty. The lute playing by Francisco Orozco, flute playing by Deborah Nathan and solo singing by Schroeder are euphonic; the clarity and strength of Schroeder’s voice, in particular, are remarkable. The pureness of her tone when Perceval first sees Blanchefleur expresses the young man’s enrapture with Blanchefleur’s beauty; it is one of the most touching moments of the film.

Perceval le Gallois: Hands

Also notable in this scene are the poses of the two young women of the chorus, Pascale Ogier and Solange Boulanger, the latter playing a small guitar. Ogier stands next to her in a typical pose, her hands raised to her chest, palms

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facing outwards. Medieval stained glass windows often depict figures holding their hands up: hands raised in front of the chest to shoulder level, palms facing outwards, fingers and thumbs extended. Rohmer explains: As to gesture, in medieval art it is always very stylised. A hand, for instance, is always shown stretched wide open, you’ll rarely see one closed. So I sought an overall system of gesticulation which would justify every such movement. And finding the key was less tricky than I thought. I observed that it was enough to pivot the forearm around the elbow, keeping the elbow close to the body and never moving the upper arm. . . . By constantly thinking of this code, the actors soon managed to arrive at a natural style; and during the year in which we rehearsed they would practise it everyday, like scales. . . . Perceval himself is depicted as a man of nature, a naïf whose reactions are quite spontaneous and he was permitted a great deal of freedom in his gestures. The courtiers and musicians, on the other hand, who represent the manners of a society – and this was an excessively mannered, precious society – adhered much more rigidly to the code. (Adair 1978: 231) The open-palmed raised-hand gesture symbolizes the rigidly codified behaviour, but Ogier incorporates these gestures into her performance with an unforced naturalness. Rohmer’s most significant alteration of Chrétien’s text was his addition of the Passion Play sequence (Chrétien’s tale breaks off mid-sentence). Of this decision, Rohmer says: Capturing the spirit and originality of the original text involved long, exciting hours of work, but it also often required painful choices. We had to abbreviate or cut some pages which medieval scholars think very highly of. We concentrated on portraying Perceval’s character and the way it evolves over the course of his mystical passion. We were less interested in the mythical Grail quest than in the way it shapes the deeper character and behaviour of the hero. We were more interested in behaviour and psychology than we were in magic. The ending of the film is an open one with a sort of Chaplinesque shot of the hero disappearing alone into the distance. The audience have to make up their own mind as to whether the Grail quest has finished or is only just beginning. (Anon 1978: 42) Despite Rohmer’s claim about retaining the ‘spirit’ of the original text, he made some major changes. As well as adding the Passion Play, he cut most of the parts of Chrétien’s text which describe Gawain’s adventures. Chrétien’s text has 1421 lines that follow Gawain’s adventures, before returning to Perceval’s Good Friday experience for 302 lines and then back to Gawain for 2716 lines. Rohmer includes a small fraction of Gawain’s adventures

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in the film, breaking off before Guinganbresil reappears; he excludes all of Gawain’s adventures after Perceval’s Good Friday experience.34 After the King of Esclavon stops the attack on Gawain, a voice-over declares: ‘here the tale leaves Sir Gawain and returns to Perceval’. The young knight appears on his horse, speaking of himself: Perceval, we are told, had forgotten to worship the lord. Five times did spring come; five whole years in which Perceval never entered a church, nor worshipped God and his cross. But he did not forsake the quest of Chivalry, and went far and wide in search of adventures and survived many difficult tests. So did he spend five years forgetful of God. Perceval meets a group of penitents in hoods and cloaks (Chrétien says they are wearing hair shirts) who tell him that he should not be bearing arms since it is Good Friday, ‘the day to worship the Cross and atone for all our sins’. They direct him to the hermit who lives in the forest. Perceval speaks again: ‘hearing this, Perceval wept and left to go to speak to the hermit. On his way there, he sighed repeatedly. He had done wrong towards God and regretted it. He wept in the woods. When he reached the hermitage . . .’. Then the film cuts to Perceval kneeling in front of an old man in a hood, who hears his confession and tells Perceval of his dead mother, whom the hermit saw buried. Perceval learns that he is related to the old Grail king. The hermit, who is Perceval’s uncle, his mother’s brother, tells him that the man served from the Grail was the brother of Perceval’s mother and the hermit. The old Grail king is the Fisher King’s father and the Fisher King is Perceval’s cousin. Perceval’s hermit uncle describes how his brother, the old king, has been sustained for twelve years by a single host taken daily from the Holy Grail. Here, Rohmer inserts a short scene in which we see an old man in bed taking a biscuit from the illuminated Grail. The hermit then suggests that Perceval must ‘let repentance flood his heart and go in penitence to one place: the Church of God, our Saviour’ (Rohmer transposes all this from the book). Thus begins the penultimate scene – an enactment of a Good Friday Passion play, which shows the Crucifixion and the events leading up to it, including the flagellation of Christ and the soldier pressing his lance into Jesus’s side.35 The original states: ‘So he remained and heard the service and his heart filled with joy; after the service he worshipped the Cross and wept for his sins’ (Chrétien 2004: 460) and ‘Thus Perceval acknowledged that God was crucified and died on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday Perceval very worthily received communion. The tale no longer speaks of Perceval at this point; you will have heard a great deal about my lord Gawain before I speak of Perceval again’ (Chrétien 2004: 460–1). For his Passion Play scene, Rohmer uses parts of Latin liturgical texts which do not exist in Chrétien’s original. The Good Friday liturgy is spoken and sung as the Stations of the Cross are acted out.

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Interpreting Rohmer’s new ending is difficult. The film begins with Perceval, in Rohmerian terms, as another blindfold hero, ignorant and self-absorbed. His mother recommends chivalrous attitudes and behaviour (honour women, respect God, pray in church); he misinterprets these instructions. On his journey, Perceval learns about honour, from Gornemant of Gohort, and love, from Blanchefleur. According to Friedrich Heer, Chrétien’s romances were ‘educational in intention, aimed at the creation and moulding of a new type of man’ (1962: 180). Chrétien’s romance tells the story of a naïve young hero on a quest who is introduced to chivalric codes of honour and religious observance. Rohmer shared Chrétien’s educational impulses: I had one aim, the desire to pay homage to one part of an oeuvre which I found was not well known. . . . Chrétien de Troyes is really unknown. Perceval was a chance to make him better known. In the end, the film only touched a few people, but I don’t regret it at all. Anyway, they were sufficiently numerous so that it wasn’t pointless. (Delavaud and Montaville 1981: 89)36 Of the film’s end, he says: The Grail is not a magic object, but a bowl in which one serves the host. It is the celebration of the mystery of the Eucharist, which takes place on Good Friday. It really seems that the text is centred on the Christian idea, Christ-like, that God is Christ. (Magny and Rabourdin 1979: 18)37 Nevertheless, despite the Passion Play ending and although Rohmer’s pedagogical aims echoed those of Chrétien’s romance, the film retains an ambiguity about the Grail and the quest. Others continued Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval. These continuations develop the Grail story, including assigning to it the legend of the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea receives the blood of Christ on the cross. Further thirteenth-century versions increase the roles of Merlin and Galahad. The story was also adapted into German as Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach (Wagner’s inspiration), into Welsh as Peredur of the Mabinogion, and into English as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1470). Since then, the Grail has symbolized many things, often representing loss – of innocence, of a primordial or paradisiacal state, of a pre-symbolic and pre-linguistic period in childhood and of an infantile attachment to the mother. In addition, the Grail quest has symbolized many things and Perceval is an early questing hero. A huge amount of literature focuses on the Grail. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, the Grail has been explained in three principal ways: as a Christian legend, which changed its details through history; as a pagan fertility ritual; and as a Celtic story, already mythological before being

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transmitted through Welsh and Breton into the French romance tradition where it was eventually Christianized (Drabble 1994: 409).38 Only after Chrétien did the Grail become linked to Christian ritual. Chrétien’s Story of the Grail is a prototypical story about a young man who undertakes a quest and through that quest discovers his place in society, yet Chrétien refuses to explain the significance of the story’s most mysterious details. Beatie points out that Eschenbach’s Parzifal gives the story ‘a tight structure and a focussed meaning lacking in Chrétien’s text’ (Beatie 1992: 257). There are two dimensions to this. First, Chrétien’s text is incomplete, hence the continuations. Second, the text’s meaning is often enigmatic. Rohmer’s ending for Perceval le Gallois appears to Christianize Chrétien’s text, but, in fact, the film preserves the ambiguity and openness to interpretation that are features of Chrétien’s Perceval. Several interpreters agree that Rohmer’s addition to the conclusion is judicious. Zumthor (1980: 122), for example, argues that Rohmer’s ending plausibly extends Chrétien’s unfinished text; though anachronistic to the twelfth-century text and its first audiences’ expectations, the Passion Play ending evokes late medieval performances, in churches and squares in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Beatie writes: The notion of Perceval the wise fool as a type of Christ has been a commonplace of literary criticism for generations, but no critic or adapter has been as explicit as Rohmer in making this identification. However, just as Rohmer’s operatic stylisation has distanced the audience from the fictional events and offered multiple levels of commentary on them, so this liturgical ‘conclusion’ is also left in a state of ambiguity. (Beatie 1992: 259) Rohmer, like Chrétien’s continuators, may be Christianising Perceval’s experiences, but the film’s ending preserves the mystery in Chrétien’s text.39 The film ends with Perceval riding through the forest again: he passes off-screen, but the sound of his horse’s hooves continues, as does the bird song, conjuring up visions of open fields in the sunshine. A woman sings: ‘Le Chevalier sans nul arrêt/va chevauchant par la foret’ (‘The knight rode on through the forest’). Then the end credits begin. As Beatie notes, the final lines of the film reprise the same or similar lines heard on four earlier occasions: when Perceval takes the Red Knight’s armour; when he leaves Gornemant; when he leaves Blanchefleur; and when he leaves the Ugly Damsel. For Beatie, at the end of the film, ‘the words have become Perceval’s leitmotiv’ (1992: 262). The conclusion emphasizes cyclical movement; Perceval rides endlessly through the forest, an errant knight whose wanderings never cease. For Beatie (1992: 262), as for Callahan (1999: 50), the film ends by stressing the inconclusiveness of Chrétien’s text and the endless unsolvable mystery of the Grail quest.40

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Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois has a haunting and mysterious quality, and several specialists in medieval literature have praised its abridgement and translation (from Old French) of Chrétien’s octosyllabic couplets, its references to medieval art in the design and performances, its mixing of indirect and direct speech, its use of music and Rohmer’s changes to the story (increasing the focus on Perceval, excluding most of Gawain’s story and adding the Passion Play ending).41 In its emphasis on Chrétien’s text as a work meant to be performed, Perceval le Gallois corresponds with recent scholarship, which increasingly values the performativity of medieval literature.42 Zumthor praises Rohmer’s film: ‘the interpretation of Perceval that Rohmer offers us is exemplary (I mean an exemplary success) in that it is based on a multiple translation’ (1980: 120): The exemplarity of Perceval le Gallois is based on the coherent thought which underlies it. Persistent and secret, Rohmer, we know, thought about this film for a long time, from the period of his Six contes moraux, it is said. For me, I had perceived in Le Genou de Claire some delicate and moving equivalent of Roman de la Rose: a medieval impression, negligible apart from the analogies one was aware of, formed at the deepest levels and without being consciously planned. (Zumthor 1980: 121) Zumthor admires Rohmer’s refusal to update the story or to disguise the gap of 800 years between text and film: ‘to keep open, without hiding it, the space which separates us, while allowing comprehension, is on the contrary to confer on the ancient object the only possible and the only desirable credibility: that which does not lie’ (Zumthor 1980: 124). Rohmer’s film creates its own unity, though parts of it remain opaque. As Grimbert concludes, ‘“reading” Rohmer is, like reading Chrétien, an intellectual enterprise’ (2000: 41). One ambiguity that cannot be resolved is whether Perceval or Luchini plays the part of Christ. The Passion Play ending also emphasizes the cinematic miracle of the suspension of disbelief, whereby we allow ourselves to be lured into accepting that actor and character are the same. It takes a moment to realize that Blanchefleur/Dombasle plays Mary Magdalene, Perceval’s mother/Pascale de Boysson is the Virgin Mary and beneath the beard and dressed as Christ is Perceval/Luchini. Yet nothing confirms how we should read this ambiguity, and the inclusion of doubt in a scene about belief relates to what David Williams describe as the ‘tension of the relation between the actors and the very odd set . . . the characters, despite their sometimes curious or comic behaviour, present very real personalities’ (Williams 1990: 25).43 This is an astute comment about Luchini as Perceval, Dussollier as Gawain and Dombasle as Blanchefleur; the actors merge with their characters. The scrawny young physique of Luchini, his wide-eyed gawping combined with a sophisticated verbal delivery, the poise and

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precision of Dombasle’s posing, the patrician air of Dussollier’s Gawain, Arthur’s greatest knight – Rohmer discovers these performers’ qualities on Perceval le Gallois. In addition, the same troupe of actors and musicians re-appear in many scenes. To have actors playing many parts is a common practice in theatre of the Middle Ages and afterwards. However, on film the re-using of actors in different parts is a noteworthy decision. Through this decision, Rohmer reflects the difference between theatre and film, and, therefore, considers his art of film, something that he continues in Le Rayon vert (1986) and Conte d’hiver (1992).44 In organising the troupe of actors and actresses for Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer put together a group of collaborators who would go on to be important in his later films. The performers who play small roles in Perceval le Gallois make their presence felt; the voices and gestures of Marie Rivière, Pascale Ogier and Anne-Laure Meury are a distinctive part of Perceval le Gallois. After finishing Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer said: ‘After this, we will see. I don’t have any precise project, but I would like to return to the contemporary world’ (Magny and Rabourdin 1979: 14). The collaboration between the 58-year-old Rohmer and the troupe of young actors revived his interest in contemporary life.45 The 10 films that comprise the Comédies et proverbes and the Contes des quatre saisons owe a huge amount to the talented young actors that Rohmer organized while making Perceval le Gallois: ‘I got to know them and they formed almost a little school, although I wouldn’t say that I taught them how to act, because I don’t consider myself a drama teacher’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 22). Several performers whom he first met while making Perceval le Gallois go on to star in his later films: Rivière, Meury, Dombasle, Ogier, Dussollier, Clémentine Amouroux. Rohmer knew Fabrice Luchini from Le Genou de Claire, but his full potential is first seen on Perceval le Gallois.46 Mary Stephen, Rohmer’s editor and co-composer after Conte d’hiver, was a student of his in 1977, before he gave her a job as an assistant during the rehearsals for Perceval le Gallois (Fauvel 2007: 237). She too makes a brief appearance in La Femme de l’aviateur, Rohmer’s next film. Absent from Perceval le Gallois are Béatrice Romand, who had worked with Rohmer on Le Genou de Claire when she was 18, Emmanuelle Chaulet, whom Rohmer recruited from the theatre, Amanda Langlet, whom he discovered as a 15-year old catalogue model, and Sophie Renoir. However, before Rohmer returned to the contemporary world, he directed a play (the first of his two attempts), Kleist’s Catherine de Heilbronn.47 Gérard Falconetti performed in it along with Pascale Ogier, Arielle Dombasle, Daniel Tarrare, Marie Rivière, Françoise Queré (Rosette) and Pascal Greggory. In addition, while directing Catherine de Heilbronn, he met a young journalist called Marie Binet-Bouteloup when she came to interview him. Later, Rohmer asked if he could talk to her about her life and he used some of these conversations as a resource for his creation of characters and stories in the Comédies et proverbes (Binet-Bouteloup 1982: 35).

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4 Comédies et proverbes – Part 1 Art gives an image of its time that is truer than an objective reproduction. For example, I know the past through novels, and I have more confidence in Balzac than any history book. . . . The myths of a society come out, and a society reveals itself more through its myths than through a summary of events. (Tesich-Savage 1978: 56) After the commercial failure of Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer returned to making films cheaply.1 Galvanized by the young people he met on Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer made films that responded to them and the society in which they lived. The Comédies et proverbes continue the thematic focus of the Six contes moraux – relationships, marriage, separation, divorce – but they are more oriented towards women, who in the 1980s were living with gains that had been made in equal rights and opportunities, particularly with divorce, birth control, the right to abortion and employment.2 More egalitarian than the Six contes moraux, the Comédies et proverbes are populated with independent young women, less bourgeois than the men of the earlier series: office workers, secretaries, hairdressers, shop assistants, fashion designer, students, all of whom are working out how to live equally with men. The six Comédies et proverbes take into account the progressive changes in attitudes and legislation towards women’s rights and opportunities which took place between the 1960s and 1980s. None of the heroines in the Comédies et proverbes are married. They work or study and either live on their own or cohabit with a man: in La Femme de l’aviateur, Anne lives alone; in Le Beau mariage, Sabine lives alone when in Paris; in Pauline à la plage, Marion is getting divorced; in Les Nuits de la pleine lune, Louise cohabits with Remi for half the time and alone for the rest; in Le Rayon

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vert, Delphine lives alone; in L’Ami de mon amie, Blanche lives alone. In all six films, the heroines try to discover what kind of relationships they want. By telling stories about women sorting out their private lives, Rohmer’s films of the 1980s respond to what has come to be known as post-feminism.3 One can compare Rohmer’s focus on personal relationships in the Comédies et proverbes with the focus that Stanley Cavell (1981) finds in the comedies of remarriage produced in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Cavell argues that the comedies of remarriage consider women’s roles in the period following the feminist campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which culminated in the winning of the vote for women in America in 1920. The comedies of remarriage, Cavell writes, reflect upon the idea that ‘the validity or bond of marriage is assured, even legitimised, not by church or state or sexual compatibility (these bonds, it is implied, are no deeper than those of marriage), but, by something I call the willingness for remarriage, a way of continuing to affirm the happiness of one’s initial leap’ (Cavell 1981: 20). In the early 1980s, the Comédies et proverbes, like the comedies of remarriage, investigate marriage and heterosexual relationships in a world where desire is now separate from conception. As a consequence, Rohmer’s preparatory work with his actresses was of central importance; he developed themes and ideas in response to his extended conversations with them, which he tape-recorded. In The World Viewed (1979: 35), Stanley Cavell discusses the capacity of the medium of film to create individualities, stars who provide examples of individual ways of inhabiting social roles. Raymond Carney (1986: 235–6) makes an argument similar to Cavell’s about It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), suggesting that it opposes fixed and free characters. Using Carney’s terms, Rohmer’s actresses in the 1980s, like Capra’s stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, are non-technical and non-character actors, in that their personalities as stars appear to merge with their characters, in films where they try to escape from fixed roles and which explore the faultline between imagination, individuality and the social role.

La Femme de l’aviateur (1981) Rohmer first conceived the subject for La Femme de l’aviateur in 1946, writing it as a 15-page short story (Ziolkowski 1982: 64). In adapting the story to the 1980s, he adjusted its representation of young people’s attitudes to marriage: Sometimes, it is simply the work of the actors which adapts them to this era. As far as La Femme de l‘aviateur is concerned, I adapted it to the

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actress’s way of speaking; it was the language which changed. On the other hand, the attitude of the character of Anne towards marriage had to take the era into account. Saying ‘I don’t want to get married’ would have felt different in 1946. It was something which could have been said, but which was much rarer, more unusual, which it doesn’t seem to be nowadays. (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 20) The lead actresses in La Femme de l’aviateur are Marie Rivière and Anne-Laure Meury, both from Perceval le Gallois. Rohmer’s conversations with them influenced the dialogue and themes of La Femme de l’aviateur, though he insisted that the script ‘is a text written from beginning to end, not at all improvised’ (Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 221).4 Rivière’s performance of Anne is a courageous interpretation of a difficult role; Rivière never makes her likeable; Bonitzer (1981: 6) suggests it would be hard to make Anne more disagreeable. She is attractive to men, who often approach her, but Rivière depicts Anne as capricious and rude. The devotion of François (Philippe Marlaud) irritates her, including the help he gives her in finding a plumber, which he may be doing just to please her. The film shows her impatience during lunch with a friend (Lisa Heredia). Only when she cries with François does the film offer any explanation for her ill temper. Her conversation with François prompts sympathy for her struggle to refuse marriage, maintain independence, yet have a relationship. Anne’s discussion with François is one of the film’s several references to marriage, relationships, adultery and divorce. Anne’s affair with a married man has ended, and Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury) tells François, as they speculate that Christian (Mathieu Carrière) and the blonde woman (Haydée Caillot) are husband and wife going to a solicitor’s office to arrange an ‘amicable’ divorce, that ‘My parents did it; it’s fashionable’. Her comment refers to the divorce law passed in 1975, which for the first time in France allowed ‘amicable’ divorces. When Anne lunches with her friend, they discuss Christian and marriage. Her friend counsels her that if she loves someone she should get married; ‘that’s what most people do’. But Anne refuses: ‘Loving doesn’t mean living together’. Her friend replies, ‘You’re living in a dream world. How can you keep a man if he isn’t with you?’ The friend is marrying because she does not want the kind of disillusionment that comes from having an affair with a married man. When François later suggests that Anne live with him, she refuses, saying that she tried it for three years and is not doing it again. Instead, Anne lives on her own in an attic room with a broken pipe. In the Comédies et proverbes, Rohmer continues to use the ironic mode that he developed on the Six contes moraux. Ironic humour comes from the divergence between the parts of the films that establish the viewpoint of the protagonists as central to the story and the parts of the films that reveal the limitations of the protagonist’s perceptions. By drawing attention to rhymes

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and parallels, connections and coincidences, of which the characters remain unaware, the films detach themselves from the characters’ viewpoints. Rohmer’s use of hidden connections recalls Hitchcock’s or Lang’s manipulation of information; the connections can imply a determining social, ideological or economic system, evoking the ways in which we can be blind to things that shape us, but they also remind us of the filmmaker’s manipulation of the story.5 La Femme de l’aviateur presents François’s point of view, showing how his imaginings about one woman lead him to ignore the truth about another. Some scenes exclude François, but most include him. The scenes that exclude him are Anne talking with Christian in her room, Anne at work hanging up the phone on François, Anne having lunch with her friend, Anne phoning Serge to cancel their date and Anne bumping into Mercillat (Fabrice Luchini) at the bus stop on the way home, where she meets François. Apart from those scenes, the film follows François as he follows Christian and the mysterious blonde woman. In outline, La Femme de l’aviateur tells a story about a tired young man who needs some sleep before returning to work that evening. Instead of sleeping, though, he walks around Paris. La Femme de l’aviateur’s mystery begins when he imagines the separation of ex-lovers to be a re-kindling of an affair. The mystery ends when François sees Lucie, the girl he meets in Buttes-Chaumont Park, embracing his colleague. The film uses his tiredness to highlight the correlation between dreaming and awakening. As Bonitzer argues, ‘the unconscious is in effect the subject of the film, in the guise of chance, and it is why the central character, a night worker, doesn’t stop falling asleep’ (1981: 6). François falls asleep three times and, as Bonitzer observes, he is a further embodiment of Rohmer’s notion, described by Aurora in Le Genou de Claire, that all heroes resemble Don Quixote: ‘If François sleeps, and dreams, it is because he has his eyes blindfolded, like everyone’ (1981: 6).6 Through the device of François nodding off, the film links François’s imagination to the things he does not witness. The first sequence without François – Christian’s meeting with Anne – begins with Christian’s explanation that his pregnant wife is moving to Paris. Rohmer cuts to a newsagents, where François buys pen and postcard; in a café, he sits thinking about what to write. He starts to go to sleep, his eyes closing, his chin nodding onto his chest. Leaving him asleep, the film returns to Anne and Christian. The edit joins the shot of his eyes closed to a shot of Anne re-entering her bedroom. Christian asks her for a goodbye kiss. She mentions that she had a nice time on holiday, where she met and went out with a handsome man who loves her. They almost embrace, but she ends it. Christian sits down to have coffee with her. Rohmer cuts back to François, asleep in the café. By enclosing the sequence of Anne and Christian within shots of François asleep in the café, Rohmer implies that François could have dreamt this scene. The editing links the characters to the sleeping François,

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maybe dreaming of Anne. Yet when he sees the couple leave Anne’s apartment, François imagines wrongly that they are together rather than separating. His detective work with Lucie originates in this misperception. When François confesses to Lucie, she says that he is ‘telling stories’. He replies, ‘No, that’s how it is. I can hardly believe it myself. You’re beginning to make me wonder whether I’m awake or dreaming’. She says: ‘You’re dreaming’. He agrees: ‘Could be’. ‘No, I mean you’re dreaming up a film about a total stranger’. Lucie’s assessment echoes Anne’s friend’s comment to Anne about her living in a dream. Both comments connect to the scenes of François falling asleep.7

La Femme de l’aviateur: Gare de l’Est – François falls asleep with iris

The second time François falls asleep occurs when, by coincidence, he sees Christian at the café in the Gare de l’Est. As he watches him, he nods off. An iris closes on the sleeping François. The sound fades out, then returns when the iris opens. Christian has gone, but the blonde woman is there, looking over some papers. The iris represents a drift into a fantastical world, one that looks like ours but which has different rules, one where coincidences happen a lot. Evoking an earlier era of cinema, the iris also figures as a fitting emblem for François nodding off and imagining things about Anne while not noticing things about Lucie. Rohmer aimed for this: There is a dreamlike quality in all my stories. All of them could have been dreamt by the character, at one given moment during the action. Here, for example, there are several shots where the young man falls asleep. He could really have dreamt that his girlfriend is with another man; he could really have dreamt that he followed the aviator in the street. . . . There’s a moment of absence. All the characters have a moment of absence in which the story could be re-read in another way. I always make films so

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that they take all their interest when one re-thinks about them, not only for the immediate impression. (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 37–8)8 François falling asleep resembles Hannay (Robert Donat) asleep on the train in The 39 Steps (1935) and Jefferies (James Stewart) asleep at the beginning of Rear Window (1954). Charles Barr discusses both films, noting of the latter that Hitchcock links Jefferies’s mind to his neighbours (2002: 35–7). Jefferies combines the parts of a director and a viewer; the way he sees people is shaped by his perception, yet they exist beyond his control. Rohmer, like Hitchcock, invokes this paradox of cinema with the sleeping François; the way he perceives Anne and Christian depends on his imagination, yet they remain beyond his control. In his discussion of The 39 Steps, Barr quotes Hitchcock: ‘I wanted to embody the dream in the reality, in solid, unblurred images’ (1999: 153), a description that applies to La Femme de l’aviateur. Barr then writes: In The 39 Steps, Hannay, until close to the end, participates in or witnesses virtually each scene; the brief exceptions occur only when he is shown, at the time or retrospectively, to be asleep or otherwise unconscious, creating the sense that – as with the discovery of the body – they are part of his mental scenario, while also, quite plausibly corresponding to the film’s objective reality. (1999: 153) Both Hitchcock’s and Rohmer’s films play with exposing cinema’s ability to switch between the world and the imagination, to infuse one with the other.9 The third time François falls asleep, in the café with Lucie, she wakes him and he explains that he works nights at the post office at the Gare de l’Est; she replies ‘that’s funny’. ‘Do you know it?’ he asks. ‘Yes, I know it. In fact . . .’ she falters. ‘In fact, what?’ he asks. The film shows her in profile, giving us full opportunity to notice her changing her story. The conclusion confirms that her boyfriend works with François. She may not tell François this because she likes him. Yet because of his anxious obsession with Anne, François almost ignores the spark of mutual attraction between Lucie and him, begun as an exchange of looks on the bus. When they talk in the park, after François almost bumps into her, Lucie reveals a playful willingness to participate in his conspiracy, amused by François’s tale, if sceptical. As they explain their lives to each other, it becomes apparent that they get on well, something François acknowledges: ‘It’s strange. I hardly know you and yet I can talk to you. I’ve never talked about my troubles before. I don’t know what’s got into me’. While their conversations reveal their appreciation of each other, the film counterpoints Lucie’s vivaciousness with Anne’s moping. That counterpoint is one example of a comparison unnoticed by François. The scenes of François falling asleep bind the story to his imagination; the connections and patterns unnoticed by him divert attention away from his

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viewpoint. Rohmer mentions one such pattern in the comparison of the wallpaper of leaves and flowers in Anne’s apartment and trees in the park (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 34). Anne’s room was the home of the assistant director, Hervé Grandsart, who told Rohmer that he could paint over the wallpaper. Rohmer kept it: I must say that the wallpaper inspired me . . . with regards to the colours of the film, there is a rapport between Buttes-Chaumont, which has the same colours, with this sombre, closed and cloistered quality. That interested me, and my work as a decorator (I didn’t have a decorator for this film; I only have one when I work in the studio) was to furnish this room as the room of a young woman, so that it matched the character. There, I was helped by the actress herself, who gave me some ideas. (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 34) Another pattern can be found in the film’s dominant colours. On the colours of La Femme de l’aviateur, Rohmer comments: I am extremely content with the unity of the colour and with the unity of the photographic and pictorial quality because what shocks me in most films made in colour is exactly this badly matched quality: with each shot, we are in a world coloured completely differently. Now, here, I obtained, I believe, a unity not only amongst the exteriors but between the exteriors and the interiors. There is a dominant in the film, a dominant blue. It is a film which is blue and green, and then yellow. Yellow is in the pen, which François buys; it is also the lining of Lucie’s raincoat. And on the poster I wanted the letters to be yellow. So, it is a film which is thought through its colours. For the costumes, we did it very knowingly, because the actors don’t normally dress like that. (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 33). Rohmer asked Meury and Marlaud to wear more contemporary, younger clothes than they normally wore (Carcassonne and Fieschi 1981: 30). And, as Rohmer remarks, the yellow of Lucie’s coat and the yellow of François’s pen link them. The film also compares Christian with François, and Lucie with Anne, both of whom ask François ‘What are you thinking about?’, using the same phrase: ‘A quoi penses-tu?’ Anne asks because she suspects that François is brooding. He replies: ‘Don’t you ever think of nothing?’, then lies, saying that he ‘picked up’ a girl in the park, not that he was following Christian. ‘I was just trying to be honest,’ he claims, though he does not tell her everything. However, the question also refers to the difficulty of knowing what someone else is thinking about (it is repeated in Pauline à la plage, Conte de printemps, Les Rendez-vous de Paris and Conte d’été).

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The photographs perform a similar function. François has a photograph of Anne above his bed and another one in his bag, which he shows to Lucie. Anne has a photograph of her and Christian above her bed, which she removes before lying down. The tourist takes a Polaroid of Lucie, which she offers to François, but decides to keep (reserving it for someone else, one suspects). Anne shows François a photograph, claiming that the blonde woman is not Christian’s wife, but might be his sister. However, as François points out, she has no proof other than Christian’s word about who either of the two women are. Photographs prove nothing on their own, Rohmer implies, just increase doubts about the truth of images. As Gérard Legrand (1981: 72) notes, Rohmer again seems to allude to Hitchcock, comparing François’s imaginings with those of the photographer Jefferies in Rear Window. One structuring repetition connects François’s job at the post office with the notes written for Anne and Lucie and the postcard. There are several occasions when notes are written (or not) and sent (or not), but the repetitions only become a pattern in retrospect or on repeat viewings. First, François’s colleague gives him a piece of paper on which to leave a note for Anne. At the same time, he arranges to meet François at the Gare de l’Est buffet, near the Avenue Verdun exit, at 1.45 p.m. When François arrives at Anne’s apartment he starts to write a note for her, but his pen does not work, so he leaves. As he heads into the background of a long shot, a taxi pulls up in the foreground and Christian gets out. The camera panned left with François as he left Anne’s apartment; now it reverses its direction with Christian. The film then repeats the identical framings of the shots that followed François’s approach to Anne’s door, until, that is, Christian writes his note – his pen works.10 These similarities and differences between François’s and Christian’s approaches are apparent on a first viewing. Meanwhile, François buys the postcard for Anne when he buys the pen, but he never writes his note because he falls asleep. That afternoon in the café, when Lucie asks François for something on which to write her address, he gives her the postcard. That evening, he writes his note for Lucie on the postcard, but ends up posting it instead of hand-delivering it because he discovers her kissing his colleague, the same person who gave him paper on which to leave a note for Anne. Until this point, the film hides François’s colleague’s relationship with Lucie. Off-screen, unknown by François, his colleague interacts with Lucie; in all probability, he asks François to meet him near the Verdun exit because Lucie lives on Avenue Verdun. When he and François meet there, he has no doubt just left Lucie, for as François follows Christian onto the bus Lucie gets on before them. The coincidence of François seeing Christian in the station café hides, therefore, another coincidence, that the young woman he sees on the bus is his colleague’s girlfriend.11 Rohmer’s creative work often commenced with decisions about locations. In the case of La Femme de l’aviateur, the setting is the tenth and nineteenth

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arrondissements of Paris. After the opening alternation between François and Anne, most of the film takes place in Anne’s apartment and ButtesChaumont park.12 For a long time, Rohmer thought of filming La Femme de l’aviateur in the Bois du Boulogne: ‘If I ended up choosing ButtesChaumont, essentially it’s because of the different heights, to stage the film somewhere up high. We don’t really have steep places in Paris; I played with the mountainous side of the place, which one doesn’t find in the Bois du Boulogne, which is flat, without hills’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 6). However, with its man-made cliffs and artificial streams, developed by Haussmann and opened in 1867 on the site of a former quarry, ButtesChaumont park suits Rohmer’s desire to show young people in old Paris and to combine contrivance with verisimilitude: I wanted to show how in this nineteenth-century city a modern way of life had installed itself: the appropriation of an old setting by young people who feel as comfortable in it as if it were something of their generation. (Ziolkowski 1982: 66) Dealing with the constraints of low-budget location filming – the sightseers, the changing settings, the weather – was part of Rohmer’s efforts to document young people in old Paris. Several shots of passers-by are interspersed amongst the shots of Lucie and François in the park.13 Similarly, the shots of postal workers during the credit sequence, which has no dialogue or music, could be from a documentary. The rain too became part of his documentation of Parisian streets: In La Femme de l’aviateur, the rain was not predicted. We found that it started to rain and we spent a moment thinking about what we were going to do, if we were going to start again the next day. And then I said to myself: why not try to film in the rain? And that, really, was risky because I hadn’t rehearsed the scenes in a precise way . . . I found this extraordinary because in a fiction film, there was some absolute cinéma-vérité, some fictional-reportage if you like. (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 32) Nevertheless, as we have seen, the film combines this form of ‘fictionalreportage’ with strong patterns. The film’s theme song, ‘Paris m’a séduit’, is foremost among the patterns arranged to apprise us of connections hidden from François. Rohmer wrote the words and music for ‘Paris m’a séduit’: Paris has charmed me Paris has disarmed me Turning all my hopes to alarms I live alone under my garret roof

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From friends and strangers I remain aloof Yet still I feel proud of my solitude As on the hardships of life I brood Life in the city so vast and wide Constantly buffeted by wind and tide It’s a struggle for survival renewed each day With cruel destiny refusing to point the way Now the dark and malevolent night Drives all ease from anguished sight And muffled roars still prowl the night For the heart of Paris never ceases to beat.14 To integrate the song into the film, Rohmer again adopts a technique from Rear Window, in which the song ‘Lisa’ is heard at various stages of its composition during the film, before being played in full at the conclusion. Rohmer achieves the same effect in La Femme de l’aviateur: the music comes from within the fictional world, until the end, when the full version is played on the soundtrack. The musical connection made on-screen reminds us of the off-screen world.15 François whistles a small part of the song in the toilets at work, at the start. He next whistles a longer part of it in his bedroom. The third repetition comes when François whistles the tune in the café with Lucie; she continues it, singing some words she makes up to describe François’s predicament. The fourth and fifth uses of the music occur during the final sequence. That sequence begins in the Café Verdun, where François writes his postcard to Lucie. A close-up of the postcard shows the text: ‘Lucie, They did go to the lawyer’s but the woman was his sister, We never thought of that. See you sometime. François’. In long shot, the film shows François going to hand-deliver the postcard, approaching her house, then seeing Lucie kissing his colleague. The evening darkness, the grainy film stock and the blue light from the streetlamp add romance to the view. François hesitates by a van; the film cuts to a medium shot of the couple kissing. In another echo of Rear Window, this shot is framed to encompass the van windscreen: the frame-within-a-frame motif emphasizes François’s spying point of view and the movie-like qualities of his vision. Following a shot of François watching in close-up and a medium shot of the couple, Rohmer returns to François hiding behind the van, as his colleague walks past whistling the theme song. François stands by the van, looking disappointed. The colleague continues to whistle ‘Paris m’a séduit’ as François follows him down the street, both men returning to work. Before the long shot of them walking away ends, the colleague’s whistling segues into Arielle Dombasle’s singing on the soundtrack. Then, while the song continues, the film cuts to François inside the Gare de l’Est. About to throw his postcard away, he instead buys a stamp and drops it into a yellow post box. François may feel jealous when he finds Lucie with his colleague; he

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is again an accidental spy, as he was with Christian and Anne. When he walks behind his colleague, the image may suggest that François is now following his colleague as he earlier followed Christian. But he and his colleague are both going back to work and the film ends by returning to the place where it began, 12 hours earlier. The repetition reminds us of the routine, but, despite that routine, the conclusion emphasizes hopefulness not despair. François and Anne have resolved their disagreements, though a continued relationship seems unlikely. His postcard to Lucie acknowledges a shared adventure, and his friendly ending of ‘See you sometime’ permits a possible future meeting. He writes the postcard before he sees Lucie with his colleague, but his posting of it suggests an acceptance of the circumstances. Disappointment not bitterness characterizes the conclusion’s mood, a slight melancholy underscored by the song. François goes to work, despite his disappointment, taking his place in the crowd at the Gare de l’Est as he does so. The film could have ended with an image of solitude, a lonely François walking away from the camera as he follows his colleague, accompanied by the theme song. However, Rohmer freeze-frames the shot of the crowd as the final image; he shows François absorbed into a mass of people, each person leading their own life, having their own adventures. François may be back where he started, but he has learnt something from his experiences. In conclusion, La Femme de l’aviateur revels in the seductive imaginings prompted by views of Parisian streets, but Rohmer balances these with displays of the film’s artifice and contrivances. ‘Paris m’a séduit’ is emblematic of Rohmer’s vision for La Femme de l’aviateur. His work began with decisions about where to film, in which Parisian parks and streets, avenues and boulevards, cafés and stations. The importance of space continues into the film’s ending; whatever disappointments François has experienced, Paris has seduced him. Rohmer’s film celebrates Paris as a fascinating space, not a threatening one. It shows young people experiencing things as if they were in a movie or a novel, but it presents the city’s fascinations as an ordinary part of life, not as imprisoning nightmares of anonymity and alienation. François imagines things while moving through the city, but with nothing sinister in the city’s seduction of his imagination. The city is not somewhere to terrify or trap, but a place of sometimes delightful and sometimes melancholy experiences. The ending affirms that life carries on; old Paris has seduced Rohmer, seduced François, Anne and Lucie, and seduced us, the film’s viewers.

Le Beau mariage (1982) In La Femme de l’aviateur, a woman whose affair with a married man has ended says ‘I don’t want to get married’; in the second of Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes, Le Beau mariage, a woman who ends her affair

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with a married man tells everyone ‘I am going to get married’, but the film shows that she is imagining this and that Edmond is neither suitable for nor interested in her. As its title indicates, Le Beau mariage poses as a question how one makes a good marriage; as Rohmer stated at the time of its release: ‘people still marry nowadays but it’s not like it used to be. This is what the film is all about’.16 To the theme of marriage, Rohmer added class. The film shows Sabine (Béatrice Romand) negotiating a difficult path amongst characters who occupy comparative social positions: her lover Simon (Féodor Atkine), her friend Clarisse (Arielle Dombasle), her employer (Huguette Faget), Madame Saint-Biez (Denise Bailly), her mother (Thamila Mezbah), her ex-boyfriend Claude (Vincent Gauthier) and Edmond (André Dussollier), the solicitor whom she pursues. Long before he filmed Le Beau mariage, Rohmer discussed with Béatrice Romand her tastes and reactions to subjects related to the project, recording and keeping these conversations, then using them as the basis for his script. Romand’s input was vital to the story of a woman’s choices and the film is a vehicle for her. She had been 18 when she made Le Genou de Claire; she was 30 when she made Le Beau mariage.17 Her character, Sabine, is a postgraduate student at the University of Paris, doing an MA in the history of art – the film shows her entering the University’s art and archaeology library on Rue Michelet, a short walk from the Gare Montparnasse, where the Le Mans train terminates. Sabine is restless, though, and cannot settle; as she tells Edmond at her party: ‘I don’t feel at home anywhere. Not here and not in Paris’. Sabine’s declaration ‘I’m going to get married’ begins as a response to the telephone call from her lover’s wife; her stubborn assertion announces the beginning of her confused attempt to sort out her personal life. Alain Hertay (1998: 38) notes that Sabine’s declaration, ‘Je vais me marier’, spoken first to Simon, then to her friend, her employer, her ex-boyfriend and her mother, comes from her frustration with her life. It derives from a desire to defy Simon, to thumb her nose at him, and, as Serge Daney (1982: 56) points out, it is mimetic in that it copies him. Yet Sabine’s response to Simon also rebels against her social position. Arielle Dombasle, Blanchefleur in Perceval le Gallois, plays Sabine’s best friend Clarisse. Dombasle is taller than Béatrice Romand; and while Romand has dark brown, almost black hair, Dombasle has blonde hair. In the film, Romand moves rapidly and spontaneously; Dombasle moves her long limbs with a slow grace that looks measured, punctuating her dialogue with controlled, self-conscious gestures. Dombasle is the same height as Marie Rivière from La Femme de l’aviateur, but whereas Rivière’s movements are often awkwardly angled, with knees and elbows protruding, Dombasle’s movements are graceful; she holds herself erect, as if she has spent years doing ballet. Her character Clarisse is married, wealthy and professionally satisfied; everything about her expresses a classbased confidence, her clothes, movements and demeanour implying a life

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untroubled by material constraints. Yet, for all her elegance, Clarisse does not invite sympathy; her confidence is a foil for Sabine’s uncertainty.18 Furthermore, Dombasle’s and Romand’s ethnic differences also mark their relationship; as David Heinemann observes: ‘Sabine is afraid of ending up like her mother, a middle-class woman of Arabic origin, surrounded by the “pure” French upper class’ (2007: 80). The women’s contrasting social and ethnic status complicates their friendship. Hertay suggests that Clarisse creates the ‘character Sabine’, by throwing her into the arms of Edmond and dictating her attitudes and actions (1998: 38), while Michel Serceau (2000: 111) notes that Clarisse lives vicariously, pushing Sabine to take risks that she would never take. The married woman gives herself the pleasure of an adventure by proxy with her cousin, Edmond, whom she may find attractive. Daney describes Clarisse appropriately as Sabine’s ‘evil genie’, her ‘blonde demon’ (1982: 56). For Sabine’s interactions with the opposite sex, Rohmer presents three men whose differences in class the film grades meticulously. André Dussollier, Gawain in Perceval le Gallois, plays Edmond. Dussollier and Dombasle are perfect as the scions of the aristocratic class to which Gawain and Blanchefleur belonged. Yet the film presents Dussollier’s Edmond as a stuffed shirt; he wears a suit in every scene, even at Sabine’s birthday party, at which everyone else is more casually dressed than him. As unlike Edmond as Sabine is unlike Clarisse is Sabine’s lover, the painter Simon Leghen. In contrast to Edmond’s suited appearances, the film shows actor Féodor Atkine naked or shirtless. In his late thirties, Atkine is slim and muscular, hair cropped short and with tattoos on his arm, as if he has been in the army. Atkine brings a strong masculine presence to Simon, whom he plays almost as a caricature of the virile male artist, handsome and attractive to women. The third man in Sabine’s life is Claude, played by the sympathetic Vincent Gauthier, whose gentleness differs from Simon’s machismo and Edmond’s stiff professionalism. In addition to his preparatory conversations with Romand, Rohmer received input from the film’s assistant director, Marie Binet-Bouteloup, conversations with whom prompted Rohmer’s decisions about locations. She told him about Sarthe, the region where Le Mans is, and about how she spent several days each week there, commuting between Paris and Le Mans (Binet-Bouteloup 1982: 35). The director began his research by taking the train between Paris and Le Mans several times, studying timetables, thinking about how a student would travel, how much it would cost, what kind of luggage they would carry, who they would meet, what kind of people took the train and so on. In Le Mans, Binet-Bouteloup explains, Rohmer walked the streets, studied the views and the integration of new buildings with the old town. Perched on a hill overlooking the River Sarthe, Le Mans’s old town is famous for its medieval streets, Renaissance architecture and the Roman walls that surround it – Sabine comments on these to Edmond at

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Nicholas’s (Pascal Greggory) wedding party. At the town’s centre is the large gothic cathedral of Saint-Julien, towards which Sabine drives from the station and in which she bumps into Claude. Binet-Bouteloup describes the director finding the two shops: Eric Rohmer did the journey between those two places, maybe twenty or thirty times, explaining what would be best in terms of framing and the way of life that it implied. When he is developing his film, Eric Rohmer is an architect, a geographer and a sociologist. He tries to get as close as possible to reality, to the life of an area, yesterday unknown to him, today its identity known and respected. However, Eric Rohmer was not coming to make a film on Le Mans, he was coming to set the second film of the Comédies et proverbes there. (Binet-Bouteloup 1982: 36) Binet-Bouteloup’s house served as a production office, a lunch canteen and the set for Sabine’s family home in Ballon. Despite her flat in Paris and her Parisian lover, Sabine’s post-graduate study means she still depends on her family home. She has a part-time job in Le Mans, so she sleeps in her childhood bedroom for some of the week. Ballon is about 20 kilometres north of Le Mans and, when Sabine first drives home, the view through the windscreen is of a flat countryside, grey under a cloudy sky. With her mother and sister, Sabine lives in a small house on a modest suburban street, a contrast to Le Mans’s old town, where Clarisse lives. As Aimée Israel-Pelletier writes: This criss-crossing and insistence reflect Sabine’s determination to bridge the two distinct spaces, the flat and dreary landscape that surrounds her family home, on the one hand, and, on the other, the warm and hilly homes of the old French bourgeoisie into which she aspires to marry. There is a great deal one can say about how spaces here – both visual and social – impart meaning, reflect character, articulate goals and histories. (2005: 42) When Sabine arrives home, the film shows a washing line hanging in her garden, two sheets drawn across it; such a thing would be unthinkable in Clarisse’s courtyard. Through its expressive use of locations and performances the film develops its strand of social critique; for example, the first conversation between Sabine and Clarisse is filmed to illustrate their social differences. The sequence begins with Sabine driving her dark green Renault 4 from Le Mans station to the old town. The filming of this journey conveys the sense of her approaching a wealthy area; she drives past timber-framed houses and the cathedral. As she walks along narrow cobblestone lanes, the camera frames her surrounded by old buildings. In this exclusive part of town,

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Sabine works in an antique shop, the owner of which is an elegant middleaged woman who exudes privilege and sophistication. As she leaves, Sabine remembers, ‘Madame de Saint-Biez called about her Jersey porcelain’. The owner is not interested, yet: ‘She wants too much. She’ll come down’. They exchange places: the owner leaves and Sabine remains in the shop; later Sabine will take her place in the negotiation with Madame de Saint-Biez. Sabine’s employer presents one tempting model of a different lifestyle; Clarisse presents another. Like her employer, Sabine’s friend owns her shop. Clarisse’s establishment is tasteful, with nothing jarring in the décor. The colours of Clarisse’s clothes – a pale pink t-shirt and a brown apron, worn as she paints a light brown colour onto a stretched yellow silk – fix her within this setting, one which evokes permanence and tradition. When Sabine first visits Clarisse, they disagree about Clarisse’s work, but Clarisse appears used to Sabine’s outbursts and she continues painting. Sabine often acts impulsively; her mother calls her ‘impetuous’. With Simon, frustration leads her to declare that she is getting married; with her employer, impulsiveness and maybe resentment lead her to go behind her back to help Edmond buy the porcelain. When her employer confronts her, Sabine walks out of her job. In contrast to Dombasle, Romand has a muscular physique and, in Le Beau mariage, she moves with a barely-contained energy, often undirected, which manifests itself in comments snapped back at people or in the pushing past Edmond’s client as she storms out of his office. Appropriate to this suggestion of restrained vigour is Romand’s long bushy hair, worn throughout the film tied or plaited against her head, sometimes in a compact bun; in only two scenes – with Simon and at the end with Clarisse – is her hair loose. The lunchtime conversation between Clarisse and Sabine contains implications beyond its literal meaning. When Sabine says: ‘You know I really envy you?’ she refers to Clarisse’s ability to create things, but Sabine may also envy Clarisse’s settled married life and social status. ‘Do what I do’, Clarisse proposes, ignoring the circumstances that have helped her. When Sabine expresses frustration with her job, Clarisse offers her a job as an assistant, painting the lampshade bases. Sabine rejects this charitable offer in a way that explains her desire to be independent: ‘I hate taking orders’. Clarisse points out that Sabine takes orders where she works now; but for Sabine, ‘It’s just a boring job. I’ll quit one day’. During this scene, it emerges that Sabine’s imagining another life for herself derives from three kinds of frustration: dissatisfaction with her affair with a married man, with her job and with her social position. Sabine’s relationship with Clarisse exacerbates these frustrations and Clarisse offering to become Sabine’s employer does not help; although Clarisse insists ‘You’d be my partner’, Sabine replies ‘I’m too independent’. After declaring this, she tells her friend: ‘I’m going to get married’. Sabine’s abstract plan to get married surprises Clarisse, as it surprised Simon: ‘You

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can’t just decide to get married. I got married because I loved Frédéric’. This scepticism provokes further explanation from Sabine: ‘The point is that I’ve changed my attitude. The other night at Simon’s, I said to myself “what am I doing here?” This guy has a wife and kids, when so many men are unattached’. Sabine has walked across the shop and the camera has followed her while Clarisse brushes her hair and puts on her coat. Outside, they walk slowly away from the camera, diminishing in size as they proceed down one of Le Mans’s lanes. The surrounding road, walls and roofs all look grey under a slight drizzle, but the imposing architectural heritage is impressive, if not intimidating. In the following two sections, inside Clarisse’s house and then back on the street, locations and performances continue to inflect dialogue with additional meanings. Inside, Clarisse wears a loose black t-shirt and tight black leather trousers. A ponytail pulls her hair back; gold bangles dangle on her wrists as she takes some perfume out of a pink make-up bag. When Clarisse applies the perfume, she rubs it in on each side of her neck with an extended finger. Her polished movements reach their zenith as she expounds on her principles of love and marriage: she sits on the arm of a large chair and adopts a characteristic pose, thrusting her chin forward and looking down her nose. When Clarisse straddles the chair’s arm, Sabine exits frame left. Her hostess claims our attention as she positions herself: laying one hand on top of the other, interlacing her fingers, she moves her bottom further back, transferring weight to her arms, leaning forward and extending her neck. As she talks, Dombasle moves her right hand in front of her, displaying her manicured nails. Romand and Dombasle’s differences in physique and poise bring out their characters’ differing class and ethnic origins, making visible the tension underlying their conversation before they discuss their respective milieux: Clarisse is from an old Le Mans family; Sabine’s parents, as she tells Edmond, ‘lived in the colonies’. Clarisse and Sabine may have met at school or college, when shared experiences obscured their social backgrounds; now, though, Sabine notices them and this conversation with Clarisse establishes how she sees them. Clarisse claims romantic idealism as her guide, leaning forwards, almost lecturing her friend. As Clarisse argues that her own marriage is ‘simply a concession to society’ and Sabine insists that ‘It makes you feel more secure’, the film emphasizes their disagreement: on one arm of the chair, Dombasle faces the camera; on the other arm, Romand faces Dombasle. Prominent against the white background, costumes and hair reflect their opposition: Clarisse’s black trousers, black t-shirt and blonde hair contrast with Sabine’s cream cardigan and black hair. This sequence comprises only two shots; Rohmer does not use close-ups of the friends; he allows us to see how they move and relate to the setting and each other. The tension develops outside Clarisse’s house. As they stroll arm in

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arm through the courtyard and gates, Sabine expresses in words what the interior sequence has expressed visually, the ‘big difference’ between them. The depth of field shows off the grandness of Clarisse’s house, its large gateway and gates, which look hundreds of years old. At this point, Sabine criticizes Clarisse: ‘You fit perfectly in your milieu. So you feel free as air, without realising your freedom comes from being accepted’. As they pause at the border between Clarisse’s house and Le Mans’s old town, Sabine explains: ‘For me it’s different. I have to leave my milieu’. Clarisse fits into private and public spaces here, whereas Sabine finds both uncomfortable; furthermore, Clarisse commutes between home and work by walking between two expensive properties in the old town, while Sabine has a long drive to the outlying suburbs. The film continues to emphasize their differences when it cuts to a close medium shot of the two friends as Clarisse, attempting reconciliation, puts her arm around Sabine, the latter holding her friend’s hand over her shoulder. The camera pans with them as they walk back up the cobblestone lane towards Clarisse’s shop. Clarisse naively remarks, ‘we’re more or less from the same milieu’. This prompts Sabine to remove her friend’s patronising arm, pointing out: ‘Your father’s a doctor; mine’s dead. Your husband will be a doctor, like his father and yours’. As she says this, Sabine, with her hands on her hips, pulls away from Clarisse, who provokes Sabine: ‘You could marry a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer too. You can seduce any man you want’. The exact and close-textured meanings of this sequence exemplify Rohmer’s achievement in Le Beau marriage, in that they make understandable Sabine’s insistence that she needs to escape her background ‘by an act of will’. Clarisse and Sabine’s conversation takes place in four locations: Clarisse’s shop; the street between her shop and home; Clarisse’s home; the courtyard and street outside Clarisse’s house, from where the pair retrace their steps to the shop. The nearness of these locations demonstrates the integrity of Clarisse’s social arena, the importance of which Serceau articulates: Sabine’s friend . . . whose husband is a doctor, lives in the medieval part of a provincial town, a place with lots of antique shops and art shops . . . The decision to live in very old restored houses in this part of town actually conveys the persistence of a system of values and tastes which are the legacy of the past. (Serceau 2000: 24) The ‘persistence of a system of values’ is as meaningful for Sabine as it as for us. As the opening proverb intimates, Le Beau mariage is about Sabine imagining a different life for herself. The proverb is an extract from Jean de La Fontaine’s fable, ‘The Milkmaid and the Pail of Milk’: ‘Can any of us

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refrain from building castles in Spain?’ La Fontaine’s fable describes how a young woman named Perrette goes to market with a pail of milk balanced on her head. As she walks, she imagines the future riches her milk will bring. Unfortunately, her daydreaming leads her to stumble and spill the milk. Le Beau mariage’s proverb begins the concluding verse: Who doesn’t build castles in Spain? Which of us isn’t mildly insane? Picrochole, Pyrrhus, the dairymaid, Wise men and fools alike, we all daydream (No pleasure in life is so sweet) And each of us is betrayed By flattering self-deceit – The world’s riches and honours seem Ours then, and all its lovely women at our feet. (La Fontaine 1982: 88) The proverb introduces the subject of daydreaming, while the first shot of Sabine on the train shows her holding a book about gothic art, but not reading it; instead, she is daydreaming. Sabine imagines that marriage to Edmond is possible, though he does little to indicate his attraction to her. However, La Fontaine’s proverb, like Rohmer’s film, is sympathetic to the daydreamer; both recognize that ‘No pleasure in life is so sweet’. The film elaborates contexts for Sabine’s flights of fancy, which enable sympathy for her, despite her ‘impetuousness’. The film follows Sabine for its entirety apart from two brief scenes. The first comes after Sabine meets Edmond at the wedding reception. He leaves without saying goodbye to her, called away by a phone call (this interruption rhymes with the one that prompts Sabine to leave Simon). Edmond asks Nicholas to explain to ‘everyone’, but his sudden departure indicates his commitment to his work and his lack of interest in Sabine. The second separation from Sabine comes after she sees him in his office. Sabine pushes her way out of the door and collides with Edmond’s next client, Madame Joindreau (Catherine Rethi). Sabine apologizes, but the client insists on more deference, pulling Sabine around. This angers Sabine: ‘I’d rather not see an old hag’. The client raises her hand to slap Sabine, but the latter reacts by shoving the client’s files down the stairwell, then stepping down herself. ‘Who’s that wild woman?’ the client asks Edmond; ‘Sorry, in our profession, we see all kinds’, he replies obsequiously, bending to scoop up his client’s papers. Both moments of separation from Sabine show a side of Edmond which she does not acknowledge until the end; yet by revealing these things to us rather than to her, Rohmer increases our sympathy with her. This complex presentation of Sabine’s desires constitutes the large part of the film’s value. Repetitions, rhymes and parallels create an ironic

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perspective on her, with various elements arranged into patterns. These include the autumnal colours which dominate décor and costume: peach, pink, light brown, orange and fawn. Related to the unified colour scheme is the set of references around art and antiques, through which the film alludes to creativity, taste and status. Rohmer remarks of Sabine that ‘it was important to show that she was a girl who loves art – she studies art history – but who can’t express herself creatively or artistically’ (Rohmer 1982). Sabine decorates her bedroom with posters, but her lover and her friend are painters, although the latter paints lampshades not pictures. When she gives Edmond one of her paintings, he leaves it on her bed. In contrast to her painting is the large tapestry that hangs on the wall behind Edmond’s desk. An old-fashioned form of wall decoration, depicting a castle with mounted figures in the foreground, the tapestry symbolizes Edmond’s membership of a cultivated, aristocratic class; as Serceau observes, ‘[t]he Parisian chambers of Edmond bear witness as much as the residences of his provincial cousins to the attachment to the styles of the past’ (2000: 26).19 The film also compares actions and events; for example, the two parties – the sophisticated wedding reception for Clarisse’s brother, Nicholas, held at Clarisse’s parents’ house, and Sabine’s birthday party, held at her mother’s house in Ballon and populated by bopping teenagers. The music in Le Beau mariage is also, though to a lesser extent than in La Femme de l’aviateur, part of the film’s ironic patterns. The film’s only music is that played at Sabine’s birthday party, a simple upbeat melody played on an electronic keyboard, backed with a drum machine and synthesized sound effects, typical of 1980s electronic popular music. However, the same music is used during the opening and end credits; as in La Femme de l’aviateur, the music in Le Beau mariage links on-screen and off-screen worlds, reminding us of the shape of the film. Rohmer says: The music . . . is in effect a little disembodied, less physical, I think, than American rock. That side seemed to me more European, and, in a good way, was the kind of music which one might dance to in the provinces at birthday parties. There was also a little ironic and derisory aspect, which I liked a lot; that’s why I used this music for the [final] scene on the train. (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 26) The parties themselves differ, but the dramatic focus of both is on one guest’s social unease: Sabine at the wedding reception; Edmond at the birthday party. Sabine’s commuting, which expresses her restlessness, is also highly patterned. The film shows seven of her train journeys between Paris and Le Mans. Le Beau mariage also includes 10 phone calls and Sabine’s 10 drives, although in two cases we do not see the journey, just the driving into or out of a parking space. Notable drives are the lifts Sabine gives to Edmond and Claude, the comparison of which epitomizes Rohmer’s strategy. Sabine drives Edmond

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to buy the Jersey porcelain and introduces him to Madame de Saint-Biez. The latter recognizes Edmond’s name as that of an established Le Mans family, whose credentials she accepts. As they chat, Sabine interrupts them, as if annoyed by their easy establishment of a familiar rapport that excludes Sabine. Closing the deal, she haggles for a cheaper price, her irritation manifesting itself in brusqueness. The lift that Sabine gives to Edmond contrasts with the lift she gives to Claude, whom she returns to a tower block that contains the flat he shares with his family. When they enter the building, Rohmer emphasizes the ugliness of the tower block with a slow tilt upwards. Sabine’s tendency to daydream is emphasized by the repeated shots of her gazing absent-mindedly at nothing in particular or looking at views, imagining ‘the world’s riches and honours’ hers. This rhetorical figure recurs. The first occasion is foreshadowed when Sabine tries to persuade her mother to come to the wedding reception, on the grounds of the ‘fantastic view’. Her mother chuckles, knowing and sympathetic: ‘I know the view. It’s the one you see from the road’. Sabine enjoys that view with Edmond. After Clarisse’s arch introduction, Rohmer frames him standing with Sabine on the garden terrace, their backs towards the camera, looking out across the countryside. Sabine says: ‘I love houses with views like this’. Edmond responds: ‘For that you have to live in the country’. The shot of Sabine gazing out of the window on her own, after Edmond has left, forms a coda to her initial meeting with Edmond.20

Le Beau mariage: Sabine looking out of window after Edmond has left party

The partner to the view from Clarisse’s parents’ house is the one from Claude’s tower block. Sabine’s view of the Le Mans suburbs seems to encourage her to explain her plans to get married. After sneaking a look at the untidy rooms, she states her ambitions to ‘move up’. Claude retorts: ‘That’s not moving up, it’s social climbing’. Their discussion is important

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thematically because it raises the issue of whether wives should work. Claude is more concerned with equality with his wife than with a broken light switch, but Sabine perceives only an unattractive view and a messy apartment, rather than the choice that Claude and his wife have made to strive for personal and professional equality. His ordinary life represents what Sabine thinks she does not want and, as Hertay (1998: 39) points out, in the face of this, Sabine insists on her intentions more forcefully. She lies about Edmond and comes across as more self-seeking than the film elsewhere shows her to be. Sabine imagines that she wants a view like the one she sees from Edmond’s Parisian chambers. A point-of-view shot through his window visualizes her view of the busy Parisian boulevard, with its expensive apartment blocks. This view, like the one from the terrace of Clarisse’s parents’ house, is representative of a way of life from which Sabine is excluded. The film begins and ends in the same place, marking the artfulness of its construction. Sabine sits down on a train, opposite the young man (Patrick Lambert) who sat opposite her in the opening scene. They look at each other and smile. Sabine is back where she started, but though Rohmer leaves doubts about the story’s conclusion, her self-awareness has deepened and the smiles suggest hope.21 Sabine has to work out how she can be independent, yet be in a relationship. Her confusion about what she wants personally and professionally reflects the context of the film’s production in the early 1980s, after the introduction of the contraceptive pill, after the social changes brought about by feminism and before AIDS became known; her difficulties in resolving her need for independence and her desire for a partnership match the era. Her confusion manifests itself in her contradictory behaviour: she tells her mother ‘I want to be respected, to be idealised by my husband’, but she takes the traditionally masculine role and pursues Edmond. Rohmer places Sabine’s imagination and behaviour within carefully filmed socio-economic contexts. In doing so, Le Beau mariage indicates what causes her behaviour. The film never suggests that she wants to marry an upper-class man to secure a wealthy lifestyle; it clarifies that she yearns for freedom and a relationship. By repeating elements, the film creates parallels that point to feelings and motivations that characters may not want to acknowledge, contributing to an ironic but sympathetic involvement with Sabine’s plight. As Schilling comments, Le Beau mariage walks a tightrope of ‘distance and sympathy, of tenderness and malice’ (2007: 29). Sabine’s stubborn decision to marry may be wrong-headed, but the film places it within a subtle exposé of a layer of class prejudice in contemporary France.22 Rohmer shows a narrow section of society, the upper-middle and lower-middle classes; no one is rich or poor. Yet, dissecting differences within this range, he reveals how class-consciousness can be confusing and oppressive, as Sabine discovers.

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Pauline à la plage (1983) Rohmer first wrote an outline of Pauline à la plage’s story in the 1950s. All he had was a plot involving six characters: It’s the story of a young girl who takes her desires for reality; that’s the profound subject. I think it’s a modern subject. It could be an old story, but I wanted to treat it in a contemporary way. Above all, it’s a comedy. (Dupont 1983: 13). When he re-wrote the script, he did not allow the actors to change anything, but before he did this he got to know them. He named Pauline à la plage after the 15-year-old girl played by Amanda Langlet, whom he cast after seeing a photograph of her modelling. He wanted someone born in 1967 and, as soon as he saw her, he knew she would be right for the part (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 21). He had worked with four of the other five actors before: Arielle Dombasle, Pascal Greggory, Féodor Atkine and Rosette. The sixth actor was Simon de la Brosse, who plays Sylvain, the young man whom Pauline meets; he was 17 and, as with Langlet, it was his first film.23 Rohmer recorded hours of his conversations with Langlet; she later discovered some of her phrases in the script (Hertay 1998: 120), as did Greggory: ‘when one has the script in hand and after several months of work, you find phrases that you said yourself when you chatted about the story with the director in his office’ (Hertay 1998: 129). Dombasle acknowledges that Rohmer modelled Marion on her: his strength comes from really observing the performers before they play the part, which he writes for them. He simply accentuates traits . . . Rohmer already knows the actors well when he re-works the dialogue; he uses a little of their syntax, all his genius is there. He notes the tics and habitual expressions in the actor’s language. (Dombasle 1990: 138–9) Atkine’s and Dombasle’s roles in Le Beau mariage anticipate their characters in Pauline à la plage. Atkine again brings a strong masculine presence to his character, Henri, a duplicitous Don Juan-figure. Rohmer wanted Henri to have an allure ‘gégauvienne’ (Desbarats 1990: 47), an allusion to Paul Gégauff, whom he describes as: ‘more a man who was loved by women than a man who loved women’ (Desbarats 1990: 47).24 A handsome broad-shouldered wanderer, at ease with women and cynical about Pierre’s romanticism, Henri is divorced, with a daughter, Marie, who, as he says, ‘lives in Rennes with her mother’ and sees him during the holidays. He spends much of the film shirtless, exhibiting his physique when Marion finds him working at his typewriter. In looks and personality, Henri attracts

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Marion, yet though both are divorced or divorcing, he is the inverse of her because he announces his commitment to pleasure and his unwillingness to settle down. His career as an ethnologist in the South Pacific facilitates his nomadic lifestyle; as he tells Marion on their first evening together: ‘I go where and when I want without asking anyone’. Marion looks fascinated. Dombasle’s Marion contrasts with Langlet’s Pauline in age and appearance: Dombasle is tall with long blonde hair; Langlet is shorter with dark hair.25 John Fawell summarizes Rohmer’s use of these physical differences: Marion’s body is the sharply angular, well-maintained body of a model. Her gestures are extravagantly feminine and self-conscious. Pauline has the stockier shape and more awkward movements of an average teenager . . . Pauline’s movements are more natural and there is some weight in her stride, whereas Marion seems to be made of air. Their bodies correspond to their personalities. Marion will make a fairy tale of her summer while Pauline will view it all with a jaundiced eye and from a decidedly earthbound perspective. (Fawell 1993: 779) Fawell observes that Marion dresses like Jérôme in Le Genou de Claire, ‘with great panache and self-consciousness’ (1993: 779). She favours off-the shoulder diaphanous white blouses or pristine white vests and pleated skirts; Pauline wears her bikini or t-shirt and jeans. They share a large blue and white beach towel, and Pauline has a blue and white duffel bag. Marion has red accessories: wedge heels, scarf, belt, headband and straps on her white bag. As the film associates red with Henri it suggests that, despite her avowed romanticism, she resembles him. Throughout Pauline à la plage, clothes, sets and props participate in colour-coordinated patterns; crisply defined images of primary colours provide bold contrasts, the simplicity of which suits the plotting.26 The film associates red with lust and carnality, blue and white with inexperience and innocence. Thus, Sylvain wears a red t-shirt or a red sweatshirt and has a red bike, but when he is with Pauline he wears blue and white shorts and when he confronts Henri he wears a pale blue t-shirt. Similarly, Pierre has a red car with which to pursue Marion, but wears white or blue clothes. In contrast, Henri has many red things: shirt, jacket, towel draped on his window, over which he lifts Marion, t-shirt, typewriter. His daughter’s bedroom displays the red in Matisse’s La Blouse Roumaine, a red inflatable ring, a red, white and blue ball and a similarly coloured doll. Pauline à la plage is set in a Normandy beach resort, yet though the characters make brief visits to Mont St Michel and Granville, as Bonitzer and Chion observe, the film takes place on a ‘general beach’ (1983: 22), the long flat beach of Jullouville.27 However, the film alludes to Normandy’s sailing traditions: Henri’s house displays a model ship; Pierre says of Henri

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that he has sailed the South Seas in ‘dugouts’; and Pierre and Pauline visit Granville’s port, looking for Sylvain, who claims he has a boat there, though he may be lying to impress Pauline. She arrives and leaves in a blue and white sailor shirt, while Pierre wears a Breton t-shirt. Lastly, Henri, like a sailor, is always on the move. He takes advantage of this in the dénouement by sailing to Spain, thus escaping the romantic complications. Sailing and holidays both promise departure, and Pauline à la plage was the third time that Rohmer took on the subject of holidays; as before, he uses the seasonal weather expressively. When Marion and Pauline arrive, for example, the hydrangeas are blooming; a week later, when they leave, the hydrangeas have faded from pink to brown, adding to the feeling that summer is over and the days are getting cooler, as everyone returns to their routines.28 The summer facilitates the depiction of the naked or near-naked body on holiday. As Desbarats writes: People make love with an easiness which is disconcerting for the viewer used to the Contes moraux, where, as one remembers it, the whole dynamic of the intrigue rests on sexual evasions, accompanied by handsome discussions. In 1982, the filmmaker does not linger over bedroom scenes; he multiplies them. (1990: 24–5) However, as the film is set during late summer in Northern France, cooler cloudy days are possible. Thus, on day three, when it is sunny, older and younger couples appear content, but the next day it is cloudy, appropriately so, for Henri spends it with Louisette, while Marion and Pauline visit Mont St Michel.29 For Rohmer, the dramatic potential of holidays is the fact that people ‘have time for analysis and to reassess their lives’ (Peachment 1996: 11).30 Marion, in the middle of a divorce, returns to a family holiday home for the first time in several years, bumping into an old admirer. Mazierska rightly describes Marion’s visit to Jullouville as a ‘desire to find, while on holiday in a place she used to visit before she got married, her old self and her lost innocence’ (2002: 227–8). The film incorporates normal seaside holiday activities: windsurfing, swimming and holiday romances, with the characters taking the opportunity to socialize with new friends. The holiday fling is a cliché, but one based on fact. Played during the opening credits of Les Bronzés (Patrice Leconte, 1978) is Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Sea, Sex and Sun’, which sums up what holidays can offer. The broad comic version of this can be seen in Les Bronzés or in Camping (Fabien Onteniente, 2006); as Patrick Chirac (Franck Dubosc) says in Camping, ‘holidays without romances are not holidays’. Marion would recoil from this, but, though she pretends that she and Henri love each other, their romance conforms to holiday cliché; she experiments with being single. Dombasle was 28 when she made Pauline à la plage; Marion, one

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guesses, is meant to be of the same age, someone who married in her early 20s, according to a tradition of marrying young which, by the early 1980s, was becoming outmoded. One film that is close to Pauline à la plage is À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983), released a few months after Pauline à la plage. Both films revolve around 15-year-old girls on the verge of womanhood: like Amanda Langlet, Sandrine Bonnaire, Suzanne in À nos amours, was 15 during the film’s production in 1982. Pauline and Suzanne are as different as Langlet and Bonnaire, but their closeness in age means that the films offer intriguing companion portraits of young women in 1982. Attitudes towards sexual freedom changed in France in the 1970s; the traditional idea that a woman was obliged to get married no longer applied by 1982, and Marion and Henri’s divorces no longer carried a stigma. Both À nos amours and Pauline à la plage depict young women experiencing their first relationships during their summer holidays and both Suzanne and Pauline mature with a different awareness of possibilities from those that were available to Dombasle’s Marion, only 13 years older than Pauline.31 That difference between Marion and Pauline forms the film’s central dynamic: Pauline has her first relationship, while observing her cousin’s behaviour. Pauline confidently takes the initiative with Sylvain; she experiences no guilt about moral transgression, and the film contrasts her naturalness with Marion’s confused and contradictory feelings. On the first evening, Marion tells Henri, Pierre and Pauline what she would like in a relationship. This scene in which she proclaims her desires establishes the basis on which we judge her later actions. On the rebound from divorce, Marion may want a fling, but she will not confess a casual approach to affairs. Henri, however, states his lack of interest in settling down; Marion ignores his statement and initiates a fling with him.32 Marion announces: ‘I believe that to really love, you must think it’ll last forever. But we all make mistakes . . . But I won’t believe something’s love when it isn’t. Love burns. I want to burn with love’. Pierre cautions her; Henri encourages her: ‘For the moment you are free. Enjoy it. Don’t tie yourself down’. Marion answers: ‘Freedom doesn’t interest me. I don’t think the way you do’. She touches her lips with her hand, before raising the back of her hand to her mouth, as if in embarrassment.33 Then she continues: I’ve never burned for love, except in dreams, as girls do for a movie star, a prince, an athlete, a face glimpsed and never seen again. But it wasn’t love. I’ve probably set hearts aflame, but they belonged to people I didn’t care about so I never noticed. Men may have killed themselves over me. I hope not. If they did, I never found out. But strange as it may seem, one thing has never happened, to spark a love in myself and in another, instantly and reciprocally. But I don’t despair. It’ll happen one day, and suddenly I’ll go up in flames.

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Marion is self-absorbed; she works in fashion and her own clothes testify to the care she takes with her appearance. Her ‘I want to burn with love’ expresses an impractical idealism, which leads to self-deception; as Dombasle says, ‘My character is a victim of her own fixed ideas about love’ (1990: 138). Yet the blindness to follies makes Marion more not less sympathetic. As with Le Beau mariage, the story provokes sympathy for the characters, but, unlike the preceding film, Pauline à la plage is an ensemble film, Rohmer’s first, which intertwines the love lives of three men and three women over seven days with formal symmetry and a refined visual style. The multiple point-of-view structure has prompted several critics to place this film within the tradition of French theatrical comedy. The Six contes moraux follow their protagonists, as does Le Beau marriage and, for the most part, La Femme de l’aviateur. Pauline à la plage, however, devotes time to all its characters: Sylvain and Louisette have the least screen time, but they trigger events. The multiple point-of-view structure elevates the examination of its six characters, so that we learn more about them than they do about each other.34 As the characters’ romantic pursuits overlap, the film establishes parallels between them, comparing the behaviour of younger and older generations. Combining coincidence with accidental visions, it shows people misinterpreting what they see; subsequent verbal accounts of observed incidents exacerbate problems. Once the game of desire begins, deception escalates until actual or potential romantic triangles link the six characters: Pierre likes Marion; she likes Henri; he likes Louisette and starts to seduce Pauline; Louisette asks Pierre out for a date; she is also, because of Henri’s lies, associated with Sylvain; he likes Pauline, whom Marion tries to match up with Pierre. As the film shifts from character to character, it places scenes next to each other ironically; on the day of Henri’s betrayal of Marion, for example, the film cuts from Henri and Marion kissing at his house to Marion and Pauline driving away from Mont St Michel, then to Henri and Louisette swimming together. Through this method, Pauline à la plage combines sympathy for its characters with ironic detachment from them. Age is a point of comparison, as Danièle Dubroux summarizes: On one side, an adolescent couple learning about love (Pauline and Sylvain), and on the other side, a couple of adult divorcees, free to love: Marion and Henri. In between the two: Pierre and Louisette, two intermediary characters (by age and status), one of them desiring Marion and the other desired by Henri: these ‘third parties’ proceed in turn to become the focus for the role of the jealousies and competitions of the triangular structure of desire. (Dubroux 1983: 13)

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Pauline and Marion both have holiday flings, yet, though the adult imagines herself wiser than the teenager, the film shows how she deceives herself more than her cousin does.35 A further point of comparison is class. Rohmer says: ‘I didn’t want to weigh the film down with explicitly social and sociological considerations’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 22), but a class dimension emerges, particularly in the attitudes of Pierre, Marion and Pauline.36 Whereas Le Beau mariage draws our sympathies against the upper-class world of Edmond and Clarisse, Pauline à la plage hints at the holidaymaking Parisians’ prejudices about the provincial lower-class origins of Sylvain and Louisette. As Bonitzer notes (1999: 49), class is a factor in Marion’s reaction to Henri’s interest in Louisette. Desbarats also comments on Louisette’s origins: ‘Her Northern accent colours all her remarks and gives her a different tone to the Parisians who surround her’ (1990: 31). Desbarats argues that the contrast in accents puts Louisette on the side of the rebellious servants in Molière or Mozart (1990: 32); if Pauline resembles Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte, then Louisette, Desbarats suggests, resembles Despina, the wily servant: ‘behind the comic syntax and the mannered style stands the complexity of someone truly liberated’ (1990: 34). Louisette is frank, to the extent that she asks Pierre out. When he refuses, she divines ‘Is it because I’m a sweet-seller?’ Desbarats also notes that, during the final breakfast scene, Pauline talks about Louisette in words that align her with Marion: ‘I find your sweet-seller much too artificial’. Henri defends her: ‘[Artificial] in her manners maybe, but not in her nature’. To stress the symmetry of the six characters’ interactions, Pauline à la plage uses framings that highlight geometric shapes. Multiple perspectives in the film’s visual design reproduce the story’s different points of view on its characters. It is a film of intersecting lines, of space dissected by squares, rectangles and diagonals. The framing emphasizes windows, doors, perspectives, vanishing points, horizontals and the splitting of images into thirds, with frequent large vistas of the flat beaches at low tide; as Fawell notes, Rohmer’s compositions are ‘more cubist than impressionist’ (1993: 784). The forthright angles and lines match the boldness of its colour scheme; isolating frames yields photographs notable for their symmetry of colour and shape. Varied planes of action, dimensions in depth, forms of perspective and frames within frames direct our attention to or away from the main action. Long takes and depth of field recur, theatricalising the space and showing the characters as social performers.37 Marion’s and Pauline’s garden twice appears as a stage-like setting, with the characters either in depth or close to the camera; for example, when Pauline and Marion talk in the garden about the former’s lack of romantic experience and the latter’s divorce, Rohmer shoots them both facing forwards, as if sitting near the front of a stage exchanging confidences to be heard by a nearby audience.38 A later example uses foreground and background to draw attention to things that Marion may be thinking but not articulating. At the Hotel

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Casino disco, the film frames Marion within a proscenium-shaped gap in the wall. As the band begins to play ‘Chant des îles’, she walks towards the tables in the background, away from the camera. Pierre moves right, allowing a view of her from behind. The shot’s framing and depth of field emphasize Marion’s seductive performance; she aims the movement of her long legs at Henri. She is disappointed, therefore, when Pierre stops her to declare his love. Rohmer stages this interruption in the wings, curtained-off from the main room. To their right, beyond the curtain in the background, Henri dances with Pauline. As Marion rejects Pierre’s advances, she glances over her shoulder; Henri and Pauline remain visible between the curtain and the right-hand edge of the camera frame. This framing compares couples and hints at Marion’s desire to escape from Pierre and find Henri. A similar example occurs at the beginning of day three, when Pierre visits Marion and Pauline during their breakfast in the garden. To make evident the theme of a sexually awakening teenager watching sexually active adults, Rohmer often frames Pauline as an observer: when Marion and Pierre reunite on the beach, Pauline looks bored between them; when Henri talks about his nomadic lifestyle, Pauline listens behind him.39 When Pierre visits Marion, foreground and background show grown-ups and adolescent simultaneously: Pauline listens until Pierre raises his voice, then she walks away from the camera as if leaving the stage. One important motif is the framing of characters through windows and doorways. In discussing the point-of-view structure in Pauline à la plage, Rohmer describes his aim: There is a system of narration founded on multiple points of view, and it is through this that the characters discover each other in the middle of making love. This vision is really shocking, for each of them. Pauline is shocked to see Marion in bed with Henri, then Marion is shocked to see the two teenagers, Pauline and Sylvain, and then finally we are shocked with Pierre to discover the sweet-seller framed by the window. (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 22) Each vision catalyses events and each is represented through a window or doorway. When, on the morning of the fifth day, Pierre tells Marion about his view of Louisette, he says: ‘I have proof, visual, physical proof. If only I’d had a camera’.40 As Pierre’s comments intimate, the visions through windows and doorways emphasize the prominence of people parading and posing within box-like frames that echo the cinematic frame and represent the observer as voyeuristic spectator. Repetitions such as these expose the framework of intersecting story strands. The beginning and ending of the central two-day period are bookended with Pierre’s arrivals at Marion and Pauline’s, on day three and day five. Marion comes to look for Henri twice at his house: on day three, she

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finds Pauline and Sylvain upstairs; on day four, she finds Louisette and Sylvain upstairs. Rohmer films Sylvain arriving on his bike at Jullouville beach twice, presenting Sylvain’s second arrival as a visual repetition of the first. On day three, when it’s sunny, Sylvain finds Pauline; on day four, when it’s cloudy, he finds Henri and Louisette.

Pauline à la plage: steps to the beach (sunny day first)

The similarity of the two framings of Sylvain descending to the beach invites a comparison of the encounters.41 The effect of this type of repetition is that, as V. F. Perkins writes of The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948), ‘the device marks the shape of the story, marks the story as being shaped and not just unwinding with the course of events or the process of memory’ (Perkins 2000: 45). The repetition of the framings of Sylvain’s descent of the steps draws on the same principle as the repetition of the staircase shots in Letter from an Unknown Woman; that is, there are differences between the shots

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as well as similarities. The duplication highlights Henri’s casual transfer of interest from one woman to another and the lesson that Sylvain may learn from Henri’s example, but Henri and Louisette frolic in the sea in a way than one cannot imagine Henri and Marion doing. The most conspicuous moment at which Rohmer exhibits the shape of his story is in one shot that shows five of the characters passing each other. The surrounding sequence begins with Henri interrupting Sylvain and Pauline on the beach and inviting them to his house. Pauline plays his new record, ‘Chants des îles’, the song to which Henri and Marion danced at the Casino disco.42 She dances to it slowly, smiling at Sylvain, who joins her. Henri leaves them and goes to the post office. Pauline and Sylvain continue to dance, she in her white bikini, he in his shiny blue Adidas shorts, their bare skins touching as they dance. They kiss, then Pauline leads him upstairs, at which point the film cuts to Henri on the promenade, bumping into Louisette. They greet warmly and he buys some peanuts from her. She invites him to go swimming. He explains that he has prior commitments, but they leave open the possibility of meeting ‘another day’. The film then cuts to Marion on the beach. She dries her hair and goes to Henri’s house, where she finds Pauline and Sylvain kissing on Henri’s daughter’s bed. Back on the road, Marion approaches the beach and sees Henri. She throws her arms around him; he responds as if he finds her embrace too enthusiastic. She tells him about Pauline and Sylvain, shocked: ‘She shouldn’t be picking up idiots on the beach’ is her judgement, forgetting that she met Henri this way. The framing keeps visible the promenade extending into the distance behind them, thus leaving enough space for Louisette to enter the shot, walk past Henri and appear between them.

Pauline à la plage: Crossroads (sweetseller between them)

While Henri eats the peanuts he bought from Louisette, she turns to look at them, prompting Marion’s snobbish ‘She’s funny that girl’ and Henri’s evasive ‘Do you want a toffee apple?’ After this, the camera pans right to follow Marion

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and Henri towards the house and, in doing so, find Sylvain and Pauline coming down the road. The camera reverses its pan, following the younger couple as they head for the beach. Back at Henri’s house, he removes his red jacket. He and Marion embrace in their identical white vests. They dance to ‘Chants des îles’; as he grabs her waist and holds her neck, Marion clasps the back of his head. Henri removes her vest and fondles her breasts. The scene ends.

Pauline à la plage: Crossroads (couples passing)

The sequence compares generations (Sylvain and Pauline; Henri and Marion) and the women in Henri’s life (Marion and Louisette). There are 32 scenes in the film and several revolve around chance encounters; this pivotal scene takes place in scene 16, halfway through the film, towards the end of the third day. Before and after it, bracketing scenes correspond with each other and strengthen the peak of coordination in ways that sharpen its position as a pivot. Similar appearances indicate similar agendas for the partners in both couples. Sylvain and Pauline have brown hair cut to the same length, the same skin colouring and height. The only thing that indicates their gender difference is Pauline’s bikini strap around the back of her neck. Marion and Henri’s appearances also correspond; his white jeans, white vest and red jacket match her white skirt, white vest, red shoes, and white and red bag. The implication is that the teenagers’ interaction is innocent: some of Sylvain’s comments indicate bravado, but most suggest tenderness, and Pauline is relaxed with him. Equally, Marion and Henri’s comparable clothing underlines their shared physical desire, despite Marion’s protests to the contrary. The couples dance to the same music, though the film distinguishes between Sylvain and Pauline’s private dance and Henri and Marion’s dance together to the same song in the same place, which soon moves to a sexual encounter. Marion’s behaviour shows that she likes Henri more than Pierre, for she welcomes his approach. The adult couple have already slept together, but it is still hard to imagine the teenage dancers behaving like this.

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In contrast, they choose a place for their canoodling – Henri’s daughter’s bed – which suggests their connection to childhood. At the crossroads itself, when Louisette stares at Marion and Henri, the shot asserts visually the intertwining of the characters’ liaisons. Henri was walking along the path towards the camera; Marion interrupts his progress when she joins him from a right angle. As with her seduction of Henri, had Marion not diverted his attention towards her, Henri would have met Louisette again. Rohmer organizes plotting, camera and actors to compare the couples passing each other and to hint at the potential formation of a third couple. The film ends with both members of the adult couple attempting to deceive Pauline. At breakfast before she is called back to Paris, Marion tells Pauline: ‘You took the first comer’. Pauline retorts: ‘What about you?’ At the end of their breakfast, Marion says of Henri: ‘But I’m sure he’s more in love than he lets show’, a statement we know to be untrue. When Henri confesses to Pauline in the restaurant in Granville, he still lies, saying ‘Marion made it all up’. On the last day, however, after Pauline has spent the night at his house, he tries to explain to her. Henri offers the following justifications for his dalliances with Marion and Louisette, and his abandonment of both: his friend’s yacht is too confined; the sailing would be too hard for Marion; he hates goodbyes; Marion is too perfect, too artificial; Marion threw herself at him before he desired her; he met Louisette first and desired her more. None of Henri’s retrospective rationalizations convinces. During the first beach scene, Rohmer’s presentation of his arrival on the beach suggests that desire for Marion guides his approach. The most convincing explanation is his final one, but this does not articulate what the film makes apparent: Henri and Marion shared and acted on an impulse; love did not follow. Nothing is wrong with that and it is the explanation that sits most easily with Henri’s kissing of Pauline’s leg, which he does as if he acts on instinct. Physical behaviour is not a repository of ultimate truth, but verbal explanations fail to explain everything; all explanations are partial. Pauline à la plage offers a reminder of the links between instincts, desires, emotions and explanations. In the car, as they leave, Marion tells Pauline that there is ‘no proof of what really happened with the girl who sells sweets’. Pauline knows the truth already, though: she has heard Henri and Sylvain’s confessions and, from Pierre, Louisette’s version of events. Marion, unaware of these admissions, says, while off-screen: ‘But you shouldn’t be upset by something that may not be true’. Pauline looks down when Marion says this, then replies: ‘I’m not upset’. Rohmer chooses to let us study Pauline’s reactions as Marion says: ‘Tell yourself it isn’t true. Convince yourself. And me, I’ll remain convinced of the opposite. That way we’ll both be satisfied’.43 Pauline looks down while Marion says this, almost as if thinking about whether to hide the truth from Marion. She smiles and nods her head in agreement, wrinkling her nose after saying: ‘I agree entirely’. The opening proverb is from Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval: ‘A wagging

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tongue bites itself’. Pierre’s tongue wags; Pauline decides to hold hers. Henri’s kissing of her leg is the last part of her seven-day moral education; after this, she decides not to tell Marion about Henri’s advances towards her or Louisette. Desbarats (1990: 25) calls Pauline à la plage a film about learning how to lie; as Bonitzer observes, Marion ‘eludes the truth but preserves her vanity’, while Pauline ‘comes to learn the superiority of a silent lie over a futile truth’ (1983: 17). Pauline searches for the truth about adults; her week-long initiation into the adult world ends with her allowing Marion to believe her own false reasoning. Pauline’s adventures end as they began, with her in Marion’s car. At the start of the film, Pauline opened the gate; their holiday ends with Pauline again dressed in her sailor shirt, closing the gate behind them. The opening and closing of the gates, like the rising and falling of a curtain on stage, could imply that Marion and Pauline are destined to repeat mistakes, but their concluding conversation suggests that Pauline at least has learnt something.

Les Nuits de la pleine lune (1984) The commercial success of Pauline à la plage increased Rohmer’s financial resources, which he used to plan and research Les Nuits de la pleine lune. He started with the actors: The actors often bring their verbal expressions, fresher, closer to reality than what I could find. They often choose the names of their characters. Here, I wanted romantic names. Octave, Marianne and Camille are an homage to Musset. But Bastien, played by Christian Vadim, makes no allusion to Mozart, and Pascale Ogier herself chose Louise. (Villien 1984: 53) Rohmer wrote a complete script, but, as before, he incorporated the actors’ phrases and opinions; Fabrice Luchini, for example, describes the script as ‘impregnated’ with himself (Arnaud and Najman 1984: 63). Pascale Ogier plays the central character, Louise, a woman in her early 20s. As with Meury, Rivière and Dombasle, Rohmer had first worked with Ogier on Perceval le Gallois; he intuited that Ogier would help him achieve his principal aim for Les Nuits de la pleine lune – to capture the essence of the 1980s on film (Bergala and Philippon 1984: 11). Ogier’s character is a trainee interior designer and Ogier herself helped Rohmer with the set design of the film, designing her studio apartment in Paris and decorating parts of Rémi’s flat (Rohmer 1984).44 Ogier referred to Mondrian when she was decorating the sets; Rohmer (1990b: 122) says he was aware that Mondrian’s work had come back into fashion as a decorative motif. Reproductions of Mondrian’s work appear on Louise’s walls, with the artist’s lines appearing

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to divide her and her boyfriend. The colours come from the fashions of the time and from the winter setting (the film covers a four-month period with months announced by subtitles: November to February). As Hertay (1998: 64) suggests, the wintry settings, the frequency of night scenes and the predominance of greys accentuate Louise’s moroseness and the claustrophobia that the set design creates. Rohmer wanted most of the film to be coloured grey and black, but he chose bright scarves to set off the sombre colours and to link Louise and Octave.45 The film shows Louise involved with and unsure about three men, described by Vincent Amiel as a typology of ‘the Parisian literariness of Fabrice Luchini, the clumsiness of Tcheky Karyo, the pretty boy quality of Christian Vadim’ (1984: 61). Louise’s live-in partner, Rémi, is played by Karyo, whom Rohmer cast after seeing him in La Java des Ombres (Romain Goupil, 1983) (Bergala and Philippon 1984: 11). A strong man, often cast in thrillers and crime films, though he trained with the National Theatre of Strasbourg, Karyo has a size and solidity that opposes Ogier’s slimness and physical fragility. Philippon (1984: 39) identifies Rohmer’s touching upon the world of Maurice Pialat during their fight, when Karyo hits himself, hurting his arm on the wall. There are rows in other Rohmer films, but Rémi’s and Louise’s argument has a violence that is rare in Rohmer’s work.46 As Hertay notes (1998: 65), the first view of Karyo shows him exercising on the balcony, a tip-off about the unsuitability of Louise and Rémi as a couple: he likes sport, she likes parties. When he arrives at the party, for example, Rémi’s grimace is amusing: he has made an effort to come, but the tension on his face reveals a man out of place. He keeps sighing and only perks up when Camille (Virginie Thévenet) tells Rémi about Marianne (Anne-Séverine Liotard), ‘the girl I live with – she plays tennis very well’. Camille then introduces him to Marianne, but this is a precursor to him arguing with Louise, storming out and leaving her in tears. She is having fun and he is not; there is a sense of genuine confusion and upset between them; she would prefer it if Rémi was able to enjoy the party. Philippon (1984: 39) points out that, whereas Karyo is a type not often found in Rohmer’s films, Luchini plays a quintessential Rohmerien bourgeois male, intellectual, over-confident and self-involved. He and Louise are intimate friends, but he is unsatisfied with this and he tries to seduce her three times. In her Parisian apartment, on his knees by Louise’s chair, he strokes her hand as he talks about her problems with men, insinuating himself into her affections. The next time occurs in the apartment he shares with his wife and child. This scene includes various pertinent elements besides Octave’s and Louise’s conversation. His wife is out; looking after his child is a babysitter, who removes herself when Octave and Louise arrive home. Louise picks up some photographs of his wife (seen in a close-up) and comments on her prettiness: ‘You shouldn’t neglect her’. Octave re-enters and starts to change his clothes: ‘I

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don’t neglect her’. Going between living room and bedroom, he removes jacket, jumper and red shirt, baring his chest while he insists that he loves his wife. The contrast between Octave’s statements and his behaviour accrues further irony when he stands in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece and states: ‘Being old is when you give up wanting to be seductive’, a comment that heralds his second attempt at seducing Louise. Two elements sharpen the presentation of Octave’s duplicity. First, the inclusion of his mirror image means the shot stresses Octave’s two-sidedness; second, a large black and white photograph of his wife (recognizable from the other photographs) rests on the mantelpiece between Louise on the left and Octave on the right. As Octave says, ‘I enjoy seducing, that’s all. I like it as an end in itself’, Louise walks towards the camera and, in doing so, obscures the photograph of Octave’s wife and Octave’s reflection. He approaches her and, as he talks about her need of a sophisticated lover, his wife’s photograph re-appears between them.

Les Nuits de la pleine lune: Photograph of Octave’s wife between them

Despite their shared love of socialising, Louise does not desire Octave. He becomes jealous when he finds Louise with Bastien at the party. The next night he phones her, then turns up at her apartment and again tries to seduce her. He presses her until she starts crying and pushes him away. Noticeable in this scene is the way that Rohmer has dressed Octave to resemble Bastien, in a casual outfit of leather jacket, tight jeans and trainers. However, though he dresses like him, Octave fails to understand the attraction of ‘last night’s guy’. Louise repeats that she only wants to be friends with Octave. He tries to kiss her; she pushes him away and slaps him. The third man in Louise’s life is Bastien, played by Christian Vadim. Younger than Rémi or Octave, and resembling a 1980s pop star, Bastien plays saxophone in a band. In some critics Bastien provokes an ire that

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echoes Octave’s jealousy: Hertay calls him ‘an insipid pick-up artist’ (1998: 69); Crisp describes him as vulgar, though without offering any explanation and referring only to the ‘mindless instinctual rhythms of pop music’ (1988: 100) to which Bastien and Louise dance. Carcassonne suggests the film conveys Vadim’s ‘infinite ridiculousness in his narcissism’; he adds that,as opposed to the ‘pale silhouettes’ of young people in Les Nuits de la pleine lune, ‘I prefer the ferocity of the director when he takes on adversaries his own size, like the theoretician of Ma Nuit chez Maud (Antoine Vitez) or even the dubious Don Juan of Pauline à la plage (Féodor Atkine)’ (1984: 37). Adrian Martin considers whether the film is an unsympathetic portrait of silly people obsessed with appearances: is the film’s attitude towards the emotional cul-de-sac it portrays not one of savage irony, or even of profound despair? For what some viewers (such as myself) take away from it is not an ooh-la-la whimsy, but a lacerating melancholy, a numbing intuition of a cold emptiness. (1985: 66) Les Nuits de la pleine lune incited some of the most negative criticisms of Rohmer’s career: Hertay, Crisp, Carcassonne, Reynaud and Cone all judge the film to be evincing a pessimistic perspective on unlikeable characters, who they interpret as Rohmer’s ‘adversaries’, coldly manipulated by him from a distance. Critics’ repeated denigration of Bastien personifies an interpretation of the interests of 1980s young people in designer clothes and conspicuous consumption as self-centred, de-politicized and nihilistic hedonism. Hertay (1998: 71) describes Louise as ‘BCBG’, bon chic, bon genre, a slang term whose equivalence in English would be something like ‘yuppie’, the famous 1980s acronym for ‘young urban professional’. Hertay reasons that the tone of the Comédies et proverbes has become ‘frankly sarcastic and pessimistic’ (1998: 70). He describes the world of the 1980s laid bare by the film as ‘neo-bourgeois without ethics’ (1998: 70), arguing that the sarcastic and pessimistic tone stems from Rohmer’s alienation from this generation of young people in the film. Crisp thinks that the blue and grey colours of Les Nuits de la pleine lune ‘lend themselves to interpretation as the correlative of the bleak and meaningless existence of the young people in the film’ (1988: 104). From these critics’ perspective, Rohmer’s film partakes in this criticism.47 Rohmer introduces Bastien at the first party, dancing near Louise but with Marianne, the woman for whom Rémi will leave Louise. When Bastien starts dancing with Louise, he moves away from Marianne to do so.48 At the second party, Louise’s dancing with Bastien is a prelude to her sleeping with him. The next night she does so; the film later divulges that somewhere else, off-screen, Rémi and Marianne were doing the same. At the second party, Rohmer shows Louise and Bastien kissing in the kitchen while the romantic song, ‘Le Soleil et la lune’, plays in the background. They arrange to meet on Friday night and a montage sequence shows

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them on a motorbike, in a restaurant and in a nightclub, accompanied by the song about the full moon.49 This sequence celebrates Bastien and Louise’s enjoyment of each other’s company, dancing together, comfortably expressing mutual desire, so different to the heterosexual awkwardness at the parties in Rohmer’s La Carrière de Suzanne (1963). Louise’s dancing and night out with Bastien express her unselfconscious elation and convey a genuine sense of the sexual freedom that young people in their early 20s felt in 1984. Their dancing epitomizes the way that men and women incorporated changed opportunities and expectations into their lives. Bastien offers Louise freedom and excitement, but she remains attached to Rémi, who wants to marry her. Rémi is an architect who lives near a new town on the outskirts of Paris because he was involved in its planning.50 Of Marne-la-Vallée, the location of Rémi and Louise’s stylish apartment, Rohmer says: From a pictorial point of view, I find that there is there something really beautiful: one sees immediately the pure line of the station, then the big apartment blocks in the background and one comes to the constructions lower down, to a harmony of blues and whites. It isn’t maybe very warm, but I like it. Aesthetically, it’s an interesting place. . . . At Marnela-Vallée, the paradox is that there are openings onto the exterior, but in the exterior, there is nothing, or rather nothing yet. That will come much later . . . At the moment, I admit that it is sad and icy, but it will become extremely bright, or on the other hand unbearable. . . . There is nothing there yet; there will be something there tomorrow. It’s to that end that I made my hero an architect. He is a pioneer, as one found in the American west. He finds himself there in the middle of a desert. (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 7–8) While Rémi is an architect, Louise is training to become a designer, yet, unlike Rémi, she is not ready to settle in the suburbs. She works in old Paris, in what looks like a plush converted nineteenth-century apartment, in the Place des Victoires. Rohmer shows her journey to work in snippets: on the station, on the train, walking through the Place. Louise shuttles between two places, as Sabine did in Le Beau mariage; yet the film refrains from judging one place as better than the other, either city centre or suburban new town. Louise’s apartment in Paris is on a busy market street, and one understand her attraction to the centre; but one can also appreciate Rémi’s fondness for the new town’s purpose-built amenities (like the tennis courts which he and Marianne enjoy) and easy access to the countryside. As Mazierska emphasizes, the important factor is Louise’s ‘decentredness’ (2002: 236); she is settled neither in the centre nor the suburbs but always on the move.51 Bérénice Reynaud acclaims Rohmer’s skilfulness in using Louise’s journeys to convey her ‘displacements’:

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not only is Louise ‘commuting’ between Paris and the suburb – between her job and social life, on the one hand, her domestic cohabitation with Rémi, on the other – but she is perpetually essentially displaced, as the last sequence of the movie proves. (2000: 257) As an expressive device, the film’s repeated displacement of Louise emblematizes her restlessness and dissatisfaction.52 Annabelle Cone (1996) writes about Louise’s movements through the city by comparing them with Colette’s description of the relation between women and the city in Claudine à Paris (1901) and L’Ingénue libertine (1909). Cone argues that bourgeois women in nineteenth-century Paris found a new freedom in ‘the spaces of modernity (the streets, the cafés, the music halls)’ (1996: 425); in particular, Cone proposes that the ‘Haussmanization’ of Paris allowed women to discover Paris through the mobility offered by new forms of mass transit that linked the city to the growing suburbs, allowing bourgeois women ‘to circulate unescorted to and through the urban landscape’ (1996: 425).53 Louise is free to move around in Paris and, as she says, her job gives her enough money to maintain a small apartment, something that rich men with mistresses would have done. Louise enjoys the liberating effects of being able to travel where and when she likes, earn her own money, spend it how she likes and decide when she wants to go out and with whom. Her apartment represents her desire to be independent; it is an escape route if things go wrong with Rémi; she can decorate it as she likes and invite whomever she likes back to it. Yet she is still confused. One sequence that illustrates Louise’s confusions is that which shows her in her apartment telephoning friends, trying to find someone to go out with. There is irony in her having stated to Octave that she wants to know what it feels like to be alone, then phoning friends and staying in for the evening with her books. The evening scene fades out on her placing books on her bed; the morning scene fades in on her breakfasting in bed while listening to Edith Piaf, inclining her head, smiling and wiggling her toes. The telephone rings – Octave. She tells him that she wanted to be alone. She telephoned three people, but nothing guides us to read Louise’s evening alone as causing fretfulness. She is calm and relaxed in the morning. We may chuckle when she says ‘I really wanted to be alone’, as we know this to be untrue; she didn’t plan to be alone. However, nothing indicates that she lies when she tells Octave: that ‘I read for two hours. It was wonderful’; and when she returns home to Rémi, giving him a new teapot, she is aware of the irony of her situation.54 In this way, the film depicts Louise’s efforts to resolve her confusions; a single sequence excludes her, one which is linked, as the conclusion reveals, to Rémi and Marianne’s relationship, which develops off-screen. The sequence without Louise takes place in January. Louise is in a café with

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Octave. When she goes to the toilet, she sees Rémi and hides from him. Upstairs, Octave sees someone. There is no reverse-shot of whom he sees, just a striking sense of absence and deliberate withholding: Octave stares and adjusts his position to see better. When Louise returns, Octave tells her: ‘I saw a girl, there, who was looking at me. Then she turned away and disappeared around the corner . . . I wouldn’t swear to it, but she could have been your friend. The one who was at the party’. Louise offers Camille; maybe, he replies. For Louise, though, his description of an unusual hat confirms it as Camille. In the next scene, back at Marne-la-Vallée, Bertrand arrives for Rémi and Camille telephones for Louise, then she drops by. Louise questions Camille. She explains that Octave thought he saw her in a restaurant in the Place Saint Michel at 10 p.m., or at least someone wearing a fur toque like hers. Camille says this was impossible as she was returning from Italy with her new boyfriend. The film then shows Louise meeting Octave in a café in Auber station.55 She assures him that Rémi was not with Camille: he reasons that he could be making it all up, using terms that align him with other Rohmerien fantasists: ‘And I was writing at the time. Writers reinvent the world, not only on paper, but all around them’. Louise replies: ‘So, it was fiction and you made it all up’. When the film cuts to the second party, where Louise dances with Bastien, it encourages us to forget the suspense about who was with Rémi. Praising this sequence, Philippon (1984: 38) compares it with Fritz Lang’s American films, an apposite comparison because Rohmer, like Lang, is often concerned, in the words of V. F. Perkins, ‘to provoke awareness of the dangerous power of images by making us repeatedly reassess the conclusions we have drawn from what we have seen and heard’ (2005: 23). As an example, Perkins discusses Lang’s filming of Eddie’s (Henry Fonda) and Joan’s (Sylvia Sidney) departure from the prison near the start of You Only Live Once (1937). He suggests that Lang’s strategy of withholding a reverse-shot, which could show their departure, provokes the question, ‘How may the camera’s power of selection become an agent of misdirection?’ (2005: 23). Like Lang, Rohmer warns us, as Perkins writes, ‘not to assume the completeness of our knowledge, or its reliability’ (2005: 26). By withholding the reverse-shot, the film instigates a line of local suspense that it then puts aside, returning to it only in the final scene, when Rémi confirms that the off-screen space contained someone Octave recognized, and who, it transpires, recognized him.56 Louise does not foresee that her desire for independence will coincide with Rémi meeting someone else. During an early conversation about spending time alone, Louise tells Rémi: ‘One of us shouldn’t force the other one to do things he doesn’t like’. To Octave later, she says ‘I want to love him’. Octave responds: ‘Not to be mean, but as a couple you’re clearly disintegrating. You display all the symptoms. It’s irreversible’. He asks if she wants kids and she says not yet, maybe when she is 30. ‘I don’t feel grown

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up yet and I’m in no hurry to be. Rémi feels he is and he wants me to be so too’. And there lies the difference between Rémi and Louise; the latter has just finished her studies and wants to socialize; Rémi wants to settle down. When Louise arrives home late and Rémi gets out of bed, he is in a bad mood, but not necessarily because he thinks his girlfriend should be less independent and only go out with him. To portray the man as the enemy would be one option; but Rohmer doesn’t do this; neither partner is happy with the other; both want to be with someone who enjoys doing what they do. This is symbolized by the way that after their nocturnal fight Rémi sits down to listen to her with his tennis racket on his knees (it is visible on a chair in the background as he hits himself). He thinks, ‘If you loved me as I loved you we’d be married’. She adds, ‘And divorced’ and then says of her frustration with her previous boyfriends: ‘After a while, they all wanted to marry me’. In 1984, her comment makes sense; 20 or 30 years earlier it would have been interpreted differently. She tells Rémi as she sits in his lap: ‘I think you can find better: someone who’d want to be with you constantly [that is, play tennis on Saturday mornings rather than go out late on Friday nights]. And if you find someone, and if you love them, I swear I’ll step aside. But it’ll be very painful, very . . .’ In this statement, Louise predicts, unwittingly, what will happen. When she finds someone else, Louise discovers physical attraction, but not companionship and shared interests. As she tells the illustrator (Laszlo Szabo), she doesn’t know where she feels at home: ‘When I’m in one I want to be in the other. It used to work in only one direction. But now the direction’s reversed’. Louise realizes that she likes being with Rémi and wants to return to him.57 On arriving home, Louise cannot find Rémi. She enters the living room and Rohmer films her looking lost in her own home, framed by the hallway and the doorway as she turns to look around. The film fades out on this image. When Rémi comes in, he finds her asleep on the sofa. A dim winter light illuminates the dark clothes, light grey décor and Mondrian poster. Rémi approaches the sofa slowly, as if touched by her vulnerability asleep. They both confess, but, whereas she says that she spent the night with someone unimportant, he says softly that he loves Marianne. The separating couple stand facing us in a long take as her face crumples while Rémi explains; Louise tries to hold steady, but she gives a devastating cry of despair in Rémi’s arms just before she leaves, making a sudden decision to grab some clothes. Upstairs, she phones Octave, fighting tears. She asks him to pick her up in Paris, then leaves in her big grey coat and with her blue scarf on and her pink scarf in her bag. The final scene is poignant and moving; not many films end with the break-up of a relationship. The film renders the pain of that break-up without flinching: how it comes about, what kinds of confusions it arises from and leads to. When one is young, one feels free to sleep with whomever one likes; no one will disapprove; but one may not know what

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to do with this freedom. The tender last scene between Louise and Rémi is sad and, importantly, sympathetic to them both. They are unsuited to each other, as Rémi insists: ‘We made each other miserable’. Conservative patriarchal attitudes do not lead Rémi to prefer Marianne to Louise; the film is not about a man trying to imprison a woman in marriage and suburban life; it is about two people in their 20s trying to cope with varying expectations about work, leisure time, children and family, and about how these expectations are going to fit with the formation of a heterosexual couple. The tone of Les Nuits de la pleine lune is melancholy, not ‘sarcastic’ or ‘pessimistic’, as Hertay (1998: 70) asserts. It considers Louise’s follies graciously, showing what makes her act the way she does. Adrian Martin acknowledges the film’s capacity to move viewers: ‘So, in a sense, she deserves everything she gets. Yet Rohmer manages to make us feel a little sad and sorry for her’ (1985: 66).58 Rohmer’s remarkable triumph with Les Nuits de la pleine lune is in his close work with Ogier, Karyo and Luchini, who make their characters and their problems vital and authentic; the film shows them sympathetically human, with the shortcomings that everyone has. It is not a cynical or satirical portrait of self-obsessed young people, but a sensitive account of a generation dealing with changing expectations and attitudes. Rohmer was 30 or 40 years older than the actresses in the Comédies et proverbes when he made them, but he collaborated closely with them, responding to their concerns. Two related things distinguish Rohmer’s 1980s films from his 1960s films. The first is the extent to which the viewpoints of the later films are shaped by their closeness to the female protagonists. As in the 1960s, Rohmer films the social world he discovers, but the Comédies et proverbes are less critical of the women than the Six contes moraux are of the men; his compassion encompasses the women’s dilemmas in ways that stretch beyond the consideration given to the men’s prevaricating. The second is the way in which, as a result of the films’ tender tolerance of their heroines’ desires, the Comédies et proverbes survey relationships more deeply and widely than the earlier series, exploring the personal and social dimensions of the characters’ lives. The two series represent different experiments with storytelling. Like the three earlier Comédies et proverbes, Les Nuits de la pleine lune deals with the fact that, by the early 1980s, it is not always obvious what constitutes a normal heterosexual relationship. Louise in Les Nuits de la pleine lune, like Anne, Sabine and Marion in the earlier films, struggles to work out what type of independence is possible in a relationship. As Philippon concludes, Louise is not capricious in her wish to have two homes; ‘she displays sincere reactions which make her successive setbacks all the more moving’ (Philippon 1984: 40). Louise loses Rémi in the moment that she discovers that she cannot have both freedom and security; some compromise is necessary.

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Les Nuits de la pleine lune, like La Femme de l’aviateur, Le Beau mariage and Pauline à la plage, ends by echoing its beginning. The opening pan starts at the station and takes in the wintry landscape in front of the apartment blocks. Visible are unfinished buildings, cranes and newly planted shrubbery. The camera arrives at the front door of an apartment block and tilts up. The final shot is a reprising pan, which follows Louise from the front door until she goes around the street corner, heading towards the station. The end repeats the beginning not only with its pan but also with Louise’s telephone call to Octave. The matched opening and closing shots hint at circularity and entrapment, while the telephone call to Octave intimates that, though her relationship with Rémi may be finished, other possibilities exist.59 Rohmer calls the matched beginnings and endings in the first four Comédies et proverbes ‘an homage to Marcel Carné’; Hôtel du Nord (1938), for example, ends as it begins, with a young couple crossing the iron footbridge over the canal.60 The symmetrical endings of the first four Comédies et proverbes suggest that the characters are trapped. As Rohmer says: ‘you can see the similarity of the situations; the character always fails in their enterprise; the film begins in the place where it ends’ (Mauro 1985: 92). Rohmer wanted the matched beginnings and endings to have ‘a little bitter quality, disenchanted, ironic’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 22). He describes them as a way of suggesting that ‘reality always brings you back to the place at which you begin’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 9). Yet he insists: the stories have a rather unhappy ending, but anyway it’s an apparent black that is really white, an evil which is a good. The Moral Tales ended happily, but that was only a transitory white which was perhaps a black insofar as this happy ending closed, stopped the story, and dropped the character back into his banality, whereas in the Comedies and Proverbs the ending is more open . . . [it] leaves the door open for something more positive. (Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 220) Nevertheless, despite Rohmer’s insistence that the circular endings are not necessarily pessimistic, the emphasis is on disappointment, and he decided that he wanted to finish the series ‘in a more open and optimistic way (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 22). In 1983, Rohmer had full confidence in his methods of researching, planning, recording actors, re-writing and rehearsing, so much so that he wrote treatments for Les Nuits de la pleine lune and L’Ami de mon amie (1987) in the summer of 1982, just before shooting Pauline à la plage. However, while editing Les Nuits de la pleine lune, at the beginning of 1984, Rohmer began to worry that his way of working could make his films lifeless.61 Les Nuits de la pleine lune was a success, but, after this, Rohmer decided he needed a break from filmmaking where he tried to control everything.

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5 Comédies et proverbes – Part 2 Le Rayon vert (1986) On previous films, Rohmer often took a long time to research everything while writing the scripts. He prepared meticulously, rehearsing actors at length to achieve precise effects. He created a complex intertwining of patterns that helped form the film’s perspective on its protagonists. However, when he finished Les Nuits de la pleine lune (1984), which he shot, like Le Beau mariage (1982) and Pauline à la plage (1983), on 35mm film with a finished script and schedule, he was frustrated with this way of working: For La Collectionneuse, I hadn’t written a script, but simply, day-by-day, loose pages, consisting solely of the dialogue. Since then, my films have become increasingly scripted. There’s not a single moment of improvisation in Les Nuits de la pleine lune, where I even wrote the telephone responses that we don’t hear. And so to avoid being pigeonholed in this Guitry-Pagnol category, I made, as a diversion, a holiday film last summer. I wrote absolutely nothing, not before, not after and not during the filming. (Mauro 1985: 91) The film Rohmer shot in the summer of 1984 ‘as a diversion’ was Le Rayon vert, which became the fifth of the six Comédies et proverbes.1 Rohmer filmed Le Rayon vert on 16mm without script or schedule, almost as a documentary. He did some research before shooting, in the form of a photographic study of young women in Biarritz.2 However, whereas for earlier films Rohmer visited locations several times, incorporating as much as possible of the setting into the films, for Le Rayon vert he did little preparation. He filmed the opening scenes in his offices (Durel 1986:

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39), then carried on shooting Le Rayon vert in the order that it appears on screen, apart from the sequence in the Alps, which they filmed before going to Cherbourg (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1987: 17). Rohmer did not plan to go Cherbourg; the idea came from Rosette (who plays Françoise), who invited them to visit her family (as her character invites Delphine) while filming in Paris (Saada 1986: 25). Rohmer says: we filmed an entire sequence in the house of people [Rosette’s family] I didn’t know and in a town [Cherbourg] that I didn’t know either; I had refused to make an advance journey to get to know them, because there was a risk that the essential things would be said at that first meeting, to the detriment of filming, where the freshness of everything would have been lost. (Mauro 1985: 93) Whereas for previous films Rohmer had tape-recorded conversations with the actors and then worked the resulting material into his script, for Le Rayon vert he started with an idea: Marie Rivière would improvise with her family and friends and her story would have some parallels with Jules Verne’s The Green Ray (1882). They planned the final scene; cast and crew improvised the rest (Mauro 1985: 92).3 Rohmer cast some performers before filming began; in other cases, he took what he found on location. Such was the case with the group discussing Verne’s novel; Rohmer met them in Biarritz, including Dr Friedrich Günther Christlein, a physics professor from Munich University, on holiday with his wife, who explains the green ray. The casting of Joël was another instance of Rohmer leaving things open. A friend of Arielle Dombasle’s, credited as Carita, plays the Swedish woman, Lena, but, Rohmer explains, The scene with the boy [Joël Comarlot] in Biarritz was completely improvised because he didn’t even know what we wanted from him. I met him three minutes before filming, because the person who was supposed to come wasn’t there. I found this boy on the beach, I put him next to the ‘Swedish’ girl and I said to him: ‘Sit yourself down at this table and chat up these two girls’. (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1987: 17) Rohmer cast Vincent Gauthier as the young man whom Delphine meets in Biarritz station. Rivière and Gauthier improvised scenes together in June 1984, before filming began. They then filmed in July and August; Rivière explains that they would rehearse in the evening shots that they were going to film the next day, although they did not rehearse everything. As Rohmer explains, When one decides to give the actors freedom, one can’t tell them: put yourself in this or that place. As a result, there are a lot more scenes with people sitting and scenes in which the frame changes, thanks especially

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to the use of the zoom lens. There is a style of reportage different to my other films. (Ostria 1986: 35) Rohmer had four continuous collaborators working with him: director of photography Sophie Maintigneux; Claudine Nougaret on sound, holding the boom and carrying the Nagra sound recorder; production manager Françoise Etchegaray; and Rivière, the lead actress. Etchegaray describes them team as ‘the club of five’. As Maintigneux recalls, the gamble was to film a fiction film like ‘a holiday film, to follow Delphine with complete freedom, and above all complete improvisation’ (Durel 1986: 39).4 Rohmer acknowledges the risks: There are things in improvisation that annoy me, odd habits, tics. It results in a kind of loss of time and content so that instead of giving more fluidity to the narrative, one gets lost in completely pointless digressions . . . So, I set off trying to avoid these pitfalls (which I haven’t avoided completely, because at some points it appears forced). But I did try to avoid them, while filming as I usually film. In the end, I nearly succeeded because in my films there is normally a placement of the actors, which isn’t there. (Ostria 1986: 34) Yet, he says, ‘Le Rayon vert is completely improvised. Nothing was written. There is not a trace of writing. In certain cases, the actors improvised totally; they said what they wanted to say’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 17), and he insists that, ‘in the discussion scenes, people improvised completely. I said nothing. Or I gave vague indications’ (Ostria 1986: 35). Some scenes were more difficult to film because the actors had to deliver lines that were essential to the plot, ‘moments where actors vaguely knew where they were going’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1987: 17); for example, while filming the scene where Delphine’s friends offer her advice, Rohmer told Manuela (Lisa Heredia) to try to keep the improvised discussion on the right track (Ostria 1986: 35). Rohmer explains: She says things that move forwards in a precise direction. But at this moment here, I had spoken about it with Marie. It was she who had told me these stories of the cards; the stories with the colour green came from me. Everything is mixed up. As far as Béatrice Romand is concerned, she knew nothing. She arrived like that and all that she knew was that the other woman didn’t want to go to a holiday club. (Ostria 1986: 35)5 Rohmer relied on Rivière’s improvisations, of whom Maintigneux observes, ‘Marie, in her life, is a bit like Delphine. And Rohmer knew that of course’ (Durel 1986: 39). The character may have some of the actress’s outward characteristics, but Rivière denies any psychological resemblance: ‘Delphine

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doesn’t resemble me. I thought she was particularly annoying, especially at the start of the film’ (Carbonnier and Revault d’Allonnes 1986: 16). For Rohmer, I’ve found that throughout my life as a filmmaker I’ve met people who have inspired me. This isn’t the first time. In particular, I’d met the actors in La Collectionneuse and above all Daniel Pommereulle, who, although he doesn’t play the main role, represents the spirit of the film. Actresses like Béatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle, Pascale Ogier are very inspiring people, with strong personalities. So, I need actors who have strong personalities. In the two last films [Le Rayon vert and 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle], it wasn’t only that people could say their lines, but that they could project a romantic quality, albeit comic, and bring with them a whole world to comic and dramatic situations. (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19) In the scene with the retired taxi driver, Rivière and Rohmer collaborate as documentary interviewer and filmmaker. In a small urban garden, Delphine sits on the left of a table, the retired taxi driver (Basile Gervaise) sits facing the camera and his granddaughter (Virginie Gervaise) sits opposite him, with her back to the camera; on her right sits a young man (René Hernandez). They talk about the weather and then about holidays. The conversation starts when Delphine asks the pensioner, from off-screen, ‘What do you do for your holidays?’ When asked why he did not enjoy the mountains, the taxi driver chuckles – the ravines scared him. He insists on the charms of Paris – a park, the Seine: ‘Who needs the sea? I get into water up to my ankles and I’m scared. I can’t swim’. He laughs and the scene ends. The taxi driver’s account of his lack of holidays surprises Delphine; his love of Paris and his final declaration that he cannot swim evoke a life different to the one she is living. His speedy, automatic delivery comes with a smile that hovers on his face; he may not have had many holidays, but he exudes warmth, contentment and a settled quality, all things that elude Delphine. Rohmer describes this scene with the retired taxi driver as ‘pure improvisation’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1987: 17), and in scenes such as these one sees evidence of Rohmer acknowledging his inheritance of Jean Rouch’s practices, in particular Chronique d’un été (1962). Le Rayon vert chronicles a summer, with Rohmer and Rivière collaborating as Rouch and Marceline do in Chronique d’un été, asking other people about their lives. Rouch’s influence on Rohmer was important; in 1986, he said, ‘I have always dreamt of making an improvised film, as has been done by colleagues, in particular, Jacques Rivette or Jean Rouch, whom I really consider a master in this area’ (Ostria 1986: 34). Marceline’s life, work and unhappiness form the centre of Chronique d’un été; to begin with, Rouch’s film uses her as an interviewer asking various people ‘How do

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you live?’ and ‘Are you happy?’, just as Le Rayon vert uses Delphine as a collaborating catalyst, the camera panning and zooming in response to the conversation.6 Rohmer encouraged Maintigneux to move the camera whenever necessary (Ostria 1986: 35), agreeing beforehand that she should use the zoom to frame shots in response to the improvisations of Rivière, her friends and her family (Etchegaray 1986: 27). The improvised mealtime scenes include the scene in which Delphine visits her two sisters (Rivière’s sisters, Dominique and Isabelle) and her niece (Laetitia Rivière) looks at the camera for about three seconds. One of the two long improvised scenes, when Delphine talks to her friends, revolves around the confrontation between Delphine and Béatrice. Both actresses have distinctive individualities. Romand has an exceptional energy and force; Rivière’s tendency to yield to low spirits is accompanied by the potential for both an airy silliness and a genuine searching for authenticity in social roles.7 Both actresses use expressive gestures. When Béatrice’s monologue harasses Delphine, the latter demonstrates her agitation: she raises her eyebrows, shrugs her shoulders, speaks with long pauses, presses her chest or head and pushes up her hair, as if Béatrice gives her a headache. A nervous Delphine interjects, close to tears; Béatrice snaps, enunciating syllables, emphasising consonants and vowels, her vigorous harangue penetrating Delphine’s defences. When Delphine begins a fey speech about her beliefs with ‘Je crois, je crois, je crois, je crois’, she holds her fingers flat against her chest, inclines her head to one side and looks up in a pose of exaggerated romance, carried away in a vague dream, the opposite of Béatrice’s pragmatism. One celebrated mealtime scene is that in which Delphine explains her vegetarianism to Françoise’s family in Cherbourg.8 At lunch in the garden, the baffled family interrogate Delphine because she does not conform to their sense of what is normal. Her distracted justification – ‘a lettuce is a friend’ – is so humorous and eccentric that we can understand the family’s reaction. Rivière begins her explanation cautiously; but, as the discussion continues, her excitability increases, peaking as she argues that everyone should give up meat. The humour comes from Delphine’s awkwardness in social situations; her whims irritate people. However, although the family have welcomed Delphine to their holiday home, at the first sign of her difference to them they ignore her feelings. The surface holiday charm and relaxed meal do not disguise their intolerance of Delphine’s apparent headin-the-clouds romanticism. The scene exemplifies Delphine’s displacement, but it also implies that her hosts share some responsibility for their separation from her, unaware of their hardness towards her. In doing so, the film exposes French familial conformity as a pressure. Here, Le Rayon vert communicates vivid and precise distinctions and discriminations within the French middle classes, emphasising attitudes towards order and social cohesion, and the conservative ritualistic quality of some French middleclass obsessions, such as mealtimes and holidays.

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Despite its unusual production, Le Rayon vert has a structure based on repeated activities, patterns and motifs; examples include the recurrence of green and red, the playing cards, the music, the references to the green ray and, interlaced with the improvised group scenes, sequences showing Delphine alone.9 Le Rayon vert follows Delphine for all but one short passage, during which she sits alone while Béatrice, Manuela and Françoise talk about Delphine’s relationship with Jean-Pierre being finished and Delphine being single for two years. This moment allows us to know that when Delphine speaks to Béatrice and the girl in Cherbourg she lies about her relationship with Jean-Pierre. Delphine does not confess that she has given up on him until she talks to Lena in Biarritz.10 Yet this information prompts empathy for Delphine, enabling an understanding of the process by which she lets go of her attachment to her ex-boyfriend. Apart from that one separation, the film follows Delphine sitting down with people or walking alone in the three places where she goes for a holiday (Cherbourg, La Plagne and Biarritz).11 In Cherbourg. Delphine dawdles along a country path, buffeted by a wind that agitates trees and bushes. She zigzags along a path bordering fields and nearby cliffs. Her faded pink plimsolls offset the surrounding greenery and the blues of her outfit. Rivière’s gait has a long stride and, with the wind blowing around her, her ambling suggests frailty and indecisiveness. When she comes to a crossroads in the rough track, she walks up to a gate and looks over it. She wanders off, but, unsure of the direction she wants to take, she hesitates, then circles back, until she sees a narrow path between two tall hedges, its tunnel-like entrance just visible. She pauses, then enters it. As she does so, she touches the hedges around her, engaging with the leaves as she disappears into the foliage. Delphine continues to touch the overhanging ferns and flowers, smelling her fingers afterwards. Stopping to draw a flowery branch towards her, she smells it and carries on. Rohmer cuts to a rickety wooden gate; Delphine walks into shot and puts her arms on it. A point-of-view shot follows: sea mist surrounds the field and trees, their tops blown by the wind. When the film returns to Delphine, she leans back against the gate. A glance to her right introduces another point-of-view shot of tree-tops. The noise has increased. Two other shots follow, showing bushes being blown; then Rohmer returns to a close shot of Rivière; she sobs, looking around as she does so. Delphine’s touching of the hedges suggests she finds some solace in her contact with nature, yet the sequence also implies that the countryside and dramatic weather make her sense of loneliness feel acute. The second sequence of Delphine’s wandering occurs in the Alps. After being approached in Paris by a pick-up artist, a dragueur, Delphine decides to do what she earlier scorned and visit Jean-Pierre’s apartment in La Plagne. As she has been there before with Jean-Pierre, the locals know her as Jean-Pierre’s girlfriend. When she arrives, though, she finds herself locked out of his apartment and decides to go for a walk. Delphine likes rambling, and people hike in the Alps in

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the summer, but this was not what she wanted for her holiday. Delphine makes her way up the mountain, reaching a small plateau with snow-capped peaks in the background. On her right, an expanse of snow stretches away. She stops to look at it, then bends down and touches it, as if savouring it. She rubs her hands, then walks to a promontory on her left. Her touching of the snow is a normal action for anyone finding snow in the summer, but it also indicates her reaching out for something and expresses her isolation.12 The intertitle ‘Mercredi, 1er août’ begins the seven-minute sequence that follows Delphine around Biarritz; she says nothing; background voices and the sea fill the soundtrack. The film shows her on Biarritz’s town beach, where the big Atlantic swells are too rough for swimming, and inside the apartment, where she sits on the bed eating, before putting away the photographs of unknown hosts.13 This long wordless sequence establishes the rhythm of Delphine spending time with herself, alone on a crowded beach, staying in a loaned apartment in a town where she knows no one. In this, her third trip differs from her visits to Cherbourg and La Plagne, where she knew either someone or the place. Biarritz is neither a place where she can socialize with a friend nor somewhere that holds memories of a previous relationship. With its crowds of holidaymakers, Biarritz absorbs her as an anonymous stranger.14 The intertitle ‘Jeudi, 2 août’ begins the third sequence of Delphine confronting nature alone, which also initiates the movement towards the story’s conclusion. On a balcony, she leans across the wall looking out to the foaming sea. Waves crash against the cliffs, flooding a cavern beneath her. When she looks down at the sea, a point-of-view shot shows the sea ebbing and flowing, its huge roar dominating the soundtrack. As with her walks in Cherbourg and La Plagne, her languid wandering along the cliffs in Biarritz expresses her loneliness and the way she inclines towards melancholy, but all three walks communicate her appreciation of the power and beauty of the natural world.

Le Rayon vert: Delphine watching the sea at Biarritz

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The three moments in nature occur at the limits of France. Sixteen kilometres from the Italian border, in the extreme southeast of France, La Plagne is a ski resort, 2000 metres up in the Alps, a long way from Paris, even further from Cherbourg in the extreme northwest of France. Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz are in the southwest.15 Delphine’s search across France, her morose wandering, provides an escape from the difficulties she encounters when socialising. Her contact with nature culminates in her sight of the green ray, but her contact with nature is not a religious epiphany; it is part of her search for something to lift her spirits, to find, while on holiday, some form of emotional nourishment. In its depiction of a lonely woman finding in natural surroundings a refuge from a society that she feels excludes her, Le Rayon vert has parallels with Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950).16 One moment that prepares for Ingrid Bergman’s experience on Stromboli’s volcano occurs when she smells the grass growing from a wall and puts it in her mouth. José Luis Guarner comments that it is at this moment that Bergman’s Karin starts to realize that she cannot communicate with the people of the island: ‘the only possible dialogue is between her and Stromboli’ (1970: 40). Robin Wood sums up Stromboli’s ending in words that apply to Delphine: ‘If the actuality of her future is still unclear, she has grasped the need for wholeness of being, for a living relationship with the processes of nature and existence . . . she has learned to distinguish her real needs from more transient and superficial (yet powerfully seductive) ones’ (1974: 11). Le Rayon vert uses Delphine’s contact with nature to express her loneliness, but also to represent her desire to avoid social pressures and discover a new sense of self. A large part of the film focuses on the way in which Delphine’s daydreams and desires grow in response to her social context and the film attends to the links between her imagination and her actuality by integrating allusions to its own fictional status. The patterns and motifs relate to this subject. Green recurs often in costumes, settings and props, as does its opposite, red.17 When, for example, Delphine walks to her friends’ garden, various green objects catch the eye: a car, trees, hedges, a gate and, on a lamppost, a small green poster: ‘Regain contact with yourself and others’, it advises, ‘Group or private sessions’. When Manuela says she can read omens, reaching behind her to retrieve Elle’s horoscope, Delphine explains: ‘What’s weird is that I met a medium, a friend of mine, who told me that green would be my colour for the year. It’s really weird but since then – perhaps I’m just noticing it – I keep running into green things’. Manuela teases her about meeting ‘a little green man’. Béatrice says of green, ‘Ah yes, it’s the colour of hope’. In Biarritz, when Delphine wanders around, she wears a billowing red raincoat and carries a red bag. As she hurries down some wide steps, her red cape stands out against the greenery of the cliffs, the grey stone and the grey-blue sea. As she passes children poking around in rock pools, her red cape corresponds with a man’s red t-shirt. The repeated

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colours give the film a visual unity, but they also raise expectations that the title will fulfil its promise of a vision of a green ray. Rohmer connects Le Rayon vert’s interest in a rare and ephemeral atmospheric light effect to the film’s grainy image. In some scenes, the lighting scheme disregards the conventional practice of ensuring continuity between adjacent shots. For example, when Delphine meets Manuela in the Square Brignole-Galliera, Rohmer places next to each other a shot of Delphine sitting in the colonnade of the Palais Galliera, the stone and stucco a brilliant white, devoid of shading or texture, and a shot of Manuela reading her book whilst leaning against a pillar in the sunlight. In the latter shot, the interior of the colonnade is visible, but darker, more shadowy, the walls more mottled than they appeared in the previous shot. The grain recurs throughout Le Rayon vert, particularly in interior scenes; for instance, during the scene in Biarritz station, the underexposure evokes the friability of the photographic image and the fragility of Delphine’s daydreams. The last shot of the film is the final example of the image’s grainy texture, a slow-motion shot of the horizon, across which flies a bird. The inclusion of visible grain emphasizes verisimilitude, but it also foregrounds the image quality itself. It is part of the film’s artistry because the representation of natural light is appropriate to the film’s emphasis on transient epiphanies, a chance meeting in a station, a chance vision of the green ray and life decisions made in an instant. The final shot is accompanied by a quartet playing an expanded version of the violin solo that is heard on five other occasions: during the opening credits; when Delphine finds the Queen of Spades in the street; when she sees the green poster advising her to regain contact with herself; when she finds the Jack of Hearts on the rocks at Biarritz; and when Delphine sees the beach shop called ‘Rayon Vert’, its name spelled out in large green capital letters, her sighting of which prompts her to ask Jacques to accompany her to watch the sunset.18 The origin of Le Rayon vert’s music lies outside the fictional world, a rare example in Rohmer’s work of conventional film music.19 However, its use is restrained: by not using the music to underline Delphine’s emotions when she is alone, Rohmer is able to use it to help make the conclusion more moving. He sets this up by linking the music to the colour green and the playing cards. Thus, when Delphine finds the first card, accompanied by the violin music, she passes a green lamppost; when she finds the second card, music and card signal the approaching change in her fortunes. Rohmer cuts from the close-up of the Jack of Hearts to the five people sitting on the wall. Delphine approaches from a path behind them as one woman asks another ‘You still reading Jules Verne?’ These words end the wordless seven-minute sequence of Delphine alone in Biarritz. Delphine passes the group and pauses, within earshot; one woman comments, ‘Until I picked up this book and read The Green Ray, I found him [Verne] paralysing. But now I think that The Green Ray is amazingly

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interesting’. The camera returns to the group on the wall; Delphine looks up, listens and sits down. One woman says: ‘I read The Green Ray; I thought it was very good. It seemed to me a kind of fairy tale, like a fairy tale. The heroine is a fairy-tale heroine’. On that phrase, Rohmer cuts to Delphine, who is listening as the woman continues off-screen: ‘She’s as simple as Cinderella or Snow-White’. (When Béatrice reads the horoscope to Delphine, she says that Delphine is ‘unaware that you’re just waiting for Prince Charming’.) The film cuts back to a frontal medium shot of three of the women as they continue talking about Verne’s The Green Ray and its Scottish setting. They ask the white-haired woman next to them if she has read it and she says that she has. The woman who started the conversation explains her fascination with it in terms that describe Delphine’s story and the film that we are watching: ‘I found it extraordinary, because it’s a love story, a romance, with characters who are . . .’ As she hesitates, the middle woman adds ‘searching’, and the first speaker agrees: ‘Yes, searching for something’. They then ask the older woman if she has seen the green ray and she says she has seen it three times: ‘At the last stage, there was a kind of pale green shaft like a sword blade, a horizontal beam, very pretty but extremely brief’. They comment that they won’t see it today, ‘too hazy’; a shot of the setting sun confirms this. When the film returns to the group, one woman explains Verne’s legend: ‘That when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others’ too’. A cut to a close shot of Delphine indicates that she has heard these comments: ‘That’s what happened to his heroine, who never sees the green ray, but who finally reads her own feelings and those of the young man she’s met’. When Rohmer cuts back to the group, one woman asks the man if he is familiar with the green ray. He stands up in front of them and explains it. In this sequence, the film acknowledges its own source material, yet without diminishing our confidence in Delphine’s quest. Indeed, it deepens sympathy for Delphine by integrating the film’s references to green, superstitions, horoscopes, playing cards, fairy-tale heroines and Prince Charming, acknowledging Delphine’s story as fiction yet encouraging us to believe what Delphine believes: that a fairy-tale chance meeting might lead to love. The scene increases our awareness of the shape of the film, mimicking Delphine’s awareness of the rational explanation of why she has been single for two years. Through its self-awareness, the film balances ironic detachment with its romantic ending. Le Rayon vert’s steady pace communicates a strong sense of Delphine passing her summer searching for something. The intertitles (from Monday 2 July to Saturday 4 August) mark the passing of Delphine’s holiday period, reminding us of her awareness of her holiday disappearing. This slow pacing reaches its zenith with the wordless sequence in Biarritz, which the Jules Verne discussion ends; after this, the film begins to prepare for the reward of the cathartic ending. When Delphine meets, at Biarritz station, a sympathetic and attractive

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young man, Jacques (Vincent Gauthier), their dialogue comes as an exquisite liberation: the rhythm of their conversation is based on him asking questions that she doesn’t answer; not answering gives him space not to pressurize her. His warmth, diffidence, gentle voice and careful listening prompt an unusual forwardness from Delphine.20 The last scene builds to its moving climax. As they sit waiting for the sunset, he asks if she will come to Bayonne with him. She thinks he’s ‘kidding’, but he insists not. Relaxed and open for the first time in the film, Delphine’s legs fall to her side; the combination of her folded long legs and a low seat causes their knees to touch; instead of pulling her leg away, Delphine brushes his knee with her hand. The screen fades to black; when it fades in, the sun is touching the horizon. The music returns; the sun’s warm light illuminates the couple. As she talks about the green ray, the camera zooms into a closer two-shot, framing their heads and torsos. The alternation between setting sun and watching couple increases in speed and Delphine starts to sob. At the last moment, the green ray flashes on the horizon. Delphine points and cries out with joy. Planning and preparation versus chance and luck: most stories balance hints about what may happen with surprises. Le Rayon vert intertwines its intrigue about whether Delphine will meet anyone with an internal doubling that is as self-conscious as Hitchcock’s cameos. Rohmer compares the control that he has over his characters with the ways in which we tell ourselves stories, connecting the stylistic patterning to Delphine’s comments about astrology, her finding of the cards, her seeing green things, talking about green and to Verne’s novel and its legend about the revealing power of the green ray.21 By including the discussing of Verne’s The Green Ray and by cutting to Delphine as someone describes Verne’s heroine, Helena, as a ‘fairy-tale heroine’, ‘as simple as Cinderella or Snow-White’, Rohmer brings to the fore the connection between the film’s own subject and method, as Alain Philippon notes: It is impossible not to see in this struggle between the failure and success of the encounter [between Delphine and Jacques] (what we’ll call here a very Rohmerian ‘suspense’) a fictional equivalent of the reality of filming: the moment of grace is also that of the unpredictable encounter between camera and actors, all the more reason for this in a cinema which gives them more than their due. (1987: 5) In Le Rayon vert, Rohmer incorporates echoes of his attempts to film a green ray, to film Le Rayon vert, and Helena Campbell’s efforts in Verne’s story to see a green ray.22 The themes of the film develop from his thinking about chance and control; Delphine’s story centres on the reconciliation of planning and leaving things to luck. Rohmer tried to abandon control and maintain a flexible openness to chance, spontaneity and improvisation.

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In retrospect, the move from the pessimism of Les Nuit de la pleine lune’s ending to the optimism of Le Rayon vert’s ending can be seen as a result of Rohmer’s decision, aged 64, to revitalize his working methods. Though it lacks the polish of previous Comédies et proverbes, Le Rayon vert is one of Rohmer’s greatest films.23

4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1987) Le Rayon vert is a film that was very successful from all points of view. It was easy to film. There was no waste. It was easy to edit. Moreover, I liked it, although I thought that the public would not like it. . . . That was the reason why I immediately started work on 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle: I wanted to see if I could keep things going well in this way. . . . I wanted to verify that these principles would work again, for another experience. (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19–20) The principles Rohmer refers to are those of incorporating a form of documentary into a fiction film. He re-applied these principles to 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, before completing the Comédies et proverbes with L’Ami de mon amie (1987). Straight after finishing Le Rayon vert, Rohmer filmed ‘The Blue Hour’ episode of 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle. For Rohmer, Le Rayon vert and 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle were both ‘amateur films’: ‘one is a holiday film, the other is a weekend film’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 22), yet the holiday film differed from the weekend film: It [4 Aventures] was fictional documentary or documentary fiction, as much as Le Rayon vert and, in certain ways, more. But, at the same time, not everything is so simple; there are some things which are derived from a reality which I myself didn’t know, and there are others which are invented. (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 9) He filmed the four sections of 4 Aventures separately, with little advance planning.24 Sophie Maintigneux returned to photograph 4 Aventures and she recalls that Rohmer wrote a script for 4 Aventures in a way that he did not for Le Rayon vert, though he left some things open to chance (Saada 1986: 25). According to Rohmer, everything was improvised in Le Rayon vert, while in 4 Aventures only the shoplifting scene was (Sterritt 1988: 19); he insists, ‘I consider myself the sole author of these stories’ (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 10). However, Joëlle Miquel, who plays Reinette, provided the germ of inspiration for 4 Aventures (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19).25 She told Rohmer some stories which gave him ideas, though this was two

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years before he made the film and before either of them had any idea about making a film together. Rohmer says: The story about the waiter is true up until the moment when Mirabelle arrives. Concerning the blue hour, it was she who told me about it; I didn’t know about it . . . the third story is improvised as far as the dialogue is concerned but the plot is mine. The last story is based on a comment by Reinette. . . . But there were maybe ten other stories that I didn’t use. (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 10) 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle was organised very quickly, because I met Reinette and I found her extraordinary. One of the first things that she told me was ‘I organise my life according to principles – it’s very good. What for example? When I decide something, I do it. When I decided not to speak, I didn’t speak’. And it was from that comment that this episode came. (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19) Filming again with lightweight equipment and a small crew, Rohmer embraced spontaneity; for the sequence set in a supermarket, he decided to film there the day before shooting. And he made 4 Aventures so cheaply that he did not take out insurance because the insurance would have cost more than the whole film (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 12). Unlike Le Rayon vert, though, Rohmer wanted 4 Aventures to have a ‘didactic side’, to be a thesis on moral values (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 18). As he explains: Joëlle Miquel told me some stories which had happened to her, and she talked about this ‘Blue Hour’. Her way of re-enacting these events coincided with one of my preoccupations. I wanted to make a film in which there was one girl with principles, who would be somewhat rigorous, even a little strict, and another girl who, on the contrary, was not encumbered by principles at all, someone who would be more antiauthority. At the start, I wanted to have this opposition, this debate.26 The strict country girl begins more natural and the city girl more sophisticated, but the film proceeds to challenge these definitions and ends by chastising inflexibility. In this, it resembles a fable by Grimm or Perrault, both of whom Reinette mentions, or something like The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. The characters’ names and the film’s title also evoke children’s tales. As Sheila Johnston (1988: 14) observes, Rohmer named the two characters after fruit: Reinette is an apple; Mirabelle is a plum. Richard Mayne (1988: 17) suggests that the title would be better translated as The 4 Adventures of Pippin and Plum. Rohmer wanted to make the film resemble a parable: ‘I replaced psychology with morality. It is what we hear all the

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way through, the question of rights and responsibilities’ (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 11). In the last three adventures, the debate about morality is dramatized as a form of filmed comic street theatre; with each section, one senses the actors performing well-practised skits.27 The encounters in these three adventures are simple, the minor characters broadly sketched players in the type of comedy that had been absent from Rohmer’s films since ‘Place de l’Etoile’. The set themes of money and morality link the three adventures. ‘The Waiter’ is a droll piece. As a warm-up, this adventure uses the two men giving Reinette conflicting directions, then arguing about who best knows Paris. Philippe Laudenbach then gives his exaggerated performance as the eccentric waiter. He rejects Reinette’s 200-franc note as if he is mad, repeating several times, ‘I’ve got my eye on you’, before the young friends escape. This first part of the debate between the strict Reinette and the flexible Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) ends with a little ironic gag: Reinette returns the next day to leave payment for her coffee but discovers that the waiter was a temporary fill-in; he will never know that she returned the money. ‘The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler’ presents three opportunities to measure Reinette’s commitment to principles against Mirabelle’s willingness to bend the rules. First, Reinette gives a beggar some money. The two friends then discuss the principle of giving money to beggars; Mirabelle reasons that there are too many beggars to give money to them all, though the film shows her changing her mind the next day. Mirabelle then tries to help a shoplifter in a supermarket by holding her bag for her. When she brings the stolen goods home, Reinette asks ‘why not let the police do their jobs?’ Adhering to her principles, Reinette denies herself champagne, salmon and duck. Following this is the scene in Montparnasse station, when Reinette’s generosity leads to her deception. She misses her train because she is delayed when she gives money to a hustler (Marie Rivière), then finds that she does not have change for a telephone call, so she has to ask people for change. Several people ignore her, thinking her a beggar, until, when she asks a man whom she does not know is a hustler, he steals her money. Upon meeting the first hustler again, now swindling money from another woman, Reinette confronts her, but when the latter starts crying she lets her keep the money. Each event shows Reinette imprisoning herself by sticking to her principles; no one benefits from her strictness. However, in the last adventure, ‘Selling the Painting’, Reinette’s strictness helps her. She takes on the absurd principle of promising not to talk for a whole day. Too poor to pay the rent, she decides to sell one of her paintings to a gallery owner, played by Fabrice Luchini as a pretentious windbag. The two women manipulate him by pretending that Reinette is a deaf-mute and Mirabelle manages to get Luchini to pay for the painting by repeating what Reinette said to her the day before: ‘Silence is the only

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attitude in front of painting’. The film ends with him telling a customer that the price for it is twice what he paid Reinette. The final credits indicate that Joëlle Miquel herself painted the surreal pictures of naked women that her character paints and which the gallery owner suggests ‘are closer to mature male fantasies. Very mature.’ Guy Austin comments that the gallery owner . . . ascribes them to the fantasies of a mature, indeed old, man rather than to a young girl. This ironic characterisation of Rohmer himself questions the status of fantasy in the film – are the paintings Reinette’s fantasies or are they, and Reinette and Mirabelle themselves, the fantasies of a middle-aged director? – and is only partly mitigated by the revelation in the closing credits that the paintings are the work of Joëlle Miquel, the actress who plays Reinette. (Austin 1996: 68) Judith Williamson, however, praises Rohmer’s depiction of women: Godard’s increasing, infuriating voyeurism contrasts strongly with Rohmer’s evident, and most unusual, liking and respect for them. He seems able to grasp physicality – a crumpled nightdress, sleep – precisely without sexualising it, in the same way that he produces a heightened sense of light and colour, movement and sound, the rhythms of speech and the nuances of expression. (Williamson 1988: 25) Rohmer’s films are open to the world and the people in it. As with Le Rayon vert, the story about two young women finding pleasure in everyday activities echoes the film’s production methods. As Rohmer comments: There are some subjects which gain from being filmed in 35mm, with a camera operator who creates a meticulous photographic style. That is the case with Les Nuits de la pleine lune or L’Ami de mon amie. In that situation, it is better to have a photographic style which complements the stylisation of the actor, which we don’t have in Reinette et Mirabelle. A less polished photography can create a bigger impression of reality: it’s the choice that one has to make; it’s a question of knowing what one wants to emphasise. (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 13) Williamson perceives Rohmer’s achievements in ‘The Blue Hour’: the grain of the film itself, pushed to the limit in night light, seems part of that magnifying glass Rohmer holds against the daily world to show the texture of life as one experiences it when young – at once expanded and intensified. (Williamson 1988: 25)

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For Rohmer, the attempt to film the blue hour was a gamble. He confesses that he did not use direct sound when the two young women get up in the middle of the night to listen for the silence just before the dawn chorus: In Brie [the area east of Paris], where we filmed, there were always night noises in the woods even though the dawn chorus had begun in the fields. To find an absolute silence then one clear birdsong is very difficult. We made several attempts, using, in particular, the image track of a video camera as the sound track of the film; this allowed us to record for four hours at a time. But the problems with the microphones remained. (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 11) Maintigneux recalls that ‘it would have been easy to cheat on the soundtrack, but we filmed the scene during the exact blue hour, despite the enormous lighting problems that we encountered’ (Durel 1986: 39). Many filmmakers would have cheated; for Rohmer, though, documenting the experience is of immense value. Reinette uses the phrase ‘the Blue Hour’ to refer to the time between darkness and daylight; it can also refer to the time between daylight and darkness, the magic hour, famed for its attraction to photographers. This phenomenon brings for Reinette and Mirabelle a moment of heightened emotion; their shared experience of this rare natural occurrence provides the grounding for the three subsequent adventures, giving weight to the film and their friendship. Notably, the first adventure is the most visually elegant of the four, containing a higher level of patterning than the other adventures. At the same time, the thematic structure of this introductory section does not impose or dominate; their discussions about art, silence and the weather take place as if part of a first encounter. The scene of the two women mending the puncture exemplifies Rohmer’s ability to introduce a visual symmetry into a commonplace setting. One two-minute shot presents the girls’ work on the puncture, sitting in the grass, surrounded by tall greenery, the sound of insects and birds loud on the soundtrack. Two things secure one’s attention. The first is the difference in the women’s costumes: city girl Mirabelle wears black trousers and vest; country girl Reinette wears white blouse and skirt. Together they form a diagram of sophistication and innocence. The second is the large red plastic basin in the middle of the frame that matches Mirabelle’s red socks and cardigan, but stands out against the green grass and bushes. As in Le Rayon vert, Rohmer uses the simplest of means to introduce visual unity. This kind of low technique is deceptive: it looks simple, but its effect depends upon introducing overt stylization into quasi-documentary scenes. The single long take demonstrates documentary truth and Rohmer jokes about his own didacticism: the film mounts a mini-demonstration of how to mend a puncture. Yet he also appears fascinated by the curve of the inflated inner

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tube encircling the large red basin. If we notice the framing of the shot, the coordination within it of shapes, colours and performers, then we are noticing a form of visual harmony that counterpoints the instructional form of the long take of the women mending the puncture. Another example of Rohmer’s interest in formal patterning is evident in his use of ellipses. For instance, when Reinette tells Mirabelle that she hasn’t got a telephone but her neighbours have, the film does not show Mirabelle phoning her parents; instead, it cuts to a delightful framing of them dining outside beneath the pear tree, both dressed in red jackets. The ellipsis encapsulates Rohmer’s deft storytelling skills. The first thing Mirabelle says is how wonderful the silence is compared with Paris. Reinette observes that there are plenty of background sounds in the countryside. They discuss the silence: Mirabelle thinks silence does not exist in nature, but Reinette says that silence can be found in the minute before dawn, the blue hour. They agree to get up at 4 a.m. to listen to it. This first adventure combines its emphasis on patterns with a push towards documentary. For example, when Mirabelle comments on the ‘magnificent’ tree and Reinette explains that the pear tree was planted the day her grandmother was born, 100 years ago, the camera, which had been panning with them as they walked through the grass, tilts to reveal the splendid tree. When Reinette takes Mirabelle to meet her neighbours, the Housseaus, the film becomes a documentary about a farm, with Reinette explaining things about her home to Mirabelle, the ethnology student, our intermediary, a traveller meeting people and asking questions. The women’s experience of the blue hour culminates with their experience of the blue hour. They get up in crumpled nightgowns to stand in the field, listening like ghosts outlined against the night sky. When the noise of a passing lorry disturbs the quiet, Reinette becomes upset until Mirabelle promises to stay another night. The film points to a lesson here about sound design and sound recording that, as in Le Rayon vert, relates to the difficulties Rohmer had with recording the actual silence of the blue hour. Before their second, successful attempt to listen to the blue hour, Reinette gives Mirabelle the tour of the farm, followed by the charming sequence of Mirabelle and Reinette dancing together to 1980s electro pop, which concludes with shots of their feet shuffling around the muddy floor of the converted barn. As David Vasse (2007: 111) points out, missing the blue hour on the first night is an effective means of enabling Mirabelle to stay on, getting to know Reinette and her home. For the sequence in which they hear the blue hour, Rohmer uses a shot/ reverse-shot structure. Mirabelle comes outside on her own with a torch. She stands listening to the owls and toads. The film then cuts to a shot of Reinette coming out. Mirabelle holds the torch at her. Six alternating shots present them listening and motionless, the cutting between them increasing the moment’s suspense.28 Just as Mirabelle switches off her torch, the night

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animals quieten down. They look at each other while they listen. Then the birds start singing. Mirabelle runs to Reinette and they embrace. The sequence ends with the full dawn chorus and a pan across the sunrise on the horizon. The three remaining adventures have a fascinating freshness and spontaneity, but only here, at the moment of the blue hour, does Rohmer truly extend Le Rayon vert’s dynamic, capturing the ephemeral human experience shared by the two women.

L’Ami de mon amie (1987) By the time Le Rayon Vert was released, in September 1986, Rohmer had finished shooting 4 Aventures; then, before that film was released in February 1987, he had shot L’Ami de mon amie. Unlike his two previous films, though, L’Ami de mon amie, the last of the Comédies et proverbes series, was planned, with shooting script and schedule finished before filming began (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19). By early 1983, Rohmer had already decided to make a film that would repeat Pauline à la plage’s experiment with multiple points of view (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 22). In June 1984, he cast Emmanuelle Chaulet, whom he saw at an audition for theatre director Robert Corider, with whom she was training, but he did not shoot L’Ami de mon amie until June 1986, releasing it a year later in August 1987. Rohmer says that he was waiting for the completion of buildings in Cergy-Pontoise (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 10).29 However, in the two years between meeting Chaulet and shooting L’Ami de mon amie, he also took a break from making films with full scripts and schedules. During this period, Chaulet and Rohmer met for him to record their conversations. They began by meeting once a month, then increased the frequency until it was three or four times a week. Rohmer explains: Everything was written down in L’Ami de mon amie, but only after I’d found at least the actresses, if not the actors . . . I wrote the female roles after having had a long conversation with them, as I often do, and recorded them so as to copy their way of speaking. This however refers to the form and not the content. I also work on developing the characters, and ask the actress how she would react under certain conditions, and how she would express herself and how she would show her emotions. (Guerand 1987) Chaulet says that during their two years of conversations she suggested several things to Rohmer about her character, Blanche; for example, she thought Blanche, though shy, should have some sporting skill and she proposed windsurfing, to which Rohmer agreed (Thomas 2007: 226). As the second female lead, Rohmer cast Sophie Renoir, from Le Beau mariage; she

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recommended Eric Viellard and François-Eric Gendron, whom Rohmer had seen on television (Guerand 1987). The director did similar preparations with them (Hertay 1998: 135). He also took the actors to Cergy-Pontoise to rehearse, take photographs and make a preparatory film on Super-8: ‘for more than a year and half, during the shooting of 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, I went there at least once a month. Everyone felt good there’ (Guerand 1987). Chaulet remembers rehearsing ‘enormously on the set. Ten, fifteen, twenty times sometimes’ (Hertay 1998: 137). Whereas Rohmer had come up with the idea for La Femme de l’aviateur in the 1940s and for Pauline à la plage in the 1950s, he had the idea for L’Ami de mon amie after making La Femme de l’aviateur (Guerand 1987). To begin with, all he had was four people swapping partners, one of them a timid young woman; he developed the script by researching the location and talking to Chaulet and the others The film establishes its setting and characters from the opening; without credit music, the film takes us straight into its world. The credits introduce actors and characters one by one, with subtitles identifying them in their places of work or study: town hall, computer college, electricity company, chemist’s and art school. All five are in their 20s. The primary character, Blanche, lives at St Christophe, in the Belvédère block of flats. This handsome monumental building, built around a large colonnade, has a strong contemporary design, clean, white and unusual for a block of flats; Blanche describes it as a ‘palace’. Her apartment has a light airiness, which differs from the nineteenth-century Parisian apartments. Rohmer chose it and the location because he liked the architecture and layout of the new town: ‘Cergy was based on a traditional outline of intersecting roads, but is at the same time lively, liveable and not monocentric’ (Guerand 1987).30 During filming, Chaulet lived in her character’s apartment, the show home and the one finished apartment in the block. The Belvédère sits at the intersection between the centre of CergyPontoise and the parks and lakes in the middle of the loop formed by the River Oise. When Léa visits Blanche for the first time, Blanche shows her the views, towards the town on one side and the lakes and Paris on the other. From Blanche’s window, she can see a long footpath leading to the lakes, where, later, we see Blanche and Fabien enjoying themselves. As Léa admires the view, she jokes about using binoculars to watch Fabien as he windsurfs on the lakes. Blanche mentions that she also windsurfs. The setting of Cergy-Pontoise naturalizes the characters’ activities; Blanche and Fabien take advantage of the watersports that proximity to the lakes offer; they are able to walk or drive a short distance to the countryside, walking along a towpath by the river and into a nearby forest.31 Their shared enjoyment of these activities brings them together. There is an egalitarian quality to Rohmer’s decision to set L’Ami de mon amie in Cergy-Pontoise and to concentrate on young people with ordinary

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jobs (a contrast from Le Beau mariage’s comparison of Le Mans’s old town with its surrounding areas). Andrew Sarris praises Rohmer’s detailed depiction of a contemporary suburb: ‘the palpable reality of Cergy-Pontoise endows the characters with novelistic nuances unattainable in a hazier, more “universal” milieu. Like California, Cergy-Pontoise is NOW, whether we like it or not’ (Sarris 1988: 57). For Alain Hertay, though, L’Ami de mon amie can be appreciated as a huge description of how people occupy spare time, now dominant, in Western societies. From inconsequential games of seduction (Léa, Alexandre) to diverse sporting activities (Blanche, Fabien), the film presents the new narcissistic culture of the body in all its forms. (Hertay 1998: 91) Hertay, however, overlooks L’Ami de mon amie’s democratic qualities, one of which is its portrayal of timidity. Chaulet gives a selfless performance as the shy young Blanche, with a delicacy and fragility unusual in Rohmer’s work, different to the forthright personalities of Arielle Dombasle, Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, whose Delphine in Le Rayon vert feels lonely but whose moping has a romantic source and who is compelling and forceful in her own way. Blanche is like a nineteenth-century heroine, timid, sincere, loyal; the analysis of her character is profound, and Chaulet makes Blanche into a shy office worker whom any one of us might know or meet. The attractive young woman she befriends is different from her, in that she likes socialising and parties. Chaulet’s performance (and Rohmer’s scripting and filming) as Blanche catches just the right tone of shyness. Cinema thrives on charismatic performers with strong personalities; demonstrativeness and exhibitionism are the norm and films rarely show diffidence without turning it into pathology, complete with tics and quirks, if not abnormalities. In Chaulet, Rohmer found a collaborator willing to expose herself on screen, where to be a performer is to be ready to reveal parts of oneself. Her performance of reticence (though not insecurity) suits the story, its mood and its location. Rohmer makes no attempt to make her ordinary life either romantic and heroic or neurotic and repressed. She is a serious young woman, unable to participate in the banter that entertains Léa and Alexandre; when Léa and Alexandre joke and flirt in the café, Blanche stammers, so shy she is almost unable to speak. Alexandre is confident, though not arrogant; he has a sharp sense of humour and is more sensitive than he first appears. Just as the film makes it apparent that Léa and Fabien do not suit each other, so it provides evidence that Léa and Alexandre do. When they dine by the river, their quick-witted repartee amuses each other. Alexandre emerges as more honourable than one had assumed; confounding expectation, he explains that he is not a drageur.

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Hertay’s disparaging interpretation ignores the film’s sincere depiction of these young people; instead of taking seriously the film’s concern with their ordinary lives, Hertay (1998: 91) argues that L’Ami de mon amie continues Rohmer’s interest in showing ‘the primacy of appearance’ in a postmodern society. He perceives an obsession with physical appearance, a sign of the decadence of 1980s society that is characterized by ‘pragmatism and hedonism’ (Hertay 1998: 93). Instead of the harmless talk of friends about people they find attractive, Hertay sees the replacement of conversations about Marx and Pascal with ‘superficial’ conversations; but he disregards the ways in which Rohmer’s 1980s films are a refinement of his 1960s films. He also forgets how a dinner-time conversation about religion and Marxism might have been more common in 1969; he sees the ‘existential and intellectual idleness’ of the 1960s heroes being replaced in Rohmer’s 1980s films by frivolity (Hertay 1998: 93). He accepts that the new cycle has a ‘sociological quality’, but he nonetheless finds in the characters of L’Ami de mon amie only a representation of 1980s ‘indifference and narcissism’ (1998: 94), the perfect incarnation of the postmodern subject aspiring to a freedom stripped of any ideological dimension. Hertay’s interpretation of L’Ami de mon amie is not unusual. Schilling agrees with Hertay’s pessimistic interpretation of L’Ami de mon amie (2007: 145), while Katherine Dieckmann writes: The only reason to see L’Ami de mon amie is for Rohmer’s memorable use of an antiseptic, futuristic suburb of Paris called Cergy-Pontoise, the Antonioniesque landscape for the ’80s: sleek, white, full of malls and faux-historical architecture, and as vacant and sterile as the characters who populate it. (Dieckmann 1987: 63) Tester says of Cergy-Pontoise: ‘In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, here is a planned utopia that is utterly soulless’ (2008: 123); and ‘Rohmer has never filmed a place so humanly empty and soul destroying’ (2008: 135). Another writer concludes, ‘it’s about the vacuous lives of four upwardly mobile bores who live in Cergy-Pontoise, a French designer paradise’ (Sawtell 1988: 8). From this perspective, L’Ami de mon amie celebrates the so-called yuppie phenomenon of the 1980s; Philip French (1988: 41) describes the setting as ‘Yuppie-sur-Seine’, while Raymond Durgnat suggests that the culture depicted in L’Ami de mon amie ‘significantly resembles our yuppies and young fogeys’ (Durgnat 1988: 198).32 Hertay thinks the characters are obsessed with social climbing, suggesting that Blanche falls in love with an image of a man who is socially and economically superior (1998: 93). However, the characters come from the same socio-economic class; the film stresses that they work and socialize in similar spheres and know people in common. In general, the social class depicted in L’Ami de mon amie is average, neither rich nor poor.

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The problem with the argument about the film revealing postmodern narcissism is that it denies the characters (and those that they represent) their individuality. Preferring alienation and angst in portrayals of contemporary society, Hertay neglects the bright cheerfulness of Rohmer’s final entry in his Comédies et proverbes series. L’Ami de mon amie is not critical of any of its four main characters; it has none of the irony which works against the protagonists of the Six contes moraux. It does not show CergyPontoise as the representation of a hideous postmodern society, obsessed with hedonism and living amongst concrete brutalism. The film shows a part of society at ease with itself and its surroundings; it presents the landscape of the new town and its environs as a good place to live, portraying the genial rhythms of life in this new satellite of Paris, while avoiding the clichés of small-town or suburban life; these are suburbs neither of frustration and repression nor of poverty and deprivation. That is why, when Hertay argues that Blanche and Fabien’s first kiss, their moment of liberty, takes place not in the ‘confinement’ of Cergy-Pontoise, but in the countryside (1998: 97), he overlooks the larger point that the film is making about the proximity of town and country, an appealing convenience for them, as for many people. Both Blanche and Fabien express their liking of the nearby parks and lakes. Hertay mentions Renoir’s Une partie de campagne (1936) and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959) as precursors to Rohmer’s portrait of suburban leisure, but Blanche and Fabien also discuss their historic predecessors on the day that they realize their attraction to each other, part of an idyllic weekend spent together around the lakes, river and woods, where they swim, windsurf, picnic and stroll. These sequences convey a wonderful sense of people enjoying their weekend (and Rohmer shows a mixed crowd). The emphasis is on the ordinary, not the bourgeois or the yuppie: the film follows shots of Blanche and Fabien drying off after swimming with shots that show them sunbathing on the grass amongst the crowds, then shots of families picnicking, young and old people relaxing, talking, or playing in the water, children playing in a hammock. The sequence ends with Fabien and Blanche buying a hotdog and a beer from a stall. These images will be familiar to anyone who visits large urban parks at the weekend in summer, whether in the suburbs or city centres. The shots integrate Blanche and Fabien into the relaxing crowds and the viewpoint expressed by this sequence of leisure time enjoyed is neutral; nothing indicates a criticism of hedonism or an obsession with ‘the body’. The images show a happy combination of pleasurable human activity, successful urban planning and natural landscape. After eating, Blanche and Fabien walk into the woods. Blanche says that it is like travelling back in time, ‘when workers would picnic on the banks of the Seine’. The reference evokes continuity between past and present forms of suburban leisure, and, through it, Rohmer alludes to the Impressionist painters who elevated ordinary people to the subjects of art: Seurat, Renoir,

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Monet. Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884) depicts bathers relaxing by the Seine, a few miles east of Cergy-Pontoise. In Seurat’s painting, one can see the factory in the background, with chimneys representing the industrial landscape, suggesting that the bathers relaxing in the foreground may be workers from those same factories. During a discussion of Une partie de campagne, Gilberto Perez writes: The impressionists gave us a pastoral of the country outing. They chose, they accepted, the excursionist’s countryside near the city, and their way of painting highlights the transient, the fluid, the casual, the impression rather than the permanency – which suggests the visitor’s way of seeing and makes felt the momentariness of the enchantment they painted. (Monet in particular liked to give his painting the look of off-handedness and labored to dissemble his labors.) The impressionists painted leisure, not the leisure of the upper class but of the ordinary people: “a day off, a trip to the country, boats, smiling women in sunlight, flags, trees in flower – the impressionist vocabulary of images,” wrote John Berger, “is that of a popular dream, the awaited, beloved, secular, Sunday”’33 In L’Ami de mon amie, Rohmer acknowledges this precedent and films ‘a popular dream’ without snobbery or condescension, using similar images to the Impressionists. Blanche and Fabien enjoy their weekend leisure time as the people around them do: Rohmer does not criticize them or 1980s society; he documents both. Moreover, he strengthens the reference to the past and the industrial history of the landscape by including a shot that shows them passing a barge on the River Oise. The shot that includes the barge is just a few seconds long, but the allusion is there.34 When Blanche and Fabien are in the woods, Blanche looks up at the trees in the sunlight and, overwhelmed by the loveliness of the afternoon, starts crying. Fabien talks about his dream of meeting a girl in a forest, while the camera pans slowly around the trees. Blanche mentions that she is upset about her failure with Alexandre, but this is secondary to the experience of happiness and companionship that she shares with Fabien. In the forest clearing, Rohmer’s film expresses the ‘momentariness of the enchantment’, which Perez describes (1998: 205), during which Blanche and Fabien discover and act upon their desire for each other. Here, her dreams and passion are expressed through the sense she has that this moment of enchantment is inappropriate, both to her supposed desire for Alexandre and to Fabien’s relationship with Léa. She cries in the forest glade, in the arms of the man she loves, because she is overwhelmed by guilt and confusion about her own feelings. When they kiss, it comes as a tender relief. From them, the film cuts to a shot of her hallway with the bedroom at the end, where Fabien is dressing. In the next scene, Blanche in her office agrees to meet Léa at her apartment; Rohmer then repeats the

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hallway shot of Blanche’s flat. A few minutes ago (the day before) Fabien was in the hallway; this time it is his girlfriend, Léa, who has returned from holiday and is telling Blanche that she is back together with Fabien. This kind of repetition of framing and setting is typical of L’Ami de mon amie. Rohmer uses it, as he did on earlier Comédies et proverbes, to draw parallels between characters and their actions. The story is told as an ensemble comedy, with multiple points of view, though the film focuses on Blanche and her relationship with Fabien. Nevertheless, the film includes sequences that focus on Léa and Fabien; and then, towards the end, a longer passage that depicts the growth of Léa and Alexandre’s relationship. As in his previous ensemble film, Pauline à la plage, Rohmer uses coincidence in L’Ami de mon amie, something that is facilitated by Cergy-Pontoise. Its central complex of train station, town hall, shops and offices is like a ‘modern village’, as Fabien says to Blanche when they bump into each other twice on the same day. As with the other Comédies et proverbes, L’Ami de mon amie’s perspective on its characters is both ironic and sympathetic. That perspective is developed by the decision to set the film in Cergy-Pontoise, the layout of which resembles a giant board game. Thomas Ennis notes that Rohmer’s subtitle for the screenplay of L’Ami de mon amie was ‘the four corners’; during production, Rohmer told one of the actresses, ‘we are going to play the four corners’ (Ennis 1993: 122). As Ennis explains, four people take up positions in four corners; a fifth person tries to displace someone else by forming a new couple. At the start of the film, Blanche is the extra character; by the conclusion, it is Adrienne and two new couples have formed.35 The emphasis on the film’s game-like structure is heightened by Rohmer’s use of the town’s layout and his use of colours. The first shot shows a large green and blue building; this colour scheme introduces that of the film, based on the river and forest of Cergy-Pontoise.36 These colours recur in décor and clothing throughout the film; examples include the following: MM

MM

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The green and blue décor outside, near the town hall; the green wall behind Blanche, who is in a blue jacket; the blue wall behind Léa, who is in a green jacket. In the swimming pool, Blanche wears a green swimming costume with Léa in a blue one. Blanche has a blue hat and Léa a white one. Léa knows Alexandre; she says hello and introduces him to Blanche. They leave, but the camera stays and we see Alexandre push in another woman, Adrienne, with whom he has come to the pool. She too is in a blue swimsuit; Blanche wears green. Meeting in the town centre, Blanche wears a green skirt and Léa a green top.

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The morning after Blanche and Fabien’s night together, she wears a pale blue dressing gown; he wears a pale blue shirt, blue jeans and a dark blue jacket. After Léa’s return from holiday and after Blanche has slept with Fabien, the four of them go to a party. On arrival, Blanche finds Fabien and Léa canoodling. Noticeable at this awkward moment are Blanche and Léa’s opposing costumes, appropriate given their competing relationships with Fabien: Blanche wears a blue top and a white skirt; Léa wears a blue skirt and a white top. When Léa and Fabien greet Blanche, Rohmer stages it so that he stands between the two women. Alexandre chats to them at the party for a couple of minutes. He twice remarks that the blue suits Blanche, but at the film’s end she appears in green, the opposite of what she started in.

The repetition of blue and green climaxes in the final scene, during which the use of colours makes Rohmer’s waggish organization explicit; green and blue represent the coloured pieces in the game of relationships being played by the characters.37 The lead-in to the final scene starts when Blanche and Fabien agree to meet at the lakeside restaurant, then Léa and Alexandre also agree to meet there, choosing it to avoid Blanche. From them, Rohmer cuts to Blanche sitting at the restaurant table, in a green dress, waiting for Fabien. As Blanche leans back, the camera pans away from its close-up of her to a long shot of Léa and Alexandre walking across the bridge towards the restaurant. He is in a green polo shirt and she is in a blue top. They hesitate when they see Blanche at a distance. Léa gestures to Alexandre to hide by some bushes, which he does, and then she walks up to Blanche’s table, feigning surprise. Blanche is disturbed by Léa’s appearance as she is expecting Fabien. Léa joins her at the table. Behind them is the lake in full summer glory. Léa begins by attempting to confess her relationship with Alexandre, which developed after Blanche left them on Friday night. They both have something to hide from each other, but they are both mistaken in how important they think it is. Blanche looks upset when Léa says: ‘I might as well tell you right out: the other day . . .’ She does not finish because Blanche thinks she knows what Léa is about to say and interrupts. They talk at cross purposes for a few minutes, with first Blanche and then Léa getting upset, the latter when Blanche says that she slept with ‘him’ when Léa was on holiday. Throughout, Rohmer shoots them in a single long take, both facing forward, unable to read each other’s faces. They work it out, though, and laugh; ‘You really scared me’, says Léa. They embrace. Then Léa realizes that Blanche and Fabien slept together when she was on holiday. Rohmer cuts to the bridge, which Fabien is crossing. He wears the same costume as Alexandre, except that his polo

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shirt is blue not green. Alexandre waves hello and shrugs his shoulders. Léa calls them both up and the two couples reconcile. The film ends with Léa and Alexandre leaving and the frame freezing on Blanche and Fabien embracing, with Léa and Alexandre visible in the background on the bridge. The credits roll as the soundtrack continues; instead of music, there are the background noises in the park.

L’Ami de mon amie: Last shot

As he had done in Pauline à la plage, and as he does 10 years later in Conte d’automne, Rohmer uses an ostentatious camera movement to make apparent the contrivances in the film’s use of chance. The slow pan from Blanche to Léa and Alexandre reveals the construction of the story and declares Rohmer’s authority as storyteller. ‘Look at this’, the pan implies, directing our view as if pointing something out to us. The reconciliation itself is choreographed with fluid criss-crossing movements of the two couples in their coloured outfits greeting each other: Alexandre and Blanche in green, Léa and Fabien in blue. When they unite in front of the camera, they come together for a last scene of knots untied and relationships re-arranged. Earlier coincidences have prepared us for this coincidence: Blanche and Fabien bump into each other twice in the shopping centre and discuss it as a likelihood in CergyPontoise’s village-like layout. Their discussion of coincidence acknowledges its use as a humorous device, helping to ensure that the symmetrical ending is satisfying; the film flaunts its contrivances. The unity of colours is there to be noticed and the jaunty spectacle of the interaction of couples, colours and coincidences is gratifying. The film ends with all four characters content; illusions and fantasies have been rejected, to be replaced not by something more mundane, but by something more solid and successful.38 The success of L’Ami de mon amie derives from Rohmer’s combination of a high-spirited display of colours and coincidences with a modest

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unobtrusiveness towards subject matter and setting. L’Ami de mon amie has a moment of deep insight into loneliness and isolation, when Blanche cries in front of her mirror, but, overall, in its sportive formation of two couples and its candid depiction of ordinary life, work and weekend leisure, it is a joyous film, with a beguiling rhythm and a special celebratory ending. In one of the few appreciate contemporary reviews, Terence Rafferty in The New Yorker describes L’Ami de mon amie as ‘the afterglow of the green ray’ (Rafferty 1988: 78). L’Ami de mon amie’s suitability as the conclusion of the Comédies et proverbes series comes from this ‘afterglow’ quality. As Rafferty writes, it ‘looks accidental, but its lovely insubstantiality is hard-won’ (Rafferty 1988: 78). Yet the insubstantiality that Rafferty appreciates is something for which others criticized Rohmer. Crisp writes of the first four Comédies et proverbes that compared with the Six contes moraux, there is a ‘loss of any overt moral reflection within the diegesis [of the Comédies et proverbes]’ (Crisp 1988: 88). The central thematic of the Comédies et proverbes for Crisp is the ‘lack of any dominant moral direction amongst the young of today’ (Crisp 1988: 95). For Crisp, the Six contes moraux had an ethic to communicate, ‘an overarching metaphysic’, whereas the Comédies et proverbes lack a moral centre: No such metaphysic is apparent in the comedies and proverbs, only a formal patterning which suggests a tidy mind and a careful craftsman. The psychological observation, deprived of its more general context, is threatened with insignificance. Nor has any overt social or political significance ever attached to Rohmer’s films, except insofar as its very absence is already significant – a typical manifestation of conservative nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural products, which ignore the ideological and ignore their own role as ideology. (Crisp 1988: 100–1) This negative judgement of the Comédies et proverbes is unforgiving. Rohmer’s second series presents a rich study of relationships in 1980s France. Just because the films do not assert their political relevance, does not make them conservative or irrelevant. George Eliot, in Daniel Deronda (1876), explains her focus on what Crisp might call the ‘psychological observation’ of her heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, rather than the apparent ‘social or political significance’ of the American civil war and its effect upon the world; Eliot could be describing one of Rohmer’s heroines from the Comédies et proverbes when she writes: Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant? – in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other

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side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy. What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections. (Eliot 1995: 124) Henry James writes of Gwendolen Harleth and her ‘blind visions’: Gwendolen’s whole history is vividly told. And see how the girl is known, inside and out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the most intelligent thing in all George Eliot’s writing, and that is saying much. It is so deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a wealth of psychological detail, it is more than masterly. (James 1981: 44–5) James insists that ‘Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness – its eagerness, its presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness, its sense of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and clever, and therefore tragedy can have a hold upon her’ (James 1981: 45). One response to Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes might be that the characters are insignificant threads in human history, but such creations are also ‘perfect pictures of youthfulness’. Rohmer released a film a year between 1981 and 1984; he then released two films in 1986 and another in 1987. The period between the editing of Les Nuits de la pleine lune in January 1984 and the release of L’Ami de mon amie in August 1987 was the most productive of his career; within a three-year period, from August 1984 until August 1987, he released four films. This contrasts with the subsequent three years: after releasing L’Ami de mon amie in August 1987, it was almost three years before Rohmer released his next film, Conte de printemps, in April 1990. There is also a contrast between the 1970s and the 1980s, when he made seven films in seven years; in part, this is because long-gestating ideas came to fruition in the 1980s; important also is the inspiration Rohmer found from the people whom he met while working on Perceval le Gallois. As Philippon writes: for twenty years, Rohmer has successfully been at the same time the painter of universal sentiments and the ethno-sociologist of the eras in which he works. How does he come to stay on the cutting edge? It really seems that in the Comédies et proverbes the young women are both the indispensable medium between Rohmer and the world, and the source of inspiration. (1984: 40)

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Philippon notes that Rohmer is in tune with the dominant sensibilities of the 1980s, and he is also ‘synchronised with the forms and colours of the epoch’ (1984: 40). Rohmer’s 1980s films explore as privileged themes female desire, relationships and marriage in the contemporary era, just as the Six contes moraux made male desire their subject. Some might accuse Rohmer of ignoring social inequalities and problems, but his detailed portraits of customs, places and people counteract this criticism; his concern with ordinary experiences is not apolitical because his conscientious attention to personal relationships and his concentrated depiction of settings and eras ensure that his films contemplate the relationship of the personal to the political. One should not underestimate the significance of Rohmer’s collaboration with the young women he met on Perceval (Rivière, Dombasle, Meury and Ogier), knew from previous work (Romand) or recruited later (Langlet, Chaulet and Renoir). The most sustained collaboration is with Marie Rivière on Le Rayon vert, but all the Comédies et proverbes are composed around the individualities of these actresses. Rohmer’s method of writing scripts for his performers ensured that their concerns became part of his films, which draw their themes from the lives of the women with whom he collaborated, enabling him to respond, however obliquely, to the impact of social changes. The Comédies et proverbes are fictions that resemble documentaries about the actresses with whom he collaborates.39 They portray differences between generations of women, such as the difference between the generation of the mothers of Romand and Rivière, who would not have expected to have careers or stand on an equal footing with their husbands, and their daughters, who have different expectations. They also show the difference between women born in the mid-1950s, who may have been too young to participate in the protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but who grew into maturity during this period and lived with the consequences in the 1980s, and women born in the late 1960s, who were teenagers in the early 1980s. All the actresses were of the age and experience where these things were relevant to their lives.40 The Comédies et proverbes series is Rohmer’s most far-reaching examination of women’s lives.41 The Six contes moraux value the intelligent and vivacious women named in their titles, but the Comédies et proverbes place equivalent women at their centre.

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6 Contes des quatre saisons – Part 1 The season is never indeterminate. If I decide to set a film in winter, it’s because of things that only occur in winter. (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 31) I like to think of my films as having a climate; that’s one of the reasons I’m making these films about the four seasons. But that climate isn’t merely an exterior décor, it is also there in the emotions of the characters. (Bright 1996: 11) I am fascinated by weather reports, possibly because they are not always right. (Peachment 1996: 11)

Conte de printemps (1990) After completing the Comédies et proverbes series in 1987 with L’Ami de mon amie, it was almost three years before Rohmer released his next feature film, Contes de printemps (1990). In the intervening period, he worked in theatre and television. For the theatre, he wrote and directed Le Trio en mi bémol, his second and last theatrical project, which he staged in the Renaud-Barrault in the Rond Point complex for a three-week run in January 1988.1 For television, Rohmer made a 60-minute programme entitled Les Jeux de société, broadcast as part of the series Histoire de la vie privée in August 1990. His episode is about the history of parlour games, which he reconstructed using actors from his films.2 One of the actresses on Les Jeux de societé was Florence Darel, who had written to Rohmer

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after seeing Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle. Two days later, he contacted her and hired her for Les Jeux de société. He then asked her to work on Conte de printemps, the first film of his third and final series, the Contes des quatre saisons. It is easy to find examples of the seasons used as metaphors or symbols in art, literature and song, and many of Rohmer’s films use the seasons, but his Contes des quatre saisons make prolonged and intricate use of them. However, Rohmer did not make the Contes des quatre saisons as variations on a single theme, as he had done with the Six contes moraux, though there are rhymes, reversals and resemblances between one film and another. All four films take place during their named seasons and relate season to setting and characters’ ages: summer and autumn in Conte d’été and Conte d’automne are the occasions for a beach holiday and the wine harvest; Conte de printemps is set in spring and concerns the youth of its characters; Conte d’hiver is set in winter and includes three generations, but also refers to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a BBC television production of which inspired Rohmer to make his seasonal films, though he made Conte de printemps first.3 His first two seasonal tales are also concerned, in different ways, with philosophy and both films have prompted fascinating interpretations from a philosopher, Stanley Cavell, and two philosophicallyminded film critics, William Rothman and Andrew Klevan. Klevan discusses the achievements of Conte de printemps, including the ways in which Rohmer keeps parts of its story open-ended and irresolvable. Klevan’s analysis of Conte de printemps is one of four examples in his study of ‘undramatic achievement in narrative film’. Several writers note Rohmer’s concern with the everyday, but Klevan develops his interpretation, praising the restraint and precision of Rohmer’s direction (2000: 183).4 Pascal Bonitzer also writes in detail about Conte de printemps and he notes that ‘Rohmer’s art consists in some ways of keeping quiet, as much as it makes use of word games. It is why the direction of his films is extraordinary and increasingly stripped of effects’ (1999: 86). Rohmer himself insisted, ‘I believe in understatement; it’s necessary not to show too much’ (Herpe and Neyrat 2004: 9). In 1965, he commented: ‘Poetic cinema often consists of bravura moments. It’s in the cinema which seeks to be prosaic rather than poetic that you will find an attempt to break the traditional narrative mode, but the method is devious rather than spectacular’ (Biette, Bontemps and Comolli 1986: 87). Bonitzer proposes: Cinema often seems made to show great catastrophes, spectacular acts that have considerable impact. The inflation of action cinema, as for example in the technological refinement of American special effects, is inversely proportional, in general, to the subtlety of the narrative. In contrast, Rohmer needs minuscule acts, minute events, perceptions at the limit of the subliminal, in order to deploy all the resources of his art

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of narration. His creative freedom, for which he openly claims responsibility (and he is in effect one of the filmmakers with the most freedom in the world, if not the most free), is co-extensive with the nimbleness of his means. But this lightness of touch is supported on a soap bubble by the characters who make up his world. (Bonitzer 1999: 38)5 With Conte de printemps, as Bonitzer and Klevan demonstrate, Rohmer made a film about almost nothing. The central issue of Conte de printemps is thought, the mystery of what other people are thinking, and the difficulty of representing thought. Both of these tally with Rohmer’s long-standing concerns, but in no other film does he make them so central to the story: Thought is the most difficult thing to show in cinema. Gestures, facial expressions, words can be shown, but the thoughts of characters remain unknown. The challenge is precisely to try to reveal them. Such cinema has always attracted me; I am not the only one to try to do this. Charlie Chapin was the first to discover how the cinema could realise it. With A Woman of Paris (1923), he showed the characters’ intentions through their behaviour. That was a revelation for lots of people, in particular for Lubitsch, with his famous ‘Lubitsch touch’. . . . I refuse to use external behaviour, psychological cutting and symbolism or metaphors. I try not to employ rhetorical processes to show thought. I prefer to film people from a distance, without ever underlining their thoughts. (Parra 1990: 54) In conventional terms, little happens in Conte de printemps; as one interviewer notes, the film takes place during a ‘parenthesis’ in the characters’ lives (de Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 30). Rohmer wanted the film to feel episodic: There isn’t this classical division between the introduction, the development and the conclusion; all the bits of the action are interwoven . . . There are two stories which are superimposed on one another, the failed seduction of Jeanne by Igor and the story of the necklace, and these two stories fit together, run parallel, and then one of them finally takes over. For a while, the spectator fills in the gaps, but I wanted to demonstrate that a little thing which is apparently futile, in which there is no interest, is finally important. We think that the necklace is a pretext for getting to the father, and actually it is closer to the heart at the story. The subject is the relationship between Jeanne and Natacha. Her relation with Natacha is more interesting for Jeanne than her relationship with Igor, which for her is a kind of game. (Legrand and Thomas 1990: 8–9) Rohmer therefore decided to leave some things ‘in the wings’:

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What stays off-screen is everything that happens to Jeanne when she is not with the people that she meets, apart from two little moments, at the beginning and at the end, which are transitional moments. From the moment that she leaves her ordinary milieu and the man that she lives with, whom we never see, she meets people. It’s not a story told from Jeanne’s point of view, but a story in which we are with Jeanne when she is with others. (De Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 24) As always for Rohmer, that distinction is important. The film follows Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) over two weekends, beginning with her leaving work. She is a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Jacques Brel, a secondary school in La Courneuve, a working-class suburb in northeastern Paris. Rohmer decided to make Jeanne a philosophy teacher because the actress had a degree in philosophy and wanted to play a philosophy teacher. Rohmer admitted: ‘I would not have dared do it if I had had someone who did not know the subject. That said, it is a role that I wrote entirely myself. The actors did not collaborate on the dialogue, unlike some of my other films, where there was a little collaboration’ (Legrand and Thomas 1990: 6).6 Rohmer wrote a complete script for Conte de printemps, although he worked a bit with the actors beforehand, asking them for suggestions about the characters: ‘they propose ideas to me about things which they know and I invent the rest’ (Parra 1990: 52).7 Therefore, Natacha (Florence Darel), the young woman who befriends Jeanne, plays the piano in the film because the actress played the piano. Darel recalls: I based her principally on the fact that she was a pianist. I myself played the piano and I really knew that world. The character is solitary, spending hours and hours in front of her piano. (Saada 1990: 15) Natacha’s father, Igor, who tries to seduce Jeanne, is played by Hugues Quester, who had known Rohmer for longer.8 Igor’s girlfriend, Eve (Eloïse Bennet), is studying for an MA in Philosophy because the actress was; she graduated while they were filming (de Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 28). Unlike L’Ami de mon amie’s milieu of Cergy-Pontoise office workers, the setting of Conte de printemps is more elevated: Igor is a government arts bureaucrat, his 18-year-old daughter Natacha an accomplished pianist, and they have a grand Parisian apartment. While Natacha and Igor have the confidence of their class, Jeanne is a somewhat classless figure, but she has the confidence of her education and profession: in this respect, the characters differ from those in L’Ami de mon amie. However, in their openness and their interactions with each other, the characters in L’Ami de mon amie are freer; and L’Ami de mon amie is one of Rohmer’s most positive and optimistic films. Conte de printemps, on the other hand, harks back to his Six contes moraux, in that it reveals a protagonist repressing

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feelings and burying emotions under intellect, using, as Klevan terms it, ‘dialogue to keep order’ (2000: 198).9 After Jeanne leaves school, she drives through Paris and arrives at a messy apartment. She starts to tidy up, but abandons this, taking instead some clothes from a wardrobe and a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. She then goes to another apartment (Jeanne has the keys to two places; Natacha also has the keys to two places, the apartment in Paris and the house in Fontainebleau; in this, they both resemble Louise from Les Nuits de la pleine lune).10 In what turns out to be her apartment, Jeanne meets someone she does not know, Gaëlle’s boyfriend, coming undressed from the bathroom. Rohmer later reverses her position, so that Jeanne is unknown to Igor when he finds her coming undressed from his bathroom. In Jeanne’s apartment, her cousin Gaëlle wants to remain for a few more days. The film has shown Jeanne get her belongings and prepare to move back to her apartment, so it is comical when she lies to Gaëlle, saying ‘I just came to switch clothes. It’s spring’. Klevan (2000: 174) and Katsahnias (1990: 20) both note that Rohmer’s opening establishes mysterious questions about Jeanne, but we do learn that Jeanne prefers to suppress her feelings rather than upset her cousin, something which emerges as part of a pattern.11 To indicate that it is spring, the film shows flowers on the mantelpiece and on the shelf above the radiator in Jeanne’s apartment. The spring blooms in Jeanne’s and Natacha’s balcony boxes match the floral patterns on Natacha’s bedroom curtains and her mother’s wallpaper in the house in Fontainebleau. The garden is full of new blossom, unlike the wilting flowers Jeanne leaves behind in her boyfriend’s apartment. Jeanne gives flowers to Natacha and receives them from Gaëlle. On several occasions, the women wear clothes patterned with flowers; at dinner, for example, all three women wear floral prints. Spring is associated with resurrection and growth; it can be the season for youth; Natacha, as the youngest character, displays a youthful temperament.12 But its symbolic function in the film is, as Klevan notes, its association with a transitional period; spring is the appropriate season because it is an ‘“in between” time, when many matters might be entertained, but not necessarily develop into fruition’ (Klevan 2000: 187). Jeanne is in between apartments, while both she and Natacha are at in-between stages in their lives. Jeanne displaces herself from two apartments before meeting Natacha at a party at a third apartment. In the party scene, the film alternates between people arriving in the hallway and the two women talking on the sofa, noticeable because the apartment is decorated in lurid blue and pink, a colour scheme that differs from Natacha and Igor’s tasteful bourgeois apartment.13 To Natacha, Jeanne explains herself; she has the keys to two apartments but can stay at neither. Absent from the first apartment is Jeanne’s boyfriend: ‘I live with its occupant. He’s away for a few days. If I’m alone, I go to my place. It’s an old whim of mine’. Natacha invites Jeanne

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to stay at her and her father’s apartment.14 She then seems to organize it so that Jeanne sleeps in her father’s room; we might suspect her of plotting for Jeanne to replace Eve, for she does not tell Jeanne (she may forget) that Igor will be back in the morning to pick up clothes before going to Rome. Natacha takes sheets from one wardrobe then shows Jeanne where she can put her stuff in another wardrobe, her father’s, the one in which Jeanne finds the necklace. In the living room, as they talk on the sofa, a piano is just audible in another apartment. Natacha then plays her piano for Jeanne. In Conte de printemps, the camera often frames people sitting together talking. Sometimes, the camera tracks towards or away from them, as when it pulls back from Jeanne and Natacha on the sofa at the party. As Jeanne listens to Natacha playing the piano, the camera moves away from her. Klevan notes that the track-back raises a question: ‘does the camera pulling back convey pure absorption in the playing of the Schumann, or is it more precisely a clue to her isolation?’ (Klevan 2000: 175). The camera’s movement is one of the means by which the film communicates its concern with Jeanne’s thoughts, but her privacy is deep-rooted; she holds herself apart. The film makes it hard to assess Jeanne’s character: she may be thinking about what to do with her life, whether to marry Mathieu and move to the provinces, but we’re not sure. The opening establishes three mysteries, only one of which it will resolve – the mystery of the necklace. The other two mysteries are whether Natacha and Igor plot for Jeanne to replace Eve, and the difficulty of understanding Jeanne; the film never provides answers to these questions. For Rohmer: One is aware that, in a way, it is the story of Jeanne’s thoughts, about what they are – about her life with the man, whom we never see, about what she imagines Natacha to be thinking – and at the end it is really a question of thinking because Igor asks her ‘What are you thinking about?’ That’s why, during the philosophical discussion, they talk precisely about thought, in its pure form, transcendental thought, not simply empirical thought. (Legrand and Thomas 1990: 5) Klevan’s discussion of Conte de printemps demonstrates how ‘the film plays with the viewer’s fascination with excluded plot information’ (2000: 178). Various occasions when Natacha claims to have forgotten something inspire suspicions about her scheming; yet, as Klevan points out, when Jeanne confronts her, Natacha’s tears appear genuine: ‘the film encourages the viewer to hesitate over establishing a clear difference between a strategic withholding of information and an accidental piece of forgetfulness’ (Klevan 2000: 178). Both Jeanne and Natacha are in transitional periods. Jeanne may be hesitating before marriage, having one last fling, like the heroes of the

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Six contes moraux.15 Natacha is in between childhood and adulthood, an adolescent who sometimes behaves like a child. While Jeanne refuses to settle in her boyfriend’s apartment, Natacha’s room in Paris and her house at Fontainebleau contain things associated with her childhood or connected to memories: heirlooms, like the plate Natacha snatches from Eve, or abandoned toys, like the child’s red bike lying neglected in the garden. When Natacha welcomes Jeanne to her apartment, she shows off her room as a child would, explaining that she still has her toys and that she does not want to leave her room, with its paintings of her grandparents. The film shows the women to be similar in some things despite their age gap. During their first weekend at Fontainebleau, Natacha and Jeanne amble around the garden, both dressed in blue and green hats and jackets, which blend with the blossom-filled trees behind them. Throughout the scene, Jeanne looks puzzled about why Natacha has taken up with her, but she is responsive. Jeanne may be in her mid-20s, older than Natacha, yet she also appears to be solitary: the philosophy teacher spends her time reading; the pianist spends her time practising. The way Natacha talks about her parents hints that she is still dealing with their divorce; at Fontainebleau, she asks Jeanne to punish her when she criticizes her mother, as if she wants Jeanne to be a teacher or parent. The punishment for criticizing her mother will be the telling of a story – ‘a fairy tale?’ asks Jeanne. ‘No’, replies Natacha, ‘The Mystery of the Necklace – a true story’. Conte de printemps explores the developing friendship between two young women, but it hides this story within the questions it provokes about Jeanne, Jeanne’s thoughts about Natacha’s hostility to Eve and Natacha’s criticism of her mother, dangling the explanation that Natacha searches for a mother figure who can replace Eve, whom she describes as ‘part vampire’. When Natacha asks Jeanne whether she finds Igor attractive, she declares, ‘You’re the kind of girl Dad needs’, maybe trying to matchmake Jeanne and her father. When Jeanne protests that ‘we’re both tied up’, Natacha replies that she suspects that Eve and her father will separate soon, adding ‘My guess is that you’re not so tied up either’. As they talk about Jeanne’s boyfriend, Mathieu, Jeanne explains that she hates his untidy apartment and when she associates him with his messy room she finds him ‘detestable’. Natacha looks mature as she listens to Jeanne, who says: ‘I applied for the town where he’s going. Mathieu does government research now; next year he’ll teach in Grenoble. Then we can get married.’ ‘Really?’ Natacha sounds surprised. ‘Yes, really. Don’t you believe me?’ ‘If you say so, but you don’t sound thrilled.’ That scene ends with Natacha saying that she is working until Wednesday, but on Thursday Jeanne must dine with her and her father, who will be back from Rome. The dinner scene is the centrepiece of the film, the first time that all four characters confront each other; Rohmer focuses on words and actions. In many of Rohmer’s films, trivial actions expose more about a character’s

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thoughts than intellectual discussion; as Bonitzer observes, the dinner-time discussion about Kant is a pretext ‘or more exactly a sign of something else’ (1999: 66). This ‘something else’ is Natacha’s willingness to show that she can talk on an equal footing with Jeanne. Bonitzer concludes: ‘It results in a tension, a veiled hysteria which draws in audiences and threatens at any moment to descend into pure aggression’ (1999: 66). The scene of the dinner’s preparation and consumption contains clues about the characters’ motives. As Klevan notes, this scene is an example of Rohmer’s lack of interest in filming intellectual discussions and his corresponding interest in filming characters who talk. One of the many fascinating things about Rohmer’s films, Klevan observes, is watching characters who are so eloquent when discussing philosophy, ‘leaving so much unsaid and uncontrolled’ (2000: 195). The scene begins with Natacha insisting that Igor stay for dinner and then insisting that he stays with Jeanne as she goes to buy bread. As they prepare food and chat, it appears that Natacha has manipulated them.16 The layout of the dinner table opposes two couples: Jeanne and Natacha versus Igor and Eve. For much of the discussion, Igor and Natacha witness a battle of words between Jeanne and Eve; in particular, when Eve questions Jeanne, Igor watches Jeanne answer. The hidden agendas of the four participants can be summarized as follows. Natacha is the youngest and the one acting in the most transparent way; she does not like Eve and she likes Jeanne. She is 18 and she lives on her own; as her father comments, it is she who runs the apartment, not him. She has a loyal attachment to her father and has a boyfriend, William, who is almost the same age as him. When Eve talks during dinner, she comes unstuck quoting Kant. However, the film establishes that Natacha’s antagonism provokes Eve’s ambition to talk of things about which she is unsure. In the potato-peeling scene at Fontainebleau, Jeanne witnesses the row between Eve and Natacha. Before Natacha comes into the kitchen, Jeanne and Eve are joking. Natacha enters and is hostile to Eve. Jeanne judges Natacha to be ‘overdoing it a bit’. Yet there are hints that all the characters behave like Natacha; the older characters just manage to disguise their emotions more. Natacha’s outbursts highlight by counterpoint Jeanne’s repression and reserve, which may be a result of her maturity, but could also be a consequence of a more general malaise. The film gives all the characters reasonable motivations, implying that ill-understood feelings can motivate unpleasant patterns of behaviour that we sometimes fail to control. Igor is an opportunistic male, but his actions are understandable. He may feel guilty towards his daughter about the break-up of his marriage six years earlier, and he tries to keep the peace between Eve and Natacha, but one guesses that he has not been strict with her, allowing her a teenage freedom that suits him more than her. He finds Jeanne attractive, intelligent and sensitive. In him, as in his daughter, the mature young philosophy teacher prompts complex feelings.

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Klevan describes Jeanne’s efforts to control her life, observing that ‘Jeanne hides behind certain words; her prospective life story protects her from being consumed in emotions that may result in disorder’ (2000: 199). Jeanne is unlike Natacha in age, a teenager despite her mature appearance, but like Natacha in that she is unsettled. Igor reveals to Jeanne during the seduction scene that the dinner-time discussion was the moment that kindled his desire for her; as Klevan describes it, ‘his neutral demeanour was actually masking a latent sexual yearning’ (2000: 199). Jeanne’s time spent with Natacha is a break from her normal routine and an opportunity to assess her own feelings. Antoine de Baecque notes: Jeanne effectively leaves her school. She enters, in all senses of the term, a holiday period. In fact, she enters chez Rohmer. Actual teaching will serve as a unique form of punctuation for the rest of the film: some notebooks that are being corrected on a kitchen table and one phrase, marking the end of this Rohmerian system, the end of the ‘holidays’, a phrase thrown out at the end of an amorous conversation, ‘What are you thinking about?’, asked by the seducer. ‘Of my class on Monday afternoon’, replies the teacher. Between the first shot and this cruel phrase, there are two holiday weekends. (De Baecque 1990: 22)17 On holiday from responsibilities, Jeanne is free to reflect on her relationship with Mathieu and experiment with Natacha, Eve and Igor; yet she is able to hold herself separate from her new acquaintances. Rohmer explores the grounds for this separation. Therefore, just as Pascal is unimportant in Ma Nuit chez Maud apart from what the characters make of him, so Kant is unimportant in Conte de printemps apart from what the characters make of him. From one perspective, the characters in Conte de printemps exemplify a traditional French middleclass emphasis on the importance of philosophy and argument, but of greater importance is the contrast between the lofty subjects they discuss and the baser desires their behaviour expresses.18 Despite the discussions of Kant, Plato and Schumann, the film focuses on the characters’ ambiguous feelings. Asked about Conte de printemps, Rohmer replied: ‘spectators in the cinema should always be trying to read between the lines, and be aware that nothing deceives so much as words. . . . You can’t show people thinking. Look at the way it was done in the silent cinema: people with their hands to their forehead; but for me it’s interesting to see how the cinema can deal with this’ (Caister 1990: 26).19 When his interviewers note a contrast between the philosophical discussions and the characters’ actions, such as Igor’s carving of the meat at dinner, Rohmer replies: There is a certain triviality in the action of the film. That’s planned. There is a contrast between the elevation of the discussion and the triviality

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of what the characters do, which in this case is the cooking: they peel potatoes, they chop some salami. I did things because I wanted to have this contrast. (De Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 28)20 The dinner scene ends with Natacha taking her father from the room, saying she wants to show him something, deepening the mystery about Natacha’s scheming. The film never reveals the topic of Igor and Natacha’s discussion, although it increases suspicions in Jeanne that father and daughter are discussing whether Jeanne appeals to Igor. Jeanne wants this question answered at the end of the film. The seduction scene, during Jeanne’s second weekend visit to Fontainebleau, concludes the film’s concern with thought and the mysteriousness of other people’s thoughts. The scene of Igor’s attempted seduction is one of Rohmer’s most comical scenes. Igor possesses a hesitant but determined charm; less weaselly than Trintignant, less macho than Atkine and less verbally dexterous than Luchini, he is polite, but practised. Moreover, the scene conveys the potential for romance. As Jeanne observes, Igor asks three questions, as in the fairy tale of three wishes: Can he sit next to her? Can he hold her hand? Can he kiss her? She answers yes, but then withdraws, using words to detach herself. She seems attracted to Igor, but resists him. While Igor is explaining his actions, he notices that she is not listening to him; Rohmer gives us a close shot of Jeanne, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. He speculates that she is thinking that she has ‘heard all this before’, but then he asks her, ‘What are you thinking about?’ She replies that she is thinking of her Monday afternoon class. Referring to the three wishes that she has allowed Igor, she adds, ‘I was acting by logic, the logic of the number three’. ‘Good things come in three’, he replies. ‘Yes, it’s a game. There’s a whole tradition of three, triangles, syllogisms, the Trinity, the Hegelian triad’. She names Natacha as the reason she stopped kissing him; he puts on a tape of Natacha playing Schumann’s ‘Symphonic Studies’. Rohmer uses Schumann’s music for dramatic effect: the music comes from within the fictional world, but it feels as if it could be film music accompanying the tense scene. That tension comes to a head when Igor lies to Eve on the phone, telling her that Jeanne and Natacha left that afternoon. Taking this as her cue, Jeanne leaves. Next morning, Jeanne hums a melody from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata while she takes her clothes from Igor’s wardrobe. The final conversation between Jeanne and Natacha takes place with Natacha leaning against the mantelpiece, the mirror behind her. Jeanne suggests that she was trying to match them. Crying, Natacha explains: I’ve got my problems, too. I wasn’t thinking about you and Dad. You’re secretive about your life. Well, so am I. I don’t talk about it, but it’s there. William came for things concerning him and me, not for some devious

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plot. Things are very tense between us. You think life’s simple for me? Dad’s a paranoiac. It’d be too much if you were too. I say what I think. Natacha runs out of the room, upset. Jeanne reaches for her things and knocks the necklace down. Everything has been a misunderstanding; the necklace was neither stolen nor hidden.21 Jeanne cries, looking as if the emotion surprises her. She explains that she has felt like an intruder, but one suspects that Jeanne has realized that she was not as in control as she thought. Rohmer explains his aims for Conte de printemps: I wanted something really light, almost empty. The story begins very slowly; it almost does not begin. My exposition scenes have often been long; here the film almost stays as an exposition scene until the end. At the moment when we think that something is going to happen, it doesn’t happen: that is my aim in Conte de printemps. (Parra 1990: 50) I always thought, if you asked me what was happening in this film, I could answer ‘nothing’, because in my other films there is always an outcome. Here things happen but there is no outcome. The only thing that happens is the frivolous one of finding this necklace. But the only thing that the story of the necklace implies is that all this is never finished. That’s what I was interested in, that’s what I wanted to show. It is this hole, this absence that got me interested in this subject. (Rohmer 1990c) Igor’s question to Jeanne after his seduction fails – ‘what are you thinking about?’ – prompts Bonitzer to reflect on ‘one of Rohmer’s obsessions’: to succeed in rendering through all the exteriority of cinema the mystery of interior life, sometimes reduced to a purely intellectual enigma, as in Conte de printemps. What is expressed on the face of a man or a woman, when, remaining silent, they make an equivocal gesture or an apparently meaningless one, or do nothing at all? What are they thinking of? Why have they done this (or not done this)? Do they know themselves? We can often ask this question when looking at the behaviour of some of Rohmer’s characters, as, reciprocally, they can ask themselves the same question. (Bonitzer 1999: 85)22 Bonitzer describes the stolen necklace in Conte de printemps as ‘a story which takes place completely in the heads of the protagonists’ (1999: 39). He concludes: ‘We cannot say that the film gives us a solution at the end. It gives us the means to choose what we want, as there is always with Rohmer a form of interactive cinema’ (Bonitzer 1999: 39). A two-minute passage from the opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s ‘Spring Sonata’ accompanies Jeanne’s return to the apartment

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she left 10 days earlier. The film refuses to confirm whether returning to her boyfriend’s apartment is the right decision, although we can interpret her resolution to tidy up, accompanied by Beethoven’s spirited music, as optimistic, a mood begun when Natacha says the last words of the film: ‘Life is wonderful’.

Conte d’hiver (1992) Conte d’hiver is a film about implausibility and faith. As mentioned above, the BBC’s The Winter’s Tale inspired Rohmer to make his Contes des quatre saisons series. Shakespeare’s final scene of the re-finding of a beloved partner prompted Rohmer to make Conte d’hiver and to include that scene in his film. For Rohmer, ‘the marvellous fairy tale side of Shakespeare [in The Winter’s Tale] gave me the idea of putting a little bit of Shakespeare in this film’ (Danton, Giavarini and Taboulay 1992: 25). He remarks: The way the BBC did the rediscovery scene – laughter mingled with tears – gave me the idea for a film in which an implausible sequence of events could be made, by the construction of a world, to seem plausible. (Church 1992: 40). All storytellers consider the relationship of implausibility to plausibility, but The Winter’s Tale offers particular challenges when used as a model. As Lionel Trilling says of E. M. Forster’s approach to story construction: ‘the four novels up to A Passage to India all suggest that they have been written after a close application of the dramatic principles of The Winter’s Tale’ (1965: 10). Trilling stresses the importance of Forster’s use of implausibility as a lesson learnt from Shakespeare’s play. He could be describing Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver when he writes ‘to accept Forster we have to know that The Winter’s Tale is dramatically and morally sound and that improbability is the guide to life’ (1965: 11). Forster is relevant to Conte d’hiver because Rohmer’s first stage in preparing us to accept his implausible plot comes during a conversation about The Longest Journey. In addition to Shakespeare and Forster, Conte d’hiver refers to Hugo, Pascal and Plato; winter in a provincial French town, and the references to Christmas, Christianity and Pascal, recall Ma Nuit chez Maud.23 Conte d’hiver mixes literary and filmic allusions with its implausible story of reconciliation and a plausible portrait of heterosexual relationships in France in 1992. When Michel Ciment notes that Rohmer’s films are contemporary, Rohmer explains that he is committed to filming on the street: ‘I prefer to be compared to Balzac than Marivaux, whereas superficially I’m closer to Marivaux. But I do a lot of research into the verisimilitude and the reality, both geographical and sociological, of France. . . . I’m a filmmaker but I live

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like a “pedestrian in Paris”, as Léon-Paul Fargue termed it’ (Rohmer 1992).24 Of Félicie (Charlotte Véry), he says: ‘I like to talk about contemporary questions. A single mother who runs after love is a story with the flavour of our times’.25 Conte d’hiver’s portrait of an unmarried mother continues Rohmer’s studies of marriage and relationships, which he commenced in the Six contes moraux and developed in the Comédies et proverbes. Félicie becomes a single mother after a summer holiday romance, shown in the prologue.26 This sequence uses a simple melody played on a piano to accompany its depiction of Félicie and Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) enjoying a holiday on the coast in Brittany. The film shows them cooking, cycling, walking, sunbathing and making love, after which Charles says to her ‘You’re taking a risk’. It then shows them parting at the station. She gives him her address; it turns out that she gives him the right street name but the wrong suburb. From the romantic holiday, the film cuts to the dark morning of 14 December, five years later. Félicie has relationships with two other men, a librarian, Loïc (Hervé Furic) and a hairdresser, Maxence (Michel Voletti), whom Pascal Bonitzer calls ‘a jolly duo of masochists’ (1999: 142). She and her five-year-old daughter Elise (Ava Loraschi) live with Félicie’s mother (Christiane Desbois), until Maxence offers to take her with him to Nevers, where he is opening a new salon. Félicie makes two visits to Nevers and Rohmer integrates into the film well-known features of the city, referring to pilgrimages, Saint Bernadette’s reliquary and the city’s fame for porcelain, some of which Félicie and Maxence admire in a shop window.27 Félicie’s first visit to Nevers is a weekend visit without her daughter. Maxence escorts her through the pretty lanes, telling her ‘I love you’; she does not reciprocate. Instead, she explains how she told Charles Courbevoie instead of Levallois, and later discovered she was pregnant.28 She explains to Maxence that she never considered an abortion: ‘It’s against my conviction. Not religious convictions because religion and I don’t get along. But convictions that are . . .’ He completes with ‘personal’. She prefers, ‘Intimate . . . I dislike what’s contrary to nature. I’d lost Charles, but I had his child. A child and some photos. He had neither’. During Félicie’s first visit to Nevers, she and Maxence visit the convent to look at Saint Bernadette’s reliquary. Félicie does not yet realize it, but she is a pilgrim to Nevers; on her second visit, she will have her revelation. Félicie’s pilgrimages to Nevers are in part an effort to banish the memory of someone whose absence resembles death and whose reappearance will resemble a return from the dead. When Félicie arrives at Loïc’s house on Tuesday 18 December, after returning from Nevers, the film reveals her coming alone into his hallway, voices coming from the other room. The moment of solitude in the hallway expresses the difference between the three people talking about books and her understanding of the topics of conversation. As she enters Loïc’s living room, the film shows her difference to Loïc and his visitors, Edwige

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(Haydée Caillot) and Quentin (Jean-Claude Biette), who do not attempt to include Félicie in the conversation about The Longest Journey.29 She has not read it. Loïc tries to include her by saying that he read it so long ago that he can’t remember anything about it. Edwige contradicts him, though, and re-starts the conversation. Edwige and Quentin talk; Loïc looks at Félicie, aware that she is not participating in the conversation. They discuss whether Forster blames Agnes (and therefore women) for Rickie’s decline, the novel’s opening talk about perception and whether Rickie is the central character. Rohmer does not show them discussing Rickie’s belief in immortality, which Forster sets against Stephen Wonham’s atheism; as Forster writes: ‘it puzzled her [Agnes] that Rickie, who could scarcely tell you the time without a saving clause, should be so certain about immortality’ (Forster 1967: 60). Nevertheless, during the ellipsis that stands in for their dinner, they may discuss Rickie’s beliefs, for when the film returns to them after dinner they are talking about reincarnation. Edwige expresses her beliefs: ‘We’ve all lived an incalculable number of lives’. As they rise from the table, talking about superstitions, magic and religion, Loïc accuses Edwige of believing in all kinds of supernatural things except Christianity. She responds: ‘There’s no difference between your supernatural and mine’. He counters with, ‘You make one, but backwards. You buy the supernatural in everything but Christianity and get suckered’. She insists, ‘You’re hooked by the charlatanism of the church. You accept the miracles of Lourdes, but reject my ideas’. He confesses, ‘My faith doesn’t rest on miracles. I may not be a perfect Catholic, but they turn me off’. For Edwige, ‘without the supernatural, there’s no religion’; ‘all religions have believed in re-incarnation. It’s compatible with Christianity’. Félicie is not a Catholic – as she tells Maxence, she and religion do not get along – yet she believes in something and joins the conversation to say, ‘If a spirit lives in many bodies, it gradually grows perfect. Responsibility is preserved’. Edwige comments, ‘All the great minds have believed in metempsychosis’, explaining to Félicie that ‘it’s the old word for reincarnation’. Loïc offers Victor Hugo as an example, launching into a spirited quotation from Hugo’s poem ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’, from the sixth volume of his Contemplations (1856): So a beast comes and goes, roars, screams, bites; A tree is there, its branches bristling, A paving stone collapses in the road That carts crush and winter ruins, And, under those thicknesses of matter and of night, Tree, beast, stone, weights that nothing raises, In that terrible depth, a soul dreams! What does it do? It dreams of God!

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As with Forster, Hugo is an apposite allusion for the film to make, providing the street name for Félicie’s mixed-up address.30 Besides this, Hugo was obsessed with death and reincarnation. While staying in Jersey, he experimented with spiritualism and tried to communicate with the dead. He believed that all forms of life, animal, vegetable or mineral, held imprisoned souls, punished for the sins of a previous existence.31 His belief in reincarnation prompts Loïc’s wonderful recitation, which ends their conversation but does not resolve their disagreement about religion and superstitions. Loïc’s success in convincing his listeners of the distinction between the two is doubtful, and in quoting Hugo he appears to gives up trying.

Conte d’hiver: Félicie in Nevers cathedral

On her second trip to Nevers, Félicie takes her daughter. She plans to stay, but discord begins when Félicie tries to cope with the competing pressures of being sole carer (without her mother to help) and ‘madame’ in the hairdressers. She takes Elise out to play and Elise insists on seeing the nativity in Nevers cathedral. Inside the cathedral, Félicie admires the ceiling and a small piece of the music from the film’s prologue is plucked on a violin. This experience appears to hasten her decision to leave Nevers. She later explains that she realized that she does not want to compromise; she will not live with anyone unless she loves them. Back in Paris, on Friday 28 December, she visits Loïc at work in the library. He invites her to see The Winter’s Tale. Loïc explains, ‘I’ve read the play – it’s pretty far-fetched. Lots of fantastic things happen. People who were thought dead, exiles who reappear resurrected’. These comments invite us to recognize that Rohmer is alluding to his own ‘far-fetched’ plotting. Rohmer begins the extract from Shakespeare with Leontes’ declaration: O Paulina, We honour you with trouble. But we came to see the statue of our queen. Your gallery have we passed through not without much content

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in many singularities. But we saw not that which my daughter came to look upon, the statue of her mother. Paulina calls for music to awake the statue. The flautist plays, Hermione moves and Félicie grips Loïc’s hand. A series of shot/reverse-shots depicts Loïc and Félicie watching, the latter crying as she watches Hermione embrace Perdita. The flautist plays the same melody that was played on a piano during the holiday sequence and plucked on a violin when Félicie was in Nevers cathedral. In these earlier instances, the music comes from outside the fictional world and is unheard by the characters. In the theatre, though, Félicie hears the flautist play the tune just before Hermione steps down from her pedestal, the music provoking Hermione to move and reveal herself as human. Rothman notes of the music’s repetition: When the flutist plays this tune, we can recognize it, but it is not possible for Félicie to do so. Her experience of this moment and ours thus diverge. Recognizing this tune, remembering the prologue, we feel that the film is revealing a sign to us, but not to her. (Rothman 2004: 328)32 Yet while the music may not be a sign to Félicie, she experiences a powerful catharsis in the theatre. Her reaction and the music foreshadow the reunion with Charles. By showing Félicie’s reaction to Hermione’s re-appearance, Rohmer aligns Shakespeare’s unveiling with his reconciliation of Félicie and Charles. Loïc and Félicie’s discussion in the car after their visit to the theatre extends the film’s comparison of a practising Catholic who does not believe in miracles and an atheist who confesses a belief in reincarnation and believes that her long-lost lover will be re-found. ‘The play’s not plausible’, says Loïc. ‘I don’t like what’s plausible’, replies Félicie. The play’s ambiguity bothers Loïc: ‘Does magic bring the statue to life or hadn’t she ever died?’ ‘You don’t get it’, replies Félicie, ‘faith brings her to life. I’m more religious than you’. Loïc takes her revelation in the church, which she explains as a moment of lucidity, as a sign that she believes in God; but he misinterprets her. She was not thinking about God, she says, but about the fact that she was ‘alone in the world’ and she had to act on her own.33 Félicie expresses her hope that she will re-find Charles and her preference to live with this hope, even though it may come to nothing. Loïc’s reply that Pascal took a similar wager on immortality prompts Félicie to say, ‘I believe the soul’s immortal, more than you do’. She then says that she has a ‘dim’ view of her previous life, but she is ‘aware’ of it. Her certainty about her love for Charles comes from the fact that she thinks she and Charles met in a previous life. ‘Stop Félicie, you’re killing me’, protests Loïc. He responds to her apparent inanity by saying that it reminds him of Plato. At home, he quotes Plato, then jokes about them having met in a previous

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life; she responds that he was her brother or her pet, not her lover. Loïc, who retains the religion of his upbringing, has an intellectual approach to his faith; for Félicie, his interest in reading and books is a gulf between them.34 Nevertheless, Rohmer refrains from endorsing the beliefs of Loïc, Edwige or Félicie and Conte d’hiver never clarifies how to interpret Félicie’s statements about reincarnation, whether as a version of Edwige’s declarations or an expression of her sense that she should re-invest in her hope for finding Charles.35 When Paulina reveals a supposed statue of the dead Hermione, it turns out to be Hermione, who has been in hiding.36 Yet, despite Shakespeare’s careful plotting, the play asks questions about magic and religion, and about whether Hermione’s implausible reappearance is a confession that she did not die. For Peter Milward, Paulina’s comment to Leontes, ‘It is requir’d/You do awake your faith’, carries a Christian implication of grace and repentance, ‘a more positive exhortation to faith and hope of new life’ (1997: 100). But for Stanley Cavell, ‘How near the religious the return is, and in what sense near, is an explicit question, both of the play and of the film’ (2004: 424). We have Paulina’s word that Hermione is dead and she reveals Hermione at the play’s end. Leontes never suspects that Paulina is lying to him and Shakespeare invites us to see something mysterious in the play’s reconstitution of Hermione. For Cavell, Leontes is afflicted with scepticism; he doubts the truth of what he sees, including his wife’s fidelity. Thus, Cavell calls Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale a ‘study of skepticism’ (1988: 80). Leontes, like Lear, wields immense power and acts on a whim. Both kings are wrong in their doubt and mistrust of others. Hermione’s re-appearance is a miracle that confounds Leontes’ doubts.37 Writing of Random Harvest (Mervyn Le Roy, 1942), George Toles concludes that, in moments of sentimental epiphany and transformation, if one does not participate, one is left with nothing but distance, an awareness of what one isn’t affected by . . . If one is not moved by the endings of Dreyer’s Ordet or City Lights, to cite two instances of films where everything seems to depend on a final catharsis, can one know the most important things that these films are capable of showing? (Toles 2001: 80) Rohmer’s risk in challenging our expectations of plausibility echoes Dreyer’s risk with Ordet.38 Dreyer refuses to confirm whether Inger’s resurrection is meant to prove God’s existence and Ordet’s ending can symbolize different kinds of faith. Characters in Ordet mention ‘the age of miracles’ three times, in comments that question whether we are living in the age of miracles. ‘Miracles no longer happen’, says the Pastor to Johannes, who believes he is Jesus and replies, ‘Thus speaks my church on earth, that church which has failed me, which has murdered my own name’. Conte

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d’hiver, like Ordet, dramatizes the difference between faith and religion; Rohmer dramatizes Félicie’s movement from doubt to belief, but he does not show that Félicie’s re-found faith is a religious one; instead, Rohmer shows the practising Catholic as the sceptic, perhaps dramatising his doubts, what he described as his ‘sliding into agnosticism’ (Lennon 1999: 21).39 Rohmer leaves it open to us to interpret Conte d’hiver as exhibiting a faith in humanity rather than the transcendental. Despite Félicie’s comments about believing in reincarnation, the film is ambiguous about whether her faith (and Loïc’s prayers) delivers Charles to her. How one should respond to the climax of Ordet is as ambiguous as how one should respond to the re-vivifying of Hermione at the end of The Winter’s Tale. In transposing the endings of The Winter’s Tale and Ordet to the ordinary world of 1992, Rohmer, like Shakespeare and Dreyer, allows for both secular and religious interpretations.40 One interviewer asked Rohmer whether Charles appears at the end by chance, by magic or because Félicie has found her faith. Rohmer replied: ‘If I make films, it is so, in a certain way, that they ask a question, but not give an answer’ (Curchod 1992: 27).41 As well as Ordet, Conte d’hiver recalls three other masterpieces of cinema: Random Harvest, It’s a Wonderful Life and Vertigo, in all of which someone is re-found. Cavell writes of Shakespeare’s and Hitchcock’s work: If one thinks of the Romance, say of The Winter’s Tale, as the satisfaction of impossible yet unappeasable human wishes, and hence as defining a presiding wish of movies generally, one might think of Vertigo as a declaration of the end of Romance. (Cavell 1979: 203) Félicie is the heroine of a film that wants to re-invest in Romance, and Conte d’hiver is the story of a woman remembering someone loved, an allegory about the power of faith, of feeling haunted by absence and of fighting memory’s domination of the present. Toles argues that movie sentiment and dream work connect; the experience of being made to cry by films taps into the same hidden part of the self that dreams access. Random Harvest, he argues, is ‘a film whose surface story offers a rich emotional fantasy of perfect love and perfect union which cannot, for reasons that are left tantalizingly obscure, be connected to the empty “waking life” of the amnesiac protagonist’ (Toles 2001: 94). As Toles point out, when Rainier regains his memory he loses the ability to feel; in this lies the similarity between Random Harvest and Vertigo.42 However, whereas Vertigo declares itself a nightmare, ‘Random Harvest does not seem to know what sort of dream it is elaborating’ (Toles 2001: 94). Conte d’hiver’s Félicie is the female equivalent of Rainier in Random Harvest, and Rohmer’s film also has a fantastical quality, which it acknowledges with the internal doubling of The Winter’s Tale. However, whereas Random Harvest concentrates on the problem of how ‘emotional memory relates to

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identity’ (Toles 2001: 105), Conte d’hiver explores Félicie’s problem of how to replace the memory of love with relationships which offer a simulation of love. Therefore, the film dramatizes the intense longing to re-find a long-lost lover, not the lover who resides in memory after the break-up of a relationship years earlier, but a fantasy version of this scenario, in which the memorialized idyll can be re-found. Félicie dreams of returning to her old lover not as someone dreaming of returning to their youth, but as someone who believes that a relationship was forsaken in error, a holiday romance that should have developed was denied its chance. Félicie, like Scottie in Vertigo and Rainier in Random Harvest, feels haunted by a sensation that someone is missing from her life. In Nevers cathedral and while watching The Winter’s Tale, Félicie starts to believe that Charles will return to her, starts to feel that her haunting of her own life will end; Rohmer’s fantastical ending puts Conte d’hiver on the side of It’s a Wonderful Life and Random Harvest, not Vertigo.43 For Cavell, Rohmer’s great subject is ‘the miraculousness of the everyday, the possibility and necessity of our awakening to it every day, call it the secularisation of the transcendental’ (Cavell 2004: 437). He argues that the dangers of scepticism are at the heart of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and that Rohmer develops these in Conte d’hiver. Thus belief and doubt, Cavell (2005: 289) argues, are linked to the themes of fantasy and reality in play and film, both of which contain discussions of the differences between magic and religion. He notes that Leontes’ line from the final scene, ‘If this be magic, let it be an art/Lawful as eating’, brings up the notion that there is lawful as well as unlawful magic (Cavell 1988: 97). Félicie points out to Loïc that as a young, unmarried mother she is an affront to traditional Catholic beliefs. She suspects that Loïc’s parents would disapprove of her and her rejection of religion, yet the film has more sympathy for Félicie’s principles than for Loïc’s intellectual Catholicism. By including Shakespeare’s resurrection scene in Conte d’hiver, Rohmer reflects on his film’s balance of plausibilities and implausibilities. Shakespeare’s play already joins the dramatic art of the play with the dramatic art within the play. Rohmer extends this self-consciousness by including the play’s final scene. In doing so, he emphasizes that Conte d’hiver is both an artificial work of art and a world for its characters. On stage, Paulina tells Leontes: ‘That she is living/Were it but told you, should be hooted at/Like an old tale; but it appears she lives’. Rohmer remarked that, with those words, Paulina ‘speaks to Félicie and to the viewers of the film in speaking not only of the play but also of the film’ (Danton, Giavarini and Taboulay 1992: 25).44 The extract from The Winter’s Tale signals the re-awakening of Félicie’s belief that she will re-find Charles and it functions as a form of internal doubling, the inclusion of which challenges expectations of plausibility and recalls the discussion of Verne’s The Green Ray in Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert. Both internal doublings emphasize the fantastic

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side of the films, yet encourage acceptance of implausibilities. As with Le Rayon vert, Conte d’hiver asks us to acknowledge the fictional structures which support Félicie’s story and ignore them if we are to share, and enjoy sharing, the ‘tears of joy’ shed by Félicie and her daughter, Elise. In both Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver, the internal doubling allows acceptance of what in other circumstances might seem contrived and overplotted. In updating Shakespeare’s play, Rohmer’s film presents conversations about reincarnation, not because the director believes in reincarnation, but because he is interested in film and faith. He ties the discussions, via the internal doubling of Shakespeare’s play, to a reflection on his film’s germination.45 Cavell remarks that . . . it is well recognized that the final two of Shakespeare’s romances, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, most clearly and repeatedly give consciousness to their own artifice, that they are plays with casts, as if no responsibility of art shall go unacknowledged. Then it may be in their awareness of themselves, their responsibility for themselves, that the films of remarriage most deeply declare, and earn, their allegiance to Shakespearean romance. (Cavell 1981: 66–7) For Cavell, Leontes’ scepticism means that . . . The matter for drama, by contrast, is to investigate the finding of a wife not in empirical fact lost, but, let me say, transcendentally lost, lost just because one is blind to her – as it were conceptually unprepared for her – because that one is blind to himself, lost to himself. (Cavell 1988: 86) We cannot say the same of Félicie and Charles. As Rothman notes, ‘the obstacle to the union, or reunion, of Félicie and Charles is external to their relationship (2004: 335).46 Félicie is not blind to herself or unprepared to recognize Charles as the father of her daughter. The holiday romance indicates that their relationship does not have to change in the way that Leontes must change his relation to Hermione. Félicie welcomes the risk that Charles notes she is taking by having sex with him without using contraception. Her laughter in response to his statement ‘You’re taking a risk’ is relaxed; she is at ease with herself and the chance that they might have a child together.47 Shakespeare, however, as Cavell writes, pictures ‘the skeptic as a fanatic’ (1988: 88); Leontes’ scepticism is a result, Cavell suggests, of ignoring rather than one of ignorance; Leontes wants there to be nothing that he can know; he is a portrait of the sceptic as nihilist (1988: 89). Cavell does not see Shakespeare’s final scene as a transposition of a moment of religious resurrection, but an indication that theatre is in competition with religion, declaring itself religion’s successor (Cavell 1988: 99). In Conte d’hiver, Félicie is moved, first in church and then at the theatre, with

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both experiences marked for us by the reprise of the music from the film’s prologue. Cavell’s description of the play’s ending applies to the film: The resurrection of the woman is, theatrically, a claim that the composer of this play is in command of an art that brings words to life, or vice versa, and since the condition of this life is that her spectators awake their faith, we, as well as Leontes awake, as it were, with her. (Cavell 1988: 99) Uncertainty as to how we should respond to the play’s final scene is part of its logic: We know as soon as we know that Rohmer is producing a meditation on Shakespeare’s play, not merely including comments here and there about certain of its themes, that he cannot avoid the maximum theatrical stake of Shakespeare’s structure, namely to consider whether the statue’s being replaced by life holds, or ‘works,’ theatrically, whether the audience is given enough motive to stay with the moment. . . . By ‘not avoiding the maximum theatrical stake’ I mean that Rohmer creates an analogous moment in his film, namely in the return of a long-absent parent. (Cavell 2004: 429) The analogous moment, Rohmer’s resurrection of Charles at the end of Conte d’hiver, claims that he is in command of an art that brings images to life.48 Thus, Rohmer reflects on his own art of film by referring to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; he acknowledges the way that his films make known cinema’s ability to show locations in the world, researched and filmed so as to situate characters, and yet make these places the subject and setting for dreams, fantasies and visions. Conte d’hiver reminds us that we see ourselves in the world in this way, as if at the centre of a novel or film; we live somewhere and relate to others, yet a part of our lives is ‘half dreamt, half lived’, as Etienne says in Conte d’automne. We are all like Don Quixote, Rohmer hints; the trick is to avoid becoming like Leontes. Both play and film warn of the dangers of giving in to complete doubt. However, Rohmer’s film does not settle on religion as providing an answer to scepticism; instead, Conte d’hiver celebrates the transformative power of art, and, in particular, of cinema. By including the extract from The Winter’s Tale, Rohmer foregrounds the parallel between us watching Conte d’hiver and Félicie watching Shakespeare’s play. There is a further doubling of artifice in the fact that Paulina stages a piece of theatre for Leontes in the final scene, most of which Rohmer shows, making explicit the idea that to believe in film characters requires a leap of faith.49 As Shakespeare leaves uncertainty as

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part of his play’s ending, so Rohmer leaves uncertainty as part of his film’s ending. He refuses to confirm that Félicie’s faith in the world derives from a religious epiphany; her experience at the theatre, where she weeps at the sight of Hermione’s restitution to daughter and husband, is a confirmation that Rohmer believes art can have a transformative value, can prompt a secular epiphany. In this, it puts him on the side of Romanticism.50 The ending invites us to achieve a response to Rohmer’s art which is as strong as Félicie’s response to Shakespeare’s ending for The Winter’s Tale, and as strong as Leontes’ response to Paulina’s art. It invites us to suspend our disbelief and invest in the reconciliation. Conte d’hiver, like the Shakespeare play that inspired it, appeals to deep desires to restore or re-find lost life. Charles and Félicie’s reconciliation is ordinary and miraculous, plausible and implausible. Before it happens, the film intimates that the lovers will re-find each other; we watch to see how this happens and in what circumstances. Rohmer’s film transfers the emotion of the final scene of The Winter’s Tale to an everyday setting, a bus. Félicie’s inability to settle in one place or with one person discourages sympathy; for most of the film, her remembrance of Charles seems an idealistic fantasy and her belief in re-finding such purity of experience an irritating naivety. Yet by the end of the film we believe as much as Félicie does that her relationship with Charles will be different to her relationships with Maxence and Loïc (though Rohmer, who could never resist forever deferring conclusions, introduces doubts about Félicie’s idealism and how she will cope with the experience of a domestic relationship, as opposed to the holiday freedom of her short relationship with Charles).51 However improbable Félicie and Charles’s reconciliation, it has been prepared for with such artistry that it proves moving; that sentiment is invoked each time one sees it in the required mood.

L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993) As he had done in the 1980s with the Comédies et proverbes, Rohmer took a break from filming the Contes des quatre saisons series to make two films that experiment with techniques: L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993) and Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995).52 One reason for this was his search for a young man to play the lead in Conte d’été: ‘I waited three years, maybe even four, to find the actor who would be suitable, though the character already existed’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46). Rohmer made L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque quickly, with a crew of four, as he had done with Le Rayon vert and 4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle: himself, one person on sound (Pascal Ribier), one person on camera (Diane Baratier) and one person doing everything else (Françoise Etchegaray).53 He says:

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I had one point of departure which was the place and my four actors: Arielle Dombasle, Pascal Greggory, Fabrice Luchini and Clémentine Amouroux. Then I decided to write the dialogue as we were filming, with the idea of really working under the conditions of absolute amateurism. (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 66)54 His aim was to show people speaking in their own words about things that concerned them. The story of a conflict between a mayor and a teacher over a médiathèque and a journalist’s investigation provided the framework for the filming of local farmers and villagers: The only constraint that I fixed for L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque was to film some scenes in the chateau and the park. The rest, that is the story, came from my desire to work around the chateau, in the village. (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 73)55 Of the conjunction of methods and topic, he says: A story too written and a production too professional would have been artificial in this situation where the point, finally, was to listen to the people who were speaking. I wanted above all to avoid clichés, those which are dangerous for a film which a priori is already at risk from its themes: politics, the countryside. . . . The story was written bit-bybit, sometimes even at the last moment. I always had the idea of using intertitles; this avoids having the images tell everything and allows one to skip certain scenes that are purely informative. On the other hand, I didn’t really know what would be written on top of it. (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 66–7) Nevertheless, unlike Le Rayon vert, which was improvised, the topic and themes of L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque required written dialogue: When I started the film in March 1992, I hadn’t yet written the different dialogues. I had only a treatment which described each sequence. . . . I wrote it [the script] individually for each actor, like a sort of personal identity card, with indications for dialogue and references to certain discussions. (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 67)56 The idea for a story about a médiathèque came from an architect, Michel Jaouën, who plays the architect in the film. In 1977, Jaouën had been working with the urban planning team developing Cergy-Pontoise; by coincidence, a few days before starting, he watched the first episode of Rohmer’s television series on new towns, about CergyPontoise (Jaouën 2007: 219). Jaouën then met Rohmer when the director

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became involved in the Axe Majeur project by Dani Karavan in 1980 and then again in 1985, when Jaouën asked Rohmer to join a sponsorship committee to help finish the project. Rohmer joined the committee of critics, artists, politicians, intellectuals and architects, including Ricardo Boffil, who designed the Belvédère Saint-Christophe apartment block, Blanche’s home in L’Ami de mon amie. When Rohmer finished L’Ami de mon amie, Jaouën organized a screening in Cergy for people who participated in the construction of the new town. During a later conversation, Jaouën and Rohmer discussed architecture, the environment and new towns, after which Rohmer began writing L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (Jaouën 2007: 221). A friend of Rohmer’s, philosopher and poet Jean Parvulesco, acted as an intermediary between Jaouën and Rohmer (Parvulesco plays a character, listed in the credits as Jean Walter, who discusses politics with the magazine editor in Brasserie Lipp). Jaouën (2007: 220–1) recounts how Parvulesco moved to Cergy-Pontoise on Rohmer’s recommendation, telephoning Jaouën some weeks later to tell him that Rohmer wanted to make a film with him and ask him if he would be in interested in acting in it. This is a good example of Rohmer doing two typical things: finding inspiration from people he meets; and becoming involved with the environment in which he is working. The two things connect: Rohmer’s interest in architecture and new towns led him to make the television series, which led the planners of Cergy-Pontoise to invite him onto the Axe Majeur committee, which led to him getting to know Jaouën. Once Rohmer began writing L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, he and Jaouën visited SaintJuire and Rohmer explained to him that he wanted to base the film around the mayor’s plans for the meadow. The architect suggested a médiathèque (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 67; Jaouën 2007: 221). Jaouën constructed a model, drew plans and assembled aerial photographs. On the day of filming, Rohmer came with cast and crew to Jaouën’s office in CergyPontoise. They improvised the scene and Rohmer used the first long take and its dialogue in the final cut. L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque functions as a fable about contemporary politics and, indeed, unlike his other films, the story’s duration is vague and undetermined; Rohmer undermines expectations of conventional continuity, presenting instead a fictional world that displays its syntax and rules.57 The teacher’s opening explanation of the use of the word ‘if’, for example, is set outside the story time. The duration of Julien’s (Pascal Greggory) and Bérénice’s (Arielle Dombasle) conversation about the country is unknown; costumes and settings change (from orchard to cow shed, to field, to house). Their conversation may take place over several days, though it is cinematically continuous. An equivalent indeterminacy occurs in the travelling shot of the village roads, filmed through a car windscreen and accompanied by Julien’s voice describing the local builders who could work on the project using traditional construction methods.

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This sequence may belong to the sequence in which Julien shows Bérénice around, but Julien’s voice resembles a voice-over in a documentary. There are also several ellipses in the film, some small, others large; De Baecque notes the two big ones: Blandine’s ‘voyage to Somalia’ and the collapse of Julien’s médiathèque project (1993: 20). These ellipses contribute to the vague sense of duration. Rohmer describes the duration in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque as the opposite of his previous film, Conte d’hiver, in which everything is dated and in which he had wanted to present a social chronicle (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 69). The title cards for the seven chapters replace conventional continuity and the film’s full title is L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque ou les sept hasards (The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, or Seven Chances). The subtitle gives the clue, as de Baecque observes: What L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque teaches, more than its study of political discourse, is that the art of telling stories is an art with ‘ifs’. This film comes straight into the category of ‘films about cinema’. It is not only a question of a practical guide (how to make a film cheaply in ten lessons), but of a directorial consideration of the construction of a film. (1993: 20) Through the seven ‘ifs’, L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque foregrounds the storyteller’s manipulations. In the prologue, the teacher, Marc Rossignol (Fabrice Luchini), explains how to use ‘if’; as an example for his pupils, he uses ‘if the weather is good, we can go for a bike ride’. Rohmer then cuts to the first chapter title, which begins as they all do, with an ‘if’: ‘If on the eve of the regional elections of March 1992, the presidential majority hadn’t become a minority’. The second chapter title reads as follows: ‘If Julien, after his defeat, had not suddenly become smitten with the novelist Bérénice Beaurivage’. The story continues like this: if Blandine had not switched off her answering machine, she would have heard a message from her editor; if she had got the message, she would not have met Julien and Bérénice; if she hadn’t met them, she wouldn’t have written an article on Julien and Saint-Juire; if she hadn’t written the article (and her editor changed it), Julien’s médiathèque might have gone ahead. Chapter IV announces the switch from Julien to Blandine, but the film thematizes chance further by the way that Blandine unplugs her telephone answering machine to plug in a tape-recorder to record a radio programme in which a philosopher is talking about the ‘imponderable’ in history. In Brasserie Lipp, Jean Walter and the editor also raise the issue of the imponderable while discussing whether France is rightwing after the 1992 elections; Walter says: ‘We’ll see what the President is going to do, what the party is going to do, and then at the same time there is the imponderable’.

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L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque combines this fable-like framework with documentary elements, such as the interviews constructed like television reports. The earliest of these comes when Bérénice talks to the shepherd, who explains that it is good for the sheep to eat the roadside plants. She talks to him as Mirabelle talks to the farmer in 4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle or Delphine talks to the taxi driver in Le Rayon vert. However, most of the interview scenes occur when Blandine (Clémentine Amouroux) interviews the villagers. Rohmer describes Amouroux and the villagers’ improvisations: the inhabitants were not given the real story and they responded to Clémentine Amouroux as if she were a real journalist who was doing an investigation on the subject of ‘the cultural needs of rural milieux’. They all responded to the reality of the village itself not the fiction of the film, about which they either didn’t know or knew very little. . . . I like this little gap. I see it as proof of the connection between the reality of the village and the story that I invented with the help of the actors and the architect. (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 67–8) Blandine’s interviews in Saint-Juire begin with Pascal Greggory’s mayor and end with Fabrice Luchini’s teacher. In between, she interviews five villagers (a shopkeeper, a student, two farmers and a bell ringer). As Rohmer acknowledges (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 68), structuring the sequence in this way integrates the unscripted encounters between Blandine and the villagers with the scripted encounters enacted by professional actors, thus ensuring that the film slides between fiction and non-fiction; for example, the second farmer looks at the camera as he is leaning against a wall, talking to Blandine. To their left, the view of the meadow and the church opens up. He chuckles as Blandine asks if he has animals and if they are far away, looking at the camera as he does so. Rohmer’s relaxed way of blending ‘the reality of the village’ with ‘the fiction of the film’ ensures that the farmer’s look at the camera, an acknowledgement of something not meant to exist in most fictional worlds, is not disturbing. The effect resembles that which Abbas Kiarostami achieves when he plays on the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994) and Close-Up (1990). As Gilberto Perez demonstrates, their emphasis on the medium of film puts the means and methods of filmic representation in question.58 Rohmer’s documentary approach is a similar experiment with the limits of fiction. One effect of this is the film’s application of off-screen sounds, whether bird song or traffic noises, to counterpoint dialogue. The film presents soundscapes composed from found elements; for example, while Blandine talks to the shopkeeper, cocks crow off-screen. The sound evokes the countryside, but also distracts from the dialogue. Rohmer applies the same principle to photography in this scene when the lighting changes

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during the shot of the shopkeeper, caused by a cloud. Most filmmakers would avoid loud background noises or changes in lighting, but Rohmer includes these sharp interruptions of light and sounds, embracing aleatory effects. The effects are not unsettling, though they do not seal tight the boundaries of a fictional world; wedged-in documentary details, which might disrupt other films, here find their place.59 At the same time, Rohmer sometimes inserts striking geometric shapes. Take again, for instance, the second farmer. He leans against a wall and glances over at the camera several times, smiling, before taking them (and one feels it is ‘them’, not just Blandine) to his field. There, the film shows him with the hedge in the background dividing the frame into thirds, forming a perfect balance of lines and forms. The shot is noteworthy; Charles Tesson (1993: 77) finds it the most beautiful in the whole film. He points to the amusement on the farmer’s face as he complies with the ‘childish naivety’ of Blandine’s request to see the cows: ‘there is no contempt and no irony in this image’ (Tesson 1993: 77). He highlights the shot not for its geometric qualities, though, but for its Bazinian uniqueness; it does not illustrate anything or make a point, but functions ‘to express the simple fact of filming’ (1993: 77). To express this ‘simple fact of filming’, L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque occupies the border between fiction and non-fiction, with Rohmer developing the form of fictional documentary that he used on Le Rayon vert and 4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, ‘The Blue Hour’ episode of which contains a mini-documentary about the farm. Blandine is a fictional character, played by Clémentine Amouroux, an actress with whom Rohmer first worked on Perceval le Gallois, but she is also, for the five villagers, a journalist researching the region. At one point during her interview with the bell ringer, she asks ‘What goes on in Saint-Juire? What do people do? How do they live?’ Here, as in Le Rayon vert, Rohmer acknowledges the inspiration of Jean Rouch and Chronique d’un été, citing the sequence in which Marceline asks people ‘how do you live?’ and ‘are you happy?’ The interview is the central strategy of L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, supplemented with discussions between Julien and Bérénice, Julien and Régis, Julien and Blandine, Marc and Blandine, and Julien and Zoé. Besides the political discussions and the interviews with people who live in Saint-Juire, the other distinctive feature of L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque is its limiting of the suspense which Rohmer’s films often attach to personal relationships. The film hints that Blandine likes Julien, but does not elaborate this. During their first meeting in her editor’s office, the close-up of Blandine looking at Julien as he talks suggests an undercurrent of mutual attraction. Another hint comes when Blandine is on the phone to her editor. Reclining on a sofa, in a close shot, she ends her conversation with Régis (François-Marie Banier) by saying of Bérénice and

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Julien: ‘They’re not in love. It’s just for show. She’s not his type at all’. The mayor’s invitation to Blandine to go for a drink with him caps this slim plotline.60 The reduced suspense is also apparent in Julien and Marc’s disagreement; the film foregrounds this plotline more than Julien and Blandine’s mutual attraction, but not so that it dominates. In his classroom, Marc cheers the announcement that Julien’s plans have been rejected, but the film ends not with this triumphalist note but with Julien’s garden party. The lack of suspense in the story is connected to Rohmer’s handling of point of view; for example, the film follows Julien and Blandine, but the sensibility that guides us through the film belongs to the storyteller, whose voice the chapter headings render legible. The story is constructed around the seven ‘ifs’ and the author of those ‘ifs’ controls the framework. For this reason, L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque is not an ensemble comedy in the mode of Pauline à la plage or L’Ami de mon amie; though it focuses on different characters, it does not construct parallels between them or suspense about events and relationships. The lack of suspense is evidence of Rohmer’s willingness to forego conventional storytelling and maintain a buoyant relaxed mood that permits digressions. In doing this, the filmmaker exhibits his own methods within the finished film; for example, Blandine’s interviews with the five inhabitants of Saint-Juire and her research into the location resemble Rohmer’s research with people like Jaouën.61 Blandine investigates politics and countryside, interviewing the villagers as Rohmer conducted his research for his films by interviewing people. His other films incorporate his research into people and places, synthesising material into motifs and metaphors that link character to setting. That L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque keeps similar research on-screen is emblematized by the close-up of the magazine cover, with its photograph of the tree accompanied by the title of the article ‘L’Arbre et/ou la Médiathèque’. The title of the article is close enough to the film’s title to make it almost another instance of the internal doubling found in Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver. Thus, the characters are plausible, but, with little suspense attached to them, the story is not based on the possibility of revelation or the promise of revelatory denouement. When the film switches to Blandine’s interviews, the plotlines about the médiathèque’s construction or Julien and Bérénice’s relationship are almost forgotten. The sequence of Julien showing Bérénice around the village blends their disagreement about the attractions of the countryside with a discussion of food production and environmentalism that links to the things Marc later says. Bérénice’s high-fashion outfits emphasize her incongruity with her surroundings, suggesting that Julien is wrong about her being able to live in the countryside; yet, apart from this, the film does not invite examination of behaviour or dress with a view to discovering unspoken motivations. The

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main issue that emerges as Julien and Bérénice talk is his worry about the countryside and urbanization. L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque’s combination of an experiment in storytelling (the seven ‘ifs’) with a pamphlet-style political report was made between two important elections in France.62 The context is connected to the content; as Michel Serceau notes (1994: 1), L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque was released a few weeks before the French national elections of March 1993, which saw the incumbent Socialist Party lose many of its parliamentary seats.63 In March 1992, the French Socialist Party also did badly in the regional elections with, as the first chapter title states, Mitterand’s presidential majority becoming a minority. The second scene is the political discussion in Brasserie Lipp, about whether Mitterand is now right-wing or left-wing. Following the first chapter title, the film shows old posters of candidates who have competed in the March 1992 elections; when Julien visits Règis in his office, the editor tells him ‘Sorry about the local elections; better for the national elections’. The film condenses its engagement with contemporary politics into its depiction of the controversy over Julien’s attempt to revitalize the local economy by building a médiathèque. However, Rohmer adds resonance to this political debate by setting the film in Saint-Juire Champgillon in the southern Vendée, in the Pays-de-Loire region in the west of France. The Vendée is famous in France for its revolt against the revolutionary government in 1793, when it fought a guerrilla war for three years. The discussion in the editor’s office refers to the Vendée’s history, when Bérénice jokes that Julien is a Royalist after the editor assumes, because of the region’s history, that the region is right-wing. Julien insists that while the north of the region is right-wing, the south of the Vendée has always been left-wing: ‘Everyone makes that mistake’; his own area marked the frontier between the Blues and the Whites.64 Julien shares the concerns of the Greens, but he does not think that they have reasonable policies in other areas. They continue talking about environmentalism and socialism, with the editor, at one point, referring to post-1968 socialism as the extreme left. It is tempting to hear echoes of Rohmer’s comments in interviews in Julien’s point about the way the right wing in the northern Vendée aligns itself with traditionalism and the heritage industry. Julien insists that the left can also embrace the countryside and its traditions, but can do so in a way that is progressive, as opposed to it just being a means of providing folklore for tourists or the owners of second homes. The strongest sense of Rohmer’s own voice comes when Julien argues that to be an environmentalist is not always a conservative position and to be concerned with the countryside does not mean one is reactionary.65 The teacher expresses his forthright opposition to the mayor’s project in the sequence following Chapter III’s title card: ‘If the white willow tree in the meadow had not miraculously resisted the assault of time . . .’ A town

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crier publicizes the availability of the architect’s plans in the town hall. The film then cuts to Marc taking pictures of the meadow and the tree, with his wife (played by Rohmer’s production manager Françoise Etchegaray) and his daughter Zoé (Galaxie Barbouth), both of whom listen to his shouting. Marc argues that the view of the village from the meadow is as valuable as a work of art; the integration of old buildings and landscape are worth preserving. Zoé criticizes her father for shouting protests into a space empty of listeners: ‘It is not shouting that is needed, but agitation’. He says she has illusions: ‘How can I, a simple teacher, fight a decision that is backed by powerful political interests?’ Zoé then asks him why he doesn’t stand in the elections. He says no, but she says that she will when she is 21. She also tells him that she has an idea but she refuses to tell him now. While Zoé listens to her father’s protests, the film inserts several shots of Zoé, sitting cross-legged in the grass, reading a book called Terre Patrimoine Commun [Common Heritage Land].66 Her reading of this book indicates her precocity, but it is another instance of Rohmer including his own research on screen. Marc and Julien disagree about the médiathèque, but they would agree about the local agricultural economy. Walking around his garden, for example, Julien and Bérénice talk about when the pears and apples ripen; she asks how fruit is available all year round in supermarkets. He explains that it is grown in greenhouses. Julien’s comments to Bérénice anticipate Marc’s later statements to Blandine about not wanting to eat pears transported from New Zealand. The film measures Marc and Julien’s shared concern for the environment against the counter-argument presented by the editor: ‘the ecologists, the Greens are the worst reactionaries. They are not left-wing; they never have been’. He claims that the Greens are against progress and that they would prefer the world to stop developing, but, as Julien and Blandine point out, some forms of progress cause global warming. While their discussion sets out positions in debates about the environment, Bérénice’s incompatibility with Julien is expressed by her view on the topic, one that combines ignorance and tabloid prejudice. The film gives the mayor’s and the teacher’s arguments for and against the médiathèque a fair hearing. The teacher’s desire to preserve the meadow is understandable, but so too is the mayor’s vision of a building that would combine traditional materials with contemporary design. Such a venue might transform a local economy, and all Blandine’s interviewees describe how difficult country life has become since the rise of monocultural farming. Instead of bringing Marc and Julien together to confront each other, though, Rohmer uses Marc’s daughter Zoé to conclude the storyline, with Zoé’s friendship with Véga being the means of her meeting Julien.67 The scene in which Zoé and Julien talk displays the hilarious literalness of children: Zoé is naive yet provocative, devoid of guile yet forceful and tenacious in her questions, which have a directness that surprises Julien. She is outside politics, but her statements to Julien are political: she can’t play

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in the fields because they are private. Zoé’s argument that the countryside needs more play areas not a médiathèque is reasonable; and her behaviour and her argument impress Julien, who promises to consider her suggestion for the future; a playground might complement his médiathèque. He gets excited about further municipal projects and congratulates her for not being afraid to talk to him. Rohmer cuts to a wonderful shot of Zoé sitting on the bench holding her knees; then he cuts back to Julien’s sudden and comic departure. The bigger dispute is that between the two fathers – a political confrontation of sorts, though they share concerns for the environment and the countryside. The film shows a difficult choice and does not make it easy to choose the mayor’s project or the teacher’s opposition. It presents a debate about contemporary architecture and old towns, about the contest between environmentalism and economic regeneration. Rohmer’s long-standing interests in the environment concur with views expressed by mayor and teacher; yet it is hard to know where Rohmer’s sympathies lie concerning the construction of the médiathèque.68 The end of the film sees the collapse of the mayor’s project, but nothing else indicates that the film is for or against the médiathèque, and Rohmer’s other work and statements indicate that he was a supporter of new buildings. The film concludes by celebrating the countryside, with songs written by Rohmer and Mary Stephen, sung by Luchini, Dombasle, Greggory and a local choir. Interspersed with the songs are numerous shots of local inhabitants enjoying the party, an appropriate ending for a film that has demonstrated such a delightful lightness of touch.

Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995) Les Rendez-vous de Paris was Rohmer’s second diversion from his Contes des quatre saisons project, and another opportunity to experiment: Les Rendez-vous de Paris was something of a rest. . . . I had absolutely no constraints of time or money, the actors had agreed to be paid out of any profits the film made, and I already had the film stock, so I just enjoyed myself. (Bright 1996: 11) However, Serge Renko remembers rehearsing for several weeks with Rohmer and Aurore Rauscher and gives an example of Rohmer’s direction: The bridge over the Saint-Martin canal, for example, was represented by two chairs a metre apart, and we had to play the scene exactly between these two chairs; it was the height of absurdity and theatricality. (Guerin 2004: 18)

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The long rehearsals enabled fast filming, though, as Renko recalls: ‘Never more than three takes or three people: Diane Baratier, Françoise Etchegaray and sound recordist Pascal Ribier’ (Guerin 2004: 18). They filmed in the Jardin des Luxembourg within an hour and a half, with the actors wearing hidden microphones: This is because Eric does not give you many things to lean on. He throws you into the arena, protected by the text, which is like a straitjacket, but, apart from that, you have incredible freedom. On other shoots, one begins a sentence and completes it two days later because in between there are inserts and reverse-shots. With Rohmer, on the other hand, shooting in continuity, one is really exposed and vulnerable. But you have complete confidence in him; he gives you so much confidence . . . And the things that I wanted to do with the character seem to be in the film. (Guerin 2004: 19) Clara Bellar also recounts that ‘when we began work on the film, he was very open to suggestions, but once he’s written the script he changes nothing’ (Andrew 1996: 4). Rohmer confirms: ‘there was very little improvisation in this film, but it was written specifically for the actors’.69 Claude-Marie Trémois describes Les Rendez-vous de Paris as a film made while truanting, play not work (1995: 48). In its experiments with structure and technique, Les Rendez-vous de Paris resembles a sketch; Rohmer speaks of its middle story as a rough draft for Conte d’été (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 45). The three stories of Les Rendez-vous de Paris possess a tight framework, built around the prominent central device of appointments, meetings and rendezvous, yet separate ideas inspired each story: In the three films, the stories are told in a very different manner, a little like exercises. In the first, there is a very theatrical construction, with several characters, a framework of scenes, entrances and exits. The second is more like a chronicle or a diary. The third is in continuity. In this one, what I was interested in was starting in the middle of the action, and instead of having exposition at the beginning (who is this Swedish woman and why is she here?) have it at the end. (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 31) Around the bare contrivance of the rendezous, Rohmer arranges coincidences, chance meetings, missed appointments and planned meetings that come to nothing. Each story uses different appointments and each ends with an appointment that fails, a relationship that does not work out and a man alone. All three create suspense about whether someone will turn up for an appointment.70 As always with Rohmer, seasons and periods play their part,

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as do locations, with the stories exploiting the expressive potential of public urban spaces: streets, markets, cafés, parks and museums. As theatre provides the inspiration for the first story, ‘Le Rendez-vous de sept heures’, it features six characters interacting at cross-purposes in a mini version of a theatrical comedy staged on the streets of Paris. In addition, as Trémois notes (1995: 48), Esther, Aricie, Horace and Hermione are all names from theatrical tragedies. Rohmer explains: I wanted to give the first film the feeling of being an exercise by students, by young people, who invented a story to amuse themselves by acting it out. I liked this drama-school quality. . . . That was why I gave them first names which came from tragedies by Corneille and Racine. I also wanted, in a way, to thank Jacques Lassalle who wrote a preface for Conte d’hiver in L’Avant-scène du cinéma, in which he said that my films didn’t recall Marivaux, but Corneille’s comedies . . . In the first film, I wanted to accentuate the comic quality of Corneille, filming in spaces and choosing a situation which could just about resemble Corneille. (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 30) Les Rendez-vous de Paris opens with one credit: the film’s title and ‘by Eric Rohmer’. Following this comes a shot of an accordionist and a singer who perform to the camera.71 The musicians introduce the stories and conclude the film; their address to camera brings street theatre into the film and maintains a light-hearted tone. Their first verse is as follows: In Paris, a rendezvous May not always be for you. It may be a surprise, Or it may be unwise. The seven o’clock appointment between Esther (Clara Bellar) and her boyfriend Horace (Antoine Basler) is unanticipated by them when we first see them, parting and arranging to meet on Saturday. Horace is ‘free tonight’, but Esther has ‘an exam tomorrow morning’. He is busy the next night, though it will transpire that he is free to meet Aricie (Judith Chancel) at the Dame Tartine at 7 p.m. Another student, Felix (Malcolm Conrath), puts doubts in Esther’s mind about Horace’s commitment to her. His claim to have seen Horace at the Dame Tartine café with another woman is reinforced by her friend Hermione (Cecile Pares), who says that before Horace met Esther he ‘always had three or four girls on the go’. Hermione recommends games: ‘Do what he does to you – make him jealous’; but the suggestion that she hide her feelings does not appeal to Esther. Hermione proposes: ‘Make him feel as if you’re surrounded by guys’. Esther answers: ‘But which ones? The

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ones I know don’t measure up’. ‘Find some others’, concludes Hermione, and on this line Rohmer cuts to an intertitle announcing ‘The next day’. That day begins with the drageur (Mathias Megard) chatting her up by talking about his appointment with his dentist. Esther arranges to meet him at the Dame Tartine café in Beaubourg at seven o’clock, aiming, one presumes, to make Horace jealous. Continuous travelling shots show Esther and the drageur walking through the market. The shots are angled up at them as they pass through the crowd; they include the sunlight shining onto the garlands hanging from the stalls and trees, creating a cheerful atmosphere. Esther is dressed colourfully, in a red dress and cardigan, carrying a straw shopping bag. The handsome drageur is in a white t-shirt and a black leather jacket. Rohmer filmed this scene in a busy market without extras, pushing director of photography, Diane Baratier, in a wheelchair, while she operated the camera.72 The scene presents an exhilarating combination of the prearranged and the precarious, a blend which favours the impulsive interaction of the two young people; at one opportune moment, Esther almost bumps into a little boy who walks in front of her as she has second thoughts and returns. She pats the boy on the head and makes her arrangement with the drageur. Rohmer never reveals whether someone stole Esther’s wallet or whether she dropped it. The story’s end appears to hint that the drageur did not steal it; he arrives at the Dame Tartine, but Esther’s comment, ‘If it wasn’t him, he’ll be there this evening’, is not necessarily true. The film also hints that Aricie, who returns the wallet, is untrustworthy, yet nothing confirms this suspicion.73 Whether or not Aricie stole Esther’s wallet, she may be about to steal her boyfriend; but, again, the truth remains inaccessible; Horace might be lying when he tells Esther, ‘That’s why I am here. To tell her it’s off’. When Esther asks Aricie ‘Is he your boyfriend?’, Aricie replies, as they stand by the Beaubourg fountains, ‘Yes, well no, not yet . . . I’m glad you’re here. I don’t wholly trust the guy. He seems hooked on me. Phones me all day, but . . . tell me what you think. I want your opinion’. The conclusion leaves all four characters alone: Horace follows Esther into the street, but she storms off; he leaves without going back to Aricie, who leaves the café before the handsome drageur arrives. A little zoom into him ends the story; then the accordionist and singer sing their introduction to the next story. Despite Rohmer’s comment about ‘Le Rendez-vous de sept heures’ being theatrical, this story is told from Esther’s point of view, in the double sense that she is in almost every scene – only the final scene of the drageur in the café lacks her – and Esther’s doubts about Horace motivate the unresolved mystery. Doubts remain at the end of all three stories. Rohmer comments: One can well imagine that everything said by the characters is false. For example, it is possible that the young woman in the second film is scared of going into the hotel and she does not see her boyfriend; that’s

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just a pretext for her. I don’t really think this, but I wouldn’t stop people from thinking this. Similarly, in the third film, one could believe that the young woman is not married to a publisher, but is a student and is amusing herself with the painter, that she is not sure whether to give in to him. . . . What is interesting in comedy is to show that speech can be separate from truth. If lies are condemnable, the ability to lie is one of the most beautiful things that man possesses. Work on the gap between words and reality is a common thing in all the arts insofar as they involve words, and even more in cinema than in theatre. (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 32) As Jousse (1995: 28) argues, Les Rendez-vous de Paris makes doubts and lies, masks and dissimulations, the essential counterweight to the film’s transparent representation of Paris. Rohmer always controlled access to his story worlds, often to maintain uncertainties about who knows what and, as Jousse (1995: 28) observes, lies or the suspicion of lies are omnipresent in Les Rendez-vous de Paris, though the film does not judge the characters who lie. Jousse emphasizes how Les Rendez-vous de Paris encapsulates the essence of Rohmer’s filmmaking: on the one hand, it is devious, full of detours and dead-ends, like the paths in the Villette park; on the other hand, it reveals, in an extreme way, Rohmer’s curiosity about the world around him. For Jousse, the middle story, ‘Les Bancs de Paris’, best examplifies this: in effect, the structure of this story is not much like a narrative, but more like a catalogue, exhausting the possibilities of an obsession with symmetry, an exercise in pure logic practised until it’s a form of madness. The systematic exploration of Paris’s parks and gardens – with the notable exception of the very beautiful Buttes-Chaumont park, already filmed in La Femme de l’aviateur – is accompanied by the female character’s stubborn refusal to have sex (without mentioning the symmetry between the two men, to which she continually refers). If there is perversion, it resides precisely in this successful diverting of sexual energy into a series of unending promenades, of a refined eroticism founded essentially on frustration, during which language entirely absorbs this energy and, even more, in the fanatical character of the young woman, for whom the man, carried away by his obsession, becomes a pure object of slavery until the cruel final act. (Jousse 1995: 28) As Jousse notes, the second story unfolds as a list of co-ordinations of space and time, yet he concludes, Everything is resolutely impressionistic, very close to amateurish (a sign of supreme perversity?), sensitive to the fresh air and the seasonal

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variations, which quickly show all four seasons, from summer to spring, filmed as naturally as possible, a mix of spontaneous charm and accepted awkwardness which produces some of the most beautiful moments in cinema. (1995: 29) ‘Les Bancs de Paris’ is an achievement in its own right, but also, as Rohmer says, a rehearsal of techniques uses on Conte d’été, both the suspense about whether the man and woman will form a couple and the combination of walking and talking.74 The story is structured as a diary of appointments, with the handwritten diary entries announcing the dates and parks in which the unnamed man and woman meet. In L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, duration is undetermined and continuity is loose, though the historical context is precise (between the 1992 and 1993 elections); ‘Les Bancs de Paris’ has the opposite, a precise sequentiality and a vague historical context. Both films exhibit their contrivances, their closeness to fables, but this story about an unnamed man and woman also emphasizes the seasons: The parks, which are a little bit of nature in Paris, allowed me to mark the evolution of time because the film was made during one year. The first episode was filmed in July, the second, more slowly, between the end of September and the beginning of December. We were filming one scene a week, so that I could have the passage from summer to autumn and then to winter in the same episode. It required a lot of flexibility because, for example, leaves fall very quickly. (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 33) The changing trees and plants of the parks mark time passing as the days grow colder. It is also important to the couple that the city parks in autumn and winter afford them privacy in public spaces, while providing a variety of backgrounds for their restless movements. Their first conversation informs us that the man (Serge Renko) lives in Bobigny, separate from the woman (Aurore Rauscher), who lives with another man, Benoît. Their next meeting is on 16 September at the ‘Fontaine Médicis’ in the Jardin Luxembourg. They walk along a path in the gardens until they get to Auguste Ottin’s statue of Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea.75 ‘I wanted you to see this’, he explains, before telling the story of the statue to the young woman: ‘When I first came to Paris, I was in love with that girl’. ‘You brought me here to show me your ex?’, she jokes. ‘To show I was faithful to an image’, he replies. By saying that when he first came to Paris he was in love with a statue, the man admits he was in love with an idealized woman, which is what his relationship with the young woman now resembles. After discussing whether Galatea looks like her, they sit down to discuss her boyfriend, Benoît. As in La Femme de l’aviateur, Pauline à la plage, Conte de printemps and Conte d’été, one character asks

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another, ‘What are you thinking about?’ The man asks the woman this as they sit on chairs by a tree. He tells her ‘You’ve looked worried today’. She explains that, in the Latin Quarter, she’s scared of meeting Benoît. Their next meeting is at ‘Cimetière St Vincent’ on 30 September. They talk about the tombs. As they walk, he hugs her and she explains that she does not like holding hands with Benoît in public. She talks about whether she loves Benoît and whether he loves her. ‘If he could see you now!’, says the man; she responds, ‘Today, unlike the other day, I almost wish I’d meet him’, spoken as they walk towards the Place Emile Goudeau, where they discuss the Bateau Lavoir. At Parc de Belleville on 14 October, he is waiting for her at the top of a small hill in the park. They are far from the centre of Paris and they talk about visiting his apartment; she refuses. If she separates from Benoît, ‘I’ll live with a girlfriend. I need time to think’. He says, ‘It’s more fun kissing on a sofa, than kissing on a public bench, especially a wet one’. In Parc de la Villette, on 21 October, they talk about its use of space, with its Science City and Geode. Again, he suggests they visit his apartment; she refuses. Villette Park’s curving complicated paths are metaphors for their relationship; when he is baffled about which direction to take, she breaks the rules and climbs over the fence to escape, before sliding down the banister. In Parc Montsouris on 12 November, a more old-fashioned park with older trees, he says that he is interested in everything; she remarks that Benoît is interested in nothing: ‘He has no talent for boredom’. As they walk through the park, they crunch dry leaves underfoot. The trees are bare behind them as they sit on a wooden bench. She sits on his knee and he tells her ‘I love you’, before they kiss. ‘Me too’, she replies. ‘Then leave Benoît’. She agrees that she should, but does not want to initiate a separation. By 18 November, in the Jardins du Trocadero, he is expressing his frustration about not being able to meet her indoors. He suggests a trip away and she jokes ‘Tahiti’. He proposes a trip to the seaside, but she is worried about lying to Benoît. Their last meeting in a park is inside the Auteuil greenhouses on 25 November, where it is warm enough for them to remove their coats. Standing in the greenhouse, surrounded by tropical leaves, she proposes that they stay two nights in a Parisian hotel. She stands, in a close shot, by huge green leaves. The film contrasts the parks outside, where the leaves have fallen to the ground, crisp and dried up, and the greenhouse inside. Within the artificial climate, she accelerates their relationship by altering the routine of their interaction; that initiative turns out to be the end for them as a potential couple. The man seems to sense this and looks miserable; nonetheless, he agrees to her hotel trip. At the Gare de l’Est, at 12 noon, they meet; there is no date. They joke on the metro, but at the hotel she sees Benoît going into the hotel. He cannot believe the unlucky coincidence, but is cheered by what he assumes to be the end of her relationship with Benoît. However, she concludes:

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‘You’re the last man I want to see now. I say that so you’ll stop hoping. It’s probably over between us. Your fate is linked to Benoît’s, no matter what we do. You helped me deal with him; but I don’t need you now. You’re his mirror image. Without him, you don’t exist’. She explains that he was a counterpart to Benoît; their relationship cannot exist without her relationship with Benoît. At this late stage, the film suggests that the man and Benoît are versions of each other. It would not be surprising if Serge Renko also played Benoît; the man in the distance looks like him: long hair, same clothes and shoulder bag. The resemblance implies that the two male characters are, as the woman suggests, mirror images of each other. Her confession that she almost went to the hotel with Benoît once reinforces the notion that one does not exist apart from the other. While the second story is a sketch for Conte d’été’s devices of a man and a woman meeting several times to walk and talk, the third story rehearses Conte d’été’s travelling shots. After the street singers remind us that ‘A rendezvous can be a surprise/Or it can be unwise’, ‘Mère et enfant 1907’ begins with the Swedish woman (Veronika Johansson) visiting the painter’s (Michael Kraft’s) studio.76 Nothing emerges about her reasons for visiting him, other than that she is a tourist in Paris and a mutual friend has given her his name and address. She is attractive, well dressed and friendly. The painter eyes her up as she comes in, but is otherwise unwelcoming. As she looks at his paintings, he says he has a little thing to finish. He asks if she is studying art and she says no, she is studying interior design. ‘Same thing’, he says; ‘not quite’, she distinguishes. He tries his luck with her by taking hold of her arm as they stand in front of his painting, but she pulls away. On the way to the Picasso Museum, they talk about which building is better looking, the run-down one or the painted. He prefers a building’s history to be visible; she prefers the renovated frontage. At the Picasso Museum, he says he is not going in with her because he is in the middle of creating. His demeanour suggests that he is lying, but her politeness gives nothing away. He arranges to meet her at 8 p.m. in La Coupole. On leaving the Picasso Museum, he sees the other woman (Benedicte Loyen) walking along the street and follows her back into the museum, where he bumps into the Swedish woman. Forced to lie to her about why he came back, he talks about the power of Picasso interrupting his concentration. He then holds forth about Picasso’s Mère et enfant, 1907 for the unknown woman’s benefit before following her into a different room. Relevant to this encounter is the Swedish woman’s dislike of the Picasso painting that gives this film its title, Mother and Child 1907.77 The painter makes a pathetic excuse to the Swedish woman. ‘Till tonight?’ he calls out; ‘See you around’, she replies, her look suggesting that she sees straight through him. Four shots show the meeting between the young woman and the painter on the streets between the museum and his studio. For the travelling shots

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that follow the painter as he follows the young woman crossing from pavement to pavement, the crew put the camera in a Citroen 2CV, which they pushed by hand (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 30). These travelling shots form the nucleus of this story, satisfying Rohmer’s intention to tell a story in continuity with few ellipses. The first, a minute long, begins by framing the entrance to the museum’s courtyard. The woman walks out; the artist follows her. The dominant feeling of this shot is created by the loud sound of her shoes on the pavement, though she is off-screen for most of the shot. He walks behind her in quiet shoes, tracked by the camera’s smooth forward movement, paced to match his walking. He catches her as she looks in a shop window and confesses, ‘I am following you’. She crosses the road away from him; he follows. The second shot, about two minutes long, is fluid, composed as a dance between the woman and the camera; as she crosses the road several times, the camera moves left and right (as does the man). This shot transmits a powerful sense of movement for, as Loyen crosses over, trying to shake off the painter, the camera moves backwards, panning sinuously as it does so. The third shot of this sequence begins when they emerge onto the busy boulevard and ends when he stops outside his studio. The fourth shot is a reverse-angle framing of her as she says that she feels secure enough in her relationship to look at his paintings. Inside, he moves close to her as he talks about his paintings when they are kneeling down, but, as happened with the Swedish woman, she pulls away from him. The long takes of the woman in his studio show her sparkling eyes and humorous charm. One moment stands out: she pokes her head around a corner in his studio to look for an answer to her question ‘Did she like your painting?’ There is a cheeky spontaneity to her movement and question, which highlights her impulsive responses. When she sits sideways in his armchair, her legs draped over one arm, her posture conveys a spirit of adventurousness. But she is wary of him: when he kneels down beside her, she stands up. He tries to seduce her and says that he made a rendezvous for good form with the Swedish woman but has no intention of going. However, when the young woman leaves him, advising him to take the Swedish woman to a party, he goes to La Coupole. In essence, this story ends with as much uncertainty as the other two, including doubt about whether the young woman lies to him about being married. The painter comes across as an opportunistic womanizer whose immaturity and self-centredness Kraft conveys well.78 However, in place of easy condemnation of the painter, the film allows us to judge his desire to follow his impulse as both hypocritical and honest, though one feels that he gets what he deserves when the Swedish woman does not turn up at the end. Like short stories, Rohmer’s two out-of-season films are playful experiments with techniques, though not lesser achievements for that. Both L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque and Les Rendez-vous de Paris try out

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forms of construction and foreground their structures: in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, it is the play on ‘if’; in Les Rendez-vous de Paris, it is the flagrant use of coincidence. Each of the three stories in the latter film is like a sophisticated game based on a simple idea: theatre, the diary and continuity. Other Rohmer films display their frameworks (the internal doubling in Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver, for example, or the novelist in Le Genou de Claire), but Les Rendez-vous de Paris’s structure is conspicuous. Rohmer worked with such a high level of precision that he was able to create something out of almost nothing and Les Rendez-vous de Paris exhibits a typical Rohmerien paradox: it is a structured film with the feel of an impressionistic documentary. That simplicity is deceptive, though, for the conspicuousness of its arrangement is not distracting; despite the prominence of its rule-bound form, Les Rendez-vous de Paris transmits a spirited sense of spontaneous, lived existence. Nevertheless, L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque and Les Rendez-vous de Paris are the side productions of Rohmer’s tremendously productive later years, when, in his 60s and 70s, he completed the Comédies et proverbes and the Contes des quatre saisons. The two interruptions to his seasonal tales are deft, incisive and pithy works, but they are slight in comparison with the Contes des quatre saisons.79 The characters of L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque and Les Rendez-vous de Paris are credible, but, as in much short fiction, they are less scrutinized than those of the Comédies et proverbes and Contes des quatre saisons, which employ similar devices for sustained, rich and complex treatments of character. Delphine, Jeanne and Félicie are examined in depth; this is not true of Julien, Marc, Blandine and Bérénice or ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ in ‘Les Bancs de Paris’ and the painter in ‘Mère et enfant, 1907’. As diversions, both films are rehearsals for Conte d’été and Conte d’automne, with their concentrated imbrications of form, theme, motif, character, topography and climate. Les Rendez-vous de Paris, in particular, with its movement and conversations, offers visible preparation for Conte d’été.

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7 Contes des quatre saisons – Part 2 Conte d’été (1996) Farewell then pretty one, I must away For my ship sails I must away to Nantes For the king asks this of me . . . Traditional Sea Shanty

Fourteen years after Pauline à la plage, Rohmer returned to Northern France to make another film about a summer holiday with Amanda Langlet, then 29.1 The opening sequences of Conte d’été lack dialogue; for Rohmer, this was vital for communicating Gaspard’s solitude.2 The first word of the film comes seven minutes in, and that word is not the name of the protagonist the film has thus far followed alone in Dinard, but the name of the woman he meets on holiday, Langlet’s character, Margot.3 In contrast, the name of our hero, reluctant gigolo Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), is not heard until the second woman he has met, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), asks her uncle and aunt ‘Can Gaspard come boating with us today?’, after they surprise Gaspard and Solène canoodling on their sofa. This is halfway into the film, two weeks after Gaspard arrives in Dinard, which time he has spent with Margot. Their friendship blossoms, but does not develop into love, in part because Gaspard is waiting for Léna (Aurélia Nolin) to arrive. As in Rohmer’s earlier series with male protagonists, the Six contes moraux, Conte d’été follows its hero, yet remains distanced from him. Dramatic tension derives from the film’s representation of Gaspard’s point

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of view as both absorbing and alienating. On a first viewing of Conte d’été, it may go unremarked that the hero’s name is unheard for 50 minutes; on subsequent viewings, one cannot fail to notice that Rohmer highlights the absence of Gaspard’s name by starting the film’s dialogue with ‘Margot’ and then by threading her name through the film. By using ‘Margot’ as the film’s first word and by delaying the introduction of ‘Gaspard’, Rohmer signals what is important. This is the mode of Ma Nuit chez Maud, which never reveals the name of its hero but has the name of the central woman in its title.4 The principle of the Six contes moraux is re-applied to Gaspard. When an interviewer calls the storytelling in Contes des quatre saisons objective, Rohmer acknowledges that in the first three films ‘we are with the character, but not in their point of view’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 47). This could be said of several Rohmer films, but the method of Ma Nuit chez Maud and Conte d’été differs from that of the Comédies et proverbes. Le Beau mariage and Le Rayon vert, for example, show their heroines in social contexts; the women are awkward and stubborn, but they stimulate compassion. Rohmer’s films that focus on women induce sufficient detachment to enable perception of the causes of the women’s behaviour; they enable sympathy for their protagonists. Ma Nuit chez Maud and Conte d’été follow their heroes, but without showing precise reasons for their behaviour; social explanation of the kind that makes comprehensible the whims of Rohmer’s female characters is absent. As a result, Ma Nuit chez Maud and Conte d’été judge the men’s negative characteristics less sympathetically.5 Conte d’été contains one moment that Gaspard does not witness. This comes after Margot and he first meet on Dinard’s beach.6 There, Gaspard twice fails to recognize Margot, these small failures preparing for his larger failure to acknowledge her feelings. When Margot recognizes Gaspard on the beach, she excuses his inability to recognize her by saying that her wet hair makes her look different. He is on his way to swim and he treats her as if not expecting to see her again, as he spoke to her casually in the restaurant the previous evening. As the film has been following Gaspard, it is a surprise that, when he walks away, the camera remains with Margot, who returns to her towel and puts on her hat and sunglasses. Despite the jumble of the crowded beach, the bold colours and simple design of Margot’s outfit distinguish her: her white sun hat has black piping on it; her red bikini has a white trim. From behind, the camera frames her leaning back on her hands.7 When Gaspard emerges from the sea, the camera follows him as he re-finds his towel. He drops it to begin looking for someone. Rohmer returns to a shot from behind Margot, using the same set-up as before. We recognize Margot, but Gaspard does not; as he walks past her, she turns her head to track him. The camera follows him as he looks around, then a cut reverses the direction. Margot asks: ‘Was it good?’ She removes her glasses and hat, shaking out her hair a little. Gaspard’s

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face shows surprise that she is so near. That momentary move away from Gaspard is one element in the film’s strategic disengagement from its hero. We see him miss Margot and we watch with her as he looks for someone. Yet the moment contains a further displacement. We watch Margot observe Gaspard and we may surmise that she assumes he is looking for her; on subsequent viewings, however, we may suspect that Gaspard is looking for Léna, as he later does, something that Margot does not know at this point. Gaspard comes to Dinard because he knows Léna will come to the region, though he does not have her address. He looks for her when he can. When Margot asks him if he is looking for someone, Gaspard hedges: ‘Not now. Not exactly’. The film highlights Gaspard’s searching with two forward-tracking point-of-view shots, the first, on his second day, when he walks along the seafront eating an ice-cream cone, the second when he visits Saint-Lunaire with Margot, on Wednesday 26 July.8 Referring to Gaspard’s look across the beach, Margot says ‘She’s a week late’. After she jokes about whether Léna exists, he explains that she is driving with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend through Spain. There might be another man in the car, she says. Gaspard gets angry and overtakes her, crossing in front of her. Margot’s response attempts to clarify his feelings: ‘You’re philosophical and not madly in love’. He replies: ‘Since no-one loves me, I love no-one’. Rohmer then cuts to a static framing of the pair sitting down with their backs towards the sea. Rohmer films this important discussion between them as a series of shot/reverse-shots. Gaspard states his philosophy: ‘In a general way, in my life, I don’t look for conquest, to push my luck. But I like luck to push me’. The day Léna told him that she would be in Dinard from 20 July, he ran into a friend from Dinard, who offered to lend him his room for the holidays. In a close-up, Margot confesses her openness to chance: ‘I’m really that way too . . . when he [her boyfriend] returns, we’ll be here for quite a while. Then we’ll see’. The significance of this scene is that they tell each other that neither of their relationships is yet settled. To tell Margot and Gaspard’s tale and to create Conte d’été’s dominant patterns, Rohmer shaped material he derived from actors and locations. He decided to make Gaspard a musician after he cast Poupaud and discovered that the actor was a guitarist, with his own band, though Poupaud distinguishes between his skills and his personality: ‘the character was already entirely written and, in my opinion, was really close to him [Rohmer]. I was not a source of inspiration for him. It is rather me who was inspired by his personality’ (Guerin 1996: 53).9 Rohmer confirms: the character was not inspired by the actor . . . of all the films that I have been able to make, I think that it is this one which is the most personal vehicle. Everything that is in this film is true. These being the things that I was able to experience during my youth, the things that I was able to notice. There is a lot less invention of situations. For each thing, I could

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give you an example. But it is not because one shows something based on fact that the film is good; actual experiences must be rethought. From this point of view, though, the film is really authentic. And in life as in my film, what happens is only the end of an account, things continue. The things that I show are things that happened during a period of holidays and I can say with the benefit of a certain hindsight that those things happened to me when I was the age of the character (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46 and 49).10 Gaspard’s music is part of the story, but the film also refers to Brittany’s musical heritage. Gaspard explains to Margot that Celtic music and sea shanties are popular with rock and folk musicians. Suzy Solidor is one instance of such a musician, active in the 1940s and 1950s; when Gaspard and Margot look across the Rance to Solidor Tower, Gaspard mentions that his parents had an album of Suzy Solidor singing sea shanties. Conte d’été assimilates Brittany’s music and sailing, and Margot’s ethnographic research into Breton folk culture. As so often with Rohmer’s films, the actress provided the inspiration, for Langlet had studied ethnography.11 When she interviews the old sailor, Langlet collaborates with Rohmer as a Rouchian on-camera ethnographer, just as Marie Rivière does in Le Rayon vert or Clémentine Amouroux does in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque. The scene reproduces Rohmer’s own activity as a filmo-ethnographer, in that he researched the area in which he chose to film and met local people (the sailor, the accordionist, the people playing Solène’s aunt and uncle).12 The film’s first music is the whistling during the opening credits of the song that Gaspard writes while staying in Dinard, ‘Fille du corsair’ (written by Rohmer and Mary Stephen). The visit to the old sailor ends with him singing a sea shanty, which inspires Gaspard to compose ‘Fille du corsair’; Rohmer shows Gaspard at home using a little tape-recorder to record the melody as he is composing.13 ‘Fille du corsair’ is next heard when Gaspard reprises the whistling after Margot rejects him when he first tries to kiss her; she asks him if it is a song he is writing and he replies that it is not yet ready. That night, he plays back the melody that he has recorded and composes the lyrics. The next day, Saturday 29 July, after Margot has rejected his advances, Gaspard plays ‘Fille du corsair’ to Solène and then gives it to her. The irony is double: the visit to the old sailor with Margot inspired Gaspard to write the song, but he had promised to write a song for Léna. Continuing the connection of sailing to music, Gaspard, Solène, her uncle and aunt, accompanied by an accordionist, sing it on her uncle’s boat when they are out sailing. At dinner, Solène’s uncle says of Gaspard ‘A great sailor is born’.14 After the credit sequence, the first music heard in the film accompanies a beguiling transition from the evening of Gaspard’s first day in Dinard, Monday 17 July, to the morning of his second day. After Gaspard unpacks

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his guitar, he fiddles around with a slow blues. Rohmer then cuts to an intertitle announcing the next day. Gaspard’s windows are open; he is sitting in a white t-shirt and grey shorts, a yellow fluted coffee bowl in front of him, again playing the guitar, plucking a melancholy tune. The moment celebrates irresponsibility by evoking the carefree existence of a young man without commitments, passing his time as he pleases, improvising as mood and moment take him, on holiday alone, free to have a late breakfast in his underwear while picking at his guitar, just as he is free to dally with three women. The beauty of the moment comes from Rohmer’s creating the sense of freedom that Gaspard experiences through the character’s music; its pertinence to the drama is that it is just this sense of freedom which Gaspard fears losing. When Gaspard dines in the Crêperie du Claire de Lune, where Margot works, on the evening of his first Tuesday, a rock version of a sea shanty plays in the restaurant. Then, on their drive to the sailor’s house, Margot tells Gaspard that she chose the sea shanties playing in the restaurant. This leads to their discussion of folklore and Breton music. He says he would like to write a song like the traditional sea shanty ‘Valparaiso’. In response, she starts singing it; he joins in. Their singing together expresses their ease with each other as they get to know each other, but all three women sing either with or to Gaspard: Margot’s spontaneous singing of ‘Valparaiso’ reveals her willingness to open up to him; Solène’s singing of ‘Fille du corsair’ with Gaspard functions similarly; however, Rohmer positions more ironically Léna’s singing of Hugues Aufray’s ‘Santiano’, with its line about ‘leaving Margot’.15 When she turns up late, Léna talks of a potential visit to the Island of Ouessant with Gaspard. His asserted jollity intimates uneasiness, for he has already discussed this trip with Margot and Solène. Oblivious to his discomfort, Léna tells him of a book she read while staying in Provence, André Savignon’s The Secret of the Seas, which is set on Ouessant. Gaspard explains that he knows it well; he offers to lend her another Savignon book set on Ouessant, Daughters of the Rain. She then puts her hands around his neck and starts to sing Aufray’s ‘Santiano’: I’ll be gone for months, leaving Margot Raise the sail, Santiano I was sad, my spirits were low Leaving the harbour of Saint-Malo. Unwittingly, Léna pricks Gaspard’s conscience; his crossing of his arms and look away from her suggest that he thinks of Margot as he hears her name in the song. Rohmer further develops this by having Léna remind Gaspard that he promised to write her a sea shanty, after which he walks away from her, saying ‘it’s not quite ready’. We later see him trying to compose a sea

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shanty for Léna, blowing out his cheeks and scratching his head in a comic demonstration of frustration as he fails to find inspiration a second time. At the end, when Gaspard discovers that his acquiescence to Léna and Solène has trapped him, his music helps him avoid choosing between them. As he tells Margot, his music comes first. He meets Margot at Dinard’s harbour to say goodbye and, as Margot walks up the jetty after seeing Gaspard sail away, the film reprises the verse from ‘Santiano’. Rohmer connects Gaspard’s sea shanty, ‘Fille du corsair’, to the old sailor’s song, to ‘Valparaiso’ and to ‘Santiano’, but Conte d’été is also a kind of modern-day sailor’s story. Gaspard arrives from and leaves by the sea. Margot, as she jokes to Gaspard, waits like a sailor’s wife for the return of her boyfriend from the South Seas.16 And, as Rohmer remarks, ‘each girl has her own location’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 16). By giving each woman her own location along Brittany’s Côte d’Emeraude, Rohmer exposes Gaspard’s exploits in sailing and sexual terms: Margot in Dinard; Solène in Saint-Malo; Léna in Saint-Lunaire.17 The film’s evocation of Brittany’s sailing traditions includes these three ports and the windswept island of Ouessant, west of mainland France in the Atlantic, near the entry to the English Channel and famous for its shipwrecks. Gaspard promises to take all three women to this island; in the end, he takes none. Sailing references also feature in the décor; when Gaspard dines with Solène’s uncle at his house, visible in the background is a large skull and crossbones flag, referring to Saint-Malo’s seafaring past and to Gaspard’s song about a pirate’s daughter. The friend’s room in which Gaspard stays has three posters on the wall: one of a saxophone, one advertising an album by a rock band, and one showing views of a design for a ship. Prominent amongst a pile of books is a large one entitled La Mer, whilst on top of his friend’s wardrobe is a model ship, and the inside of the crêperie is decorated with a model ship and posters of ships. Besides music and sailing, the other things associated with Dinard and Brittany are the summer and holidays. In the busy summer crowds, Gaspard can be isolated, as he is upon arrival, yet meet other holidaymakers. Brittany’s summer weather is part of Rohmer’s palette and, as in Pauline à la plage, Conte d’été uses the changeable weather of northern France to provide meaningful background for events. The sunny Friday 4 August, which Gaspard spends with Margot, differs from the cloudy Saturday 5 August, when he meets Solène at the statue, the varying weather intensifying the contrast between the warmth and eroticism of Gaspard’s trip with Margot and the cool mistiness of his confused conversation with Solène. Yet the summer of Conte d’été refers to both the season and the period of life experienced by Gaspard and Margot. Two things suit the story. The first is the sense of purposelessness that holidays can throw up. Gaspard’s passivity derives from his being on holiday; with no work to do while

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waiting for Léna, he responds to whatever comes along. He declares his principle of letting luck ‘provoke’ him and he sticks to this in practice; on the beach, Margot says hello to him. She questions him, takes him to the sailor’s, invites him to the crêperie and encourages him to come to the nightclub. Solène also takes the initiative, inviting him to Saint-Malo. The second significance of holidays is that Gaspard believes he is on holiday from adult life, one that need not begin, as he remarks, until he is 30.18 Like many men of his age, Gaspard postpones commitments and indulges his freedom, defining himself by his independence from person or place. Both Margot and Gaspard have finished postgraduate studies. She has a PhD in ethnology; he has an MA in mathematics. Margot studies people; Gaspard studies numbers: that bald dichotomy does not summarize the concrete vividness of Rohmer’s characters, but it alerts us to differences between them. Gaspard and the three women are young, but not teenagers; summer can be the high point of the year and their lives, a period of freedom before they settle down. It may be their last free summer before committing to career and relationships. For Rohmer, Gaspard . . . is not defined straight away, like someone who desires and who searches, as is for example the heroine of Conte d’hiver, or as are the heroes of the Contes moraux. He says himself: ‘I am nothing’ . . . I wanted a character who hesitated between three women while knowing fundamentally that he would not choose anyone. In my films, even the Contes moraux and the Comédies et proverbes, there is a moment of choice. This character [Gaspard], because younger than my other male characters, is in a period ‘before choice’. (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46) The end of summer heralds the end of this period ‘before choice’; until then, Gaspard resists settling down, unwilling to say goodbye to youthful freedom. The fixed period of Gaspard’s holiday enables an ending; the promise of separation releases him from commitments. Thus, when Gaspard first meets Margot, he tells her of his job in Nantes, beginning a month later, on 15 August. He flees a week early, able to escape because he is on holiday. The written intertitles ensure awareness of the holiday passing and Gaspard’s confusion growing. The film opens with an iris out onto the first date, Monday 17 July, written in blue on a sand-coloured background with three wavy blue lines indicating the sea.19 There are written intertitles for 19 of the 21 days that comprise Gaspard’s visit to Dinard. The two ellipses are the Sunday (23 July) after he goes to the nightclub with Margot and the Tuesday (25 July) between them seeing the Solidor tower and their visit to Saint-Lunaire. Margot and Gaspard see each other for most of the 19 days: they spend seven out walking; on one, they visit the sailor; on their first day they walk along the beach; they go to the nightclub on Saturday night; she

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sees him in the car with Solène (an exquisite moment, which, filmed from the passenger’s side, foregrounds Gaspard squirming with embarrassment, as Margot leans through the driver’s side window); he visits her to tell her about Léna; and he says goodbye to her on the last Sunday. In addition to these, Gaspard spends the first two days on his own, sees Léna on two days and sees Solène on three days, not including the visit to the nightclub. To depict Gaspard’s adventures in Dinard a series of densely choreographed travelling shots and pans present performers and camera in intimate relation. Some scenes are constructed with shot/reverse-shot couplets, as, for example, when Gaspard shows Margot his photograph of Léna, but a great many show the characters walking and talking.20 In the travelling shots, the moving camera follows the characters as they traverse the Breton coastline. While talking, they amble, march, run, turn around, overtake, change direction or walk away, meandering restless movements insinuating their openness to digression.21 Within the long travelling shots, the interaction between performers and camera is rigorous yet varied, and many sequences exemplify the lucid precision of Rohmer’s direction. Gaspard has two long walks with Léna, but most of the travelling shots record Margot and Gaspard’s walks together on the coastal paths and beaches. The long takes show them in profile, from different angles and varying distances; as they walk together side-by-side, the actors physicalize the emotions in their conversations by leading or lagging behind, stopping or overtaking, or running away from the other person, as Margot and Léna do from Gaspard. The other technique that Rohmer uses to follow moving characters is a slow pan. Gaspard and Margot’s second walk together, on Friday 21 July, the day after they have been to see the old sailor, is an example of a well-shaped scene which begins with four of these pans, after which Rohmer interrupts the pattern of walking and talking. After the third pan of the scene, during which Margot persuades Gaspard to tell her about Léna, Rohmer cuts to a low panoramic shot which moves from left to right. Margot has removed her shoes to walk across the wet sand, but Gaspard leads them from the flat sand, with the sea opening out behind them, to the rocks and pools, with the cliffs enclosing them. The change of terrain forces the barefoot Margot to slow down and pick her way across the rocks. Gaspard, in his shoes, continues as before, but, as if realizing that Margot is proceeding more gingerly, he turns to look at her, then puts down his bag and squats. He pokes about in the rocks, mentioning his and Léna’s plans to visit Ouessant. Meanwhile, Margot walks into the frame and stands in front of him, so that her torso and bare legs are visible. She pulls her right foot out of a pool with a splash and rests her toes on a rock, turning her leg out, responding to him: ‘I must go someday. If she backs out, think of me. Promise?’ This unusual framing isolates Margot’s legs. Amongst the grey rocks and Gaspard’s grey outfit, the primary colours of Margot’s red vest and blue

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skirt stress the form of the framing and Margot’s placing of herself in front of Gaspard, who is visible between and beyond her legs. The film hides her face, though, and Gaspard looks down at the rocks while she asks him to think of her, glancing up long enough for us to perceive his uncertainty about how to take her request. Here, as Gaspard and Margot start to work out their relationship, Rohmer prevents judgement of her facial expression and emphasizes with this striking composition that he is hiding it. Other variations appear in the pattern of walking and talking. An important one occurs on Thursday 27 July, the day before Gaspard tries to kiss Margot. As they walk along a narrow coastal path, next to a stone wall, Gaspard passes close by the camera, which until now has been panning to follow them. Margot says, ‘I like to initiate things’ and at the same time the camera pans to catch up with Gaspard, who, taking the initiative in their walk, turns, leans his right arm on the wall, crosses his right leg across his left and chews on grass held in his left hand. His pose of cocksure confidence blocks her way. He asserts ‘So do I’ and, with a smidgen of bravado, enacts his capacity to take the initiative. The fast pan to catch his pose shows the camera also taking the initiative, parading its independence. Nowhere is the precise coordination of setting, performer and camera more nuanced than when rendering the dynamic of scenes in which Margot and Gaspard cross the boundary between friendship and love. They kiss four times, with each person initiating two of them. When they first kiss, her preliminary joshing of him, teasing him with the grass to get his attention, gives way to her apparent surprise that he kisses her. Part of her welcomes the kiss on the cheek, for she holds herself still. After he kisses her, Margot pulls away from him, joking, whereupon Gaspard chases her and tries to kiss her again. She laughs, as his kiss on the neck tickles her, then pushes him away, rejecting his opportunistic advances. Their second kiss is the first of those begun by Margot; it occurs on the beach, after they fight. Rohmer shows their third kiss, on Friday 4 August, during their last outing together. For their last walk together, they drive to a romantic spot on the coast, where lush green trees and grass overlook wide bays and cliffs. It is a gloriously sunny day. The film cuts from the car to a shot of them walking together downhill, away from the camera; this brief shot enables us to see their costumes and the rhythm of their movements. As usual, Gaspard wears black jeans and a black t-shirt; Margot wears a red dress. The colour of the costumes differentiates the three women in Gaspard’s life; just as they each have their own location (Gaspard’s girl in every port), so they each have their own colour.22 Red is associated with Margot, who appears at different times in a red bikini, a red t-shirt, a red vest, a red sleeveless t-shirt and two red dresses. Red matches her skin tone, and the same is true of the olive-green bikini worn by the dark-haired, tanned Solène and the blue bikini worn by the pale-skinned, blue-eyed Léna. Unlike the women’s

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red, green and blue, Gaspard’s wardrobe is monochrome and he wears black clothes almost throughout the film. When he arrives in Dinard, his black attire singles him out from the holidaymakers dressed in pastelcoloured shorts and t-shirts; in the middle of summer, Gaspard wears a black corduroy jacket, black jumper, black jeans and black shoes, varying this with a grey sweatshirt and shirt or white t-shirt and jeans. As a colour for clothing, black has an enduring symbolic value; as Anne Hollander writes, when worn by men, from the period of literary Romanticism onwards, black is associated with ‘spiritual unrest and personal solitude’. Besides black having the ‘visual property of sharp contrast to other colours, or the anti-fashion function of distinguishing an individual, or the ritual quality continually associated with mourning, in the nineteenth century’, Hollander notes that, ‘it represents sartorial drama, in an essentially literary spirit’ (Hollander 1993: 374–5). She describes the man in black as . . . a wanderer, somehow in league possibly with the devil but certainly with a kind of dark power that exempted him from the responsibilities of common feeling and experience. He was unhappy; black was his natural colour. . . . It [black] emphasised an austere male detachment from female emotive and procreative life (expressed in colour and change). (Hollander 1993: 375–6) The red, green and blue worn by Margot, Solène and Léna connect them to the world, whereas Gaspard’s black clothes typify his negative passivity: his costumes absorb light as he absorbs the attentions of the three women. Gaspard’s black outfits express his unrest, solitude and youthful rebellion; he is refusing responsibility and routine, preserving his detachment from society. His precursors are Beau Brummell and Lord Byron, although, as Hollander argues, the black worn by young men now (‘Student Black’ and ‘Modern Bohemian Black’) is ‘deliberately scruffy rather than romantically sombre’ (Hollander 1993: 386). Gaspard’s black clothes distinguish him from Léna’s bourgeois friends (who work ‘in plastics’) and signal his independence, free to sail away whenever he chooses. Margot, in contrast to Gaspard, wears a close-fitting red print dress for their last excursion. The finale of her red costumes, her dress is tight above the waist, loose in the skirt and cut above the knee; as she walks along the coastal path, the pleats of her skirt brush around her legs. Immaculate white pumps provide a faultless finish. When they stop to admire the view, they stand with their back to us, facing out to sea, but not next to each other, as Margot stays behind Gaspard. The green foliage, the distant coastline and the patches of sky and sea focus attention on Gaspard’s black outfit and Margot’s red dress, the greenness of the surrounding trees providing an attractive foil for her dress. The cutaway back of her dress plunges into a wide v-shape from the edges of her shoulders, revealing the glowing ruddiness of her skin,

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which the design and colour of the dress, red with white flowers, heighten. This scene features intense backlighting and dense saturated colours; when Margot sits down, a close-up of her shows her backlit by the low sun, the light glorifying her beauty and highlighting her youthful vitality; close in, the colour of the dress and background trees increase the appeal of her dark brown hair and eyes. Margot looks as wonderful as she has yet looked in this moment of concentrated visual harmony, produced by the combination of her skin colour, her brown eyes and hair, her red and white dress, and the natural splendour of Brittany’s Emerald Coast.23 In these conditions, it is no surprise that when they discuss his trip to Ouessant with Léna or Solène, Gaspard insists, ‘If I go, it will be with you’. She says that Léna might not mind because she, Margot, ‘doesn’t count’, though she agrees that maybe Ouessant is not a good place for a ‘romantic escapade’. Initially, he sits on his own, separated from her by a tree and its shadow; Rohmer alternates close-ups of them as they talk. Showing self-awareness, he says, ‘I’m only myself with you’. The shot/reverse-shot sequence ends when he crawls towards her on all fours, a sleek panther prowling towards its prey. Placing his arm around her, he invites her to Ouessant: ‘I’d give them all up for you’. Margot’s response is important: I’d like to take a few days off, get some fresh air, get away from the restaurant, spend a few days with you, even if it’s risky. But I’d just be a stopgap. And I don’t want to be. We’ll go later, when you’ve failed. Winter is the best season. As she says this, Margot strokes his arms, leaning her face against his shoulder, her arm drawn across his. She resists him verbally, yet approaches him physically, a contradiction that makes evident her indecision.

Conte d’été: Margot strokes Gaspard’s arm

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While she talks to him, Gaspard either looks at her stroking fingers or glazes over, as if thinking about her actions not her words. As she is telling him that she does not want to be a stopgap, she leans her chin on his arm. Poupaud’s performance ensures that we notice Gaspard perceive the pressure of her head on one arm and her light caressing of his other arm. She extends herself around him, almost wrapping him towards her. He hears her refusal and he feels her close to him; he responds by turning to kiss her. He moves first, but she lifts her lips to meet his – without surprise or displeasure. Her fingertips remain on his arm; her arm remains outstretched, holding his forearm as he turns to enclose his arm around her back. They kiss, but her smiling causes their lips to separate. She looks away, hiding her eyes, as if crying. Gaspard asks: ‘What’s wrong? Are you crying?’ We cannot see if she has tears in her eyes. Maintaining her distance from Gaspard, she tells him that she is laughing: ‘Your predicament makes me laugh. You’re like a tramp who wakes up a millionaire. Aren’t three girls at a time too many?’ Margot’s knowledge of his activities prevents her engagement with him: his frankness with her, a result of their relaxed relationship, draws them together, but his divulgences to Margot about Léna and Solène prompt her caution. She spends time with him, she finds him attractive, she flirts with him; but she holds herself back from him, using quips to disentangle herself from his embraces. She is indecisive about him, yet her indecision is a reaction to his indecision. In the two scenes when Gaspard kisses her, Langlet’s performance makes this visible. Their final embrace on the jetty, as Margot sees Gaspard off, concludes Gaspard’s last weekend in Dinard, which has escalated his entanglements with Léna and Solène, both of whom declare their willingness to visit Ouessant with him. The friend’s telephone call helps Gaspard sail away from romantic complications, just as Henri does in Rohmer’s Pauline à la plage.24 Like the first four Comédies et proverbes, Conte d’été ends where it began. Gaspard acknowledges that Margot ‘counted’, that he had three not two ‘irons in the fire’: ‘Now you and I can go to Ouessant whenever we want’. The moment has passed, though; her boyfriend has written to say that he is returning in September. She will visit Ouessant with him. They stand facing each other on the jetty and she says that she is in Rennes now and then. They can meet. She kisses him on the cheek and he says: ‘I won’t forget our walks’. ‘Me neither’, she replies. She then reaches up and, with her hand on the back of his neck, pulls him towards her to kiss him passionately. She releases him and he turns to board his boat. Rohmer matches the two diminishing figures, Margot walking up the jetty, Gaspard taking the boat away from Dinard. Conte d’été prompts questions about Gaspard’s behaviour because it maintains some distance from him and establishes that Gaspard’s position – accepting the attentions of three attractive women – is a type of male fantasy. By focusing on Gaspard’s choice between three women, Rohmer

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explores ethical questions about how to behave while responding to desires. Gaspard’s passivity is a symptom of his youth; he doesn’t want to commit himself to place or person. His passivity, which manifests itself in his silences, leads him to divide his allegiances between Margot, Léna and Solène, but Rohmer makes Gaspard a chancer not a rascal.25 One may conclude that Gaspard’s wavering indecision and his unprincipled, indecorous spontaneity are unconscionable; but Rohmer reveals Gaspard’s flagrant opportunism to be not that of a roguish drageur, but just a young man growing up. Margot recognizes that his indecision comes from youthful folly rather than sneaky Don Juanism, his mildness disguising an immature propensity to faithlessness. Rohmer said that he made films about young people ‘because that’s the time when the most important things in your life happen’ (Allen 1987: 13). Conte d’été gives a precise feeling of what it felt like to be in one’s late 20s in 1996, just as Pauline à la plage transmits a profound sense of Pauline’s 15-year-old-ness in 1983. According to the mores of their society, Gaspard and Margot are in the last stages of feeling young and uncommitted. Both could be about to settle down; both are of an age (with Margot older) when their next relationship could lead to marriage. The dilemma for Margot and Gaspard concerns not the immorality of their actions but the intensity of their love for their absent partners; both have only partially committed themselves; their encounter with each other increases their uncertainty. In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis Trintignant portrays a man for whom religion represents moral principles, although that film reveals religion loosening its grip on French society. Twenty-seven years later, Gaspard struggles to know his own mind, but no religious dilemma attaches to him. A man still idealizes a young blonde woman, but desire has replaced the idealization of her Catholicism. Gaspard’s problem is not whether to have sex with an attractive woman before marriage, but which one to have sex with. He takes chances with Margot, Solène and Léna because he can. Margot hesitates because she is unwilling to devote herself to someone whose lack of acuity she beholds; Gaspard waits too long to declare his interest to Margot. With one long-term relationship behind her, one that came close to marriage, and near the beginning of another relationship, Margot has reasons to be cautious. She declares, as Gaspard does, her openness to possibility, but shrinks from taking a decisive step. For three weeks, Margot refuses to be a substitute; when she kisses him at the end of the film, she does so with the confidence that they may not meet again. Disappointment hangs over the final embrace, despite the thread of hope offered when Margot mentions that she sometimes visits Rennes. The poignant ending follows from Gaspard’s inability to realize that Margot might be in love with him and he with her. Two intelligent people with the possibility of falling in love and being happy together have not managed to do so.

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Conte d’été may appear insubstantial, yet it concludes movingly with an opportunity not taken, an emotion not expressed. The conclusion ends a story that at times feels almost featherweight, drifting along as Gaspard does. His pointless milling around, indulging in reverie, leads to an ending touched with despair. The film shows how a young man’s fatalistic preference for vaporous daydream and his lack of effort in the face of difficulties end in a disturbing crisis. Confident in his youth and refusing commitment, Gaspard envisages an unavoidable future. Rohmer shows how Gaspard’s daydreaming blinds him to the present. Conte d’été’s unexpected conclusion provokes sadness, for misunderstandings and meanderings have led to a chance of happiness getting lost.26

Conte d’automne (1998) Conte d’automne was Rohmer’s third ensemble film, after Pauline à la plage and L’Ami de mon amie; its multiple point-of-view structure allows for the creation of parallels between its nine characters, who comprise the three couples and three others whose lives interact in the Rhône valley with unexpected consequences, causing tension amongst them. When Isabelle’s (Marie Rivière) and Rosine’s (Alexia Portal) separate attempts to find Magali (Béatrice Romand) a partner overlap, their intrigues work against each other. In addition to the two plotters, Rosine’s boyfriend, Léo (Stéphane Darmon), parallels Isabelle’s husband, Jean-Jacques (Yves Alcaïs), while Etienne (Didier Sandre), Rosine’s former lover and ex-teacher, parallels Gérald (Alain Libolt), the man whom Isabelle recruits from the small ads. Through these parallels, the film compares the younger generation with the older: Rosine’s interactions with Léo and Etienne correspond to Isabelle’s relationships with Jean-Jacques and Gérald. Isabelle has been married for 24 years: she is in her late 40s and her husband is in his 60s (born in 1938, Alcaïs is 18 years older than Rivière, born in 1956).27 Isabelle’s daughter, Emilia (Aurélia Alcaïs), is in her 20s and about to marry her fiancé, Grégoire (Mathieu Davette). This couple’s wedding reception provides the setting for the story’s climax, when the widow, Magali, discovers that Rosine and Isabelle are trying to matchmake her.28 Before this, surprise occurrences upset Rosine and Isabelle’s plans. The film begins by introducing Isabelle, Magali and Rosine. Two separate sections follow, the first focusing on Isabelle’s scheme to find Magali a partner and the second on Rosine’s scheme to do the same. These sections end as they begin: Isabelle’s sequence, comprising six short scenes, begins and ends with her in the bookshop; Rosine’s section, comprising five scenes, begins and ends with her meeting Léo, the first time at a café in Avignon, the last time when she visits him and shocks him with her plot

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to match her ex-lover with his mother. Once Rosine has told Léo of her plans, she stays off-screen until the two schemes overlap. Instead, the film returns to Isabelle, who, in her bookshop, reads Gérald’s letter, phones him and meets him twice for lunch. The two separate threads then intertwine when Rosine and Isabelle meet at Magali’s and Isabelle steals one of Rosine’s photographs of Magali. This precedes Isabelle’s arranging lunch with Gérald in Montélimar. Rosine and Isabelle’s activities continue to interweave with each other when they meet their candidates for Magali in Montélimar, where Rosine espies Isabelle saying goodbye to Gérald. Rosine misinterprets what she sees, her misinterpretation predicting Magali’s interruption of Gérald and Isabelle. While the film compares Rosine and Isabelle through their scheming, it compares Magali’s widowhood with Isabelle’s marriage; in turn, the film connects Isabelle’s marriage to her daughter’s wedding and Rosine’s relationships with Léo and Etienne.29 The film extends its comparison of Rosine and Isabelle to the motives for their meddling. In trying to match her boyfriend’s mother with her ex-lover, Rosine, like Isabelle, discovers that her plans trouble her more than anticipated. Trying to matchmake Magali and Etienne, Rosine ignores Etienne’s confession of interest in younger women and, like Isabelle, seeks a distraction from her own feelings. The film also contrasts Etienne and Gérald: the former has love affairs with younger ex-students; the latter attempts to meet someone through the small ads.30 Etienne tells Rosine that he still loves her, but, though she is trying hard to forget him, her behaviour suggests that she retains strong feelings for him. As her crotchety sulking at the wedding reception reveals, she remains capable of powerful jealousies. All of Etienne and Rosine’s scenes together illustrate Rosine’s conflicting feelings towards him.31 Initial verbal resistance to Etienne collapses into a hesitant welcoming of his embrace, before she pulls away. The first time they appear together, Rosine accepts caresses on her bare shoulders and kisses on her temple; yet when Etienne slides his fingers under her shoulder strap, she withdraws from him. In contrast, Rosine avoids all physical contact with Léo, apart from when she tries to persuade him of the benefits of her matchmaking scheme. With Etienne, Rosine says one thing and does another, verifying her equivocal feelings. Her dilemma is understandable, but Etienne also draws our sympathy, confused as he is by Rosine’s to-ing and fro-ing. Rohmer’s film implies neither that Rosine chooses to contradict her spoken intentions nor that she will return to Etienne; but her behaviour confesses her confusion, the result of which is capriciousness. That Rosine is still in love with Etienne explains the force of her attempt to matchmake him. She admits as much when she and Magali look at the photographs: ‘Etienne and I are finished. When I was younger, his age didn’t bother me. Now it does: I want us to stay friends. That’ll only happen if he loves

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another woman’. When Rosine moves from the cheerful promotion of a solution to her dilemma to what sounds like sincere regret about the end of her relationship with Etienne, Magali’s sympathetic look suggests her divination of Rosine’s motives. Conte d’automne includes the possibility that Etienne still loves Rosine. Didier Sandre delivers an outstanding comic performance as Etienne, the single man in his 40s who wants to sustain the romantic excitements of youth. He is a libertine pursuing younger women, but the film grants him two sincere explanatory speeches to Rosine. As Etienne, Sandre draws upon the figure of the roué. Bert Cardullo draws attention to Didier Sandre’s and Alain Libolt’s ‘considerable experience’ as theatrical actors (2004: 182). In fact, most of their acting experience has been in the theatre, in plays by Molière, Pirandello, Corneille, Feydeau, Marivaux, Goldoni and many others.32 In 1984, Libolt and Sandre worked together when Luc Bondy directed them in a staging of Schnitzler’s Terre Étrangère. It is conceivable that Rohmer saw them on stage together; if not, it is likely he saw them on stage at some point, particularly Sandre, who worked with Antoine Vitez in 1987, when he played the lead in Vitez’s staging of Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin; and in 1978, when Vitez directed him in four Molière plays: L’École des femmes, Tartuffe, Don Juan and Le Misanthrope. Remembering the way that Rohmer borrowed a ready-made Kleist troupe from the Schaubühne, it is hard not to imagine him being familiar with Libolt’s and Sandre’s theatrical work when he cast them in Conte d’automne. In addition, by calling Etienne’s confused former lover Rosine, Rohmer acknowledges Beaumarchais as relevant to Conte d’automne. Her namesake features in Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro. In Le Barbier de Séville, Count Almaviva, Figaro’s future employer, is in love with Rosine, who is the ward of Bartholo. By the time of the sequel, Rosine has become Count Almaviva’s wife, the Countess. It could be a coincidence that, in 1987, Didier Sandre played Almaviva in Le Mariage de Figaro, but one doubts it. Etienne is after all pursuing a Rosine. Beaumarchais’s play and Rohmer’s film share the theme of a marriage threatened by adultery. They also both use the structure of an ensemble drama with multiple points of view. And Conte d’automne uses a device that features in both Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, that of someone impersonating someone else. The Count tries to sleep with the servant Suzanne, abandoning Rosine and exacting the droit de seigneur, despite having abolished this privilege when he got married. Etienne, like Almaviva, declares his undying love for Rosine, but, at the wedding reception, his eye is drawn to another young woman, suggesting that Rosine is wise to forget him. Rohmer signals the comparison of Rosine and Isabelle with a rare flourish. Outside the Garden Café in Montélimar, after Gérald and Isabelle have finished their third lunch, the camera pans from the café to a narrow street down which Etienne and Rosine are walking. The pan provides a visual

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link between the two women, while Rohmer also matches their dialogue: the films moves from Isabelle persuading Gérald to come to the wedding, to Rosine persuading Etienne to do the same. The pan draws attention to the intertwining of Isabelle’s plot with Rosine’s plot.33 As in Pauline à la plage, with the couples passing at the crossroads, or in L’Ami de mon amie, with the couples meeting at the end, Rohmer parades the intersection of what have been up till then parallel but separate story strands. Moving from one plotter to another, with the pan from café to street, the transition flaunts its status as one, conveying a palpable sensation of the storyteller re-directing our attention with the equivalent of ‘meanwhile’ or ‘look over here’, thus emphasising the closeness of the two plotters and the similarity of their motivations for matchmaking Magali. As we can see, Rohmer transposes the structure and devices of the archetypal ensemble comedy to the Rhône valley locations. In this lies one difference between Pauline à la plage and Conte d’automne. Rohmer re-uses a multiple point-of-view structure, but integrates it with the locations much more, creating an enormous amount of metaphorical play with Magali’s profession of wine-maker. It is not an accident that wine and the grape harvest are used for this comic tale of middle-age mishaps; autumn has often been used to evoke the harvest providing fruitful plenty and to allude to ripeness turning to decay.34 Rohmer inherits the traditional associations of fruitfulness and maturity and uses them to develop Conte d’automne’s story and express its autumnal themes. Just as Rohmer made Gaspard in Conte d’été a musician because the actor was a guitarist (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 14), so he made Magali a wine-maker because while researching the locations he spoke to women in the region who worked in vineyards. Rohmer found two adjacent vineyards, one unkempt with straggly weeds but no herbicide, the other neat and clean. He decided to film in the vineyard of one of the women he met, and ended up incorporating into the script things she said about herbicide (Amiel and Vassé 1998: 12). Marriage, the ageing process and the characters’ thoughts about these things are, therefore, elaborated as themes via Rohmer’s complex handling of material that is derived from the settings: wine-making, the harvest, autumn, journeys criss-crossing the valley, modes of transport and colours.35 The dominant colours are autumnal, dark red and green, as worn by Emilia and Grégoire in the opening scene and Magali throughout the film. Set against these are Isabelle’s blacks, navy blues and crisp whites. Settled middle-class elegance infuses Isabelle; her hair, posture and clothes suggest sophistication. Always stylish, Isabelle wears white jeans, a patterned blouse and a navy blue jacket to Magali’s home; she carries a large straw hat, the function of which as a shade from the sun is negated by the wind that keeps blowing it off. Magali’s costumes are practical; she carries an opposing range of characteristics: robustness, intensity and obstinacy. This opposition extends to their hair: Isabelle’s hair is thin and loose, Magali’s

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hair is thick, dark and curly; it explodes in the wind in chaotic movements. In her faded green top and denim jeans, hair swirling around her head, Magali merges with her vines and the landscape around them; shades of green dominate the images, from which Isabelle’s crisp white trousers, navy blue jacket and straw hat stand apart. Yet Rohmer plays against these differences: Isabelle’s refinement comes with longer limbs and larger hands; she fears being clumsy; Magali’s practicality conceals vulnerability. Throughout Conte d’automne, road signs and dialogue identify settings and their proximity to each other. The film begins by identifying (with a signpost during the credit sequence) Isabelle’s home in the ancient capital of Tricastin, Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux. It continues to specify locations, sometimes by cutting from the mention of a place to a shot of the place itself, as when Isabelle meets Gérald in Pont-Saint-Esprit for their first lunch. They lunch for the second time in the medieval hill village, La GardeAdhémar, after which they wander around the herb garden at the base of its church. Their last lunch occurs at the northernmost point in the film’s depiction of the Rhône valley, Montélimar, where Gérald works. He and Isabelle discuss the Tricastin nuclear power complex when they see it from La Garde-Adhémar and when they talk about industrial architecture. The film also shows Gérald dropping Magali at Pierrelatte station, from where, she claims, she can catch a train to Orange to visit her daughter. Lastly, Rosine and Léo are students in Avignon, where they meet in a café. The characters’ movements through these precisely established settings signal their restlessness, and their journeys across the Rhône valley evoke the tangled lines of the plot.36 One can move from north to south by train, say between Pierrelatte and Orange, although Magali waits without success for a train, but to cross from east to west some mode of private transport (a car or a bicycle) is necessary. Rosine’s bicycle indicates her youth; unlike Isabelle, she cannot offer lifts. Yet Rosine’s bicycle resembles Isabelle’s car in that both modes of transport give the illusion of independence, a misplaced sense of themselves as free agents. The only time Rosine appears in a car is when Etienne gives her a lift home from the wedding, after her matchmaking has failed and she has declined a lift from her supposed boyfriend, Léo. He takes Magali’s car from the wedding and, whereas Rosine fails to persuade Magali to let Etienne drive her home, Isabelle succeeds in persuading Magali to let Gérald drive her. The film makes suggestive use of Magali’s and Isabelle’s homes on opposite sides of the river Rhône, about eight kilometres apart – Isabelle on the eastern side, in the Drôme, and Magali on the western side, in the Ardèche. When Isabelle drives to Magali’s, the film shows, in three point-ofview shots taken from Isabelle’s car, that she crosses the A7 motorway, the Autoroute du Soleil, which runs the length of the Rhône valley. Tricastin is on her left and Pierrelatte is on her right; she then crosses the canal that runs between Donzère and Mondragon. In the last of the three shots,

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she crosses the Rhône with Bourg-Saint-Andéol on her right, a road sign indicating her destination. The sequence does not show Isabelle in her car, but nonetheless it conveys the feeling of her looking first south and then north as she crosses over to her friend’s house. It is appropriate that, with their contrasting marital status, Isabelle and Magali live on opposite sides of the river, for, to meet Gérald, Isabelle pretends to be Magali. Her crossing over to Magali’s side echoes this device. It is also relevant that, when Isabelle disagrees with Gérald about industrial development in the region, she expresses a preference for the Ardèche, that is, Magali’s side. David Heinemann compares the travelling shots of Isabelle driving to see Magali with the shots that open Conte de printemps: Both sequences introduce us to characters just as they cross from their ordinary routines to events of dizzying possibility. This disembodied floating – gazing out at the passing world without really being in it – shows an outer journey while mirroring an inner one; it represents both a detached view of the world and a consciousness moving though space. (2000: 52) Heinemann’s description of Isabelle’s ‘detached’ or ‘disembodied’ mood is accurate. In a film in which a married woman pretends to be her single best friend, Isabelle’s crossing of the Rhône to Magali’s side marks the beginning of an adventure for her, a romantic daydream brought to life, a passing, as Heinemann notes, from ‘ordinary routines to events of dizzying possibility’. The film’s largest symbolic use of the setting is related to Magali’s winemaking. The opening lunch scene establishes the centrality of wine to the themes of desire and ageing. The first words of the film (Grégoire’s ‘It is really good’) praise Magali’s wine, and the conversation turns to whether to serve it at the wedding. Isabelle and Magali’s walk through the vineyards elaborates the symbolism of wine-making. At lunch, Emilia comments that Magali never leaves her vineyard and, indeed, the film shows Magali connected to her home, land and vines, which she handles as she walks amongst them.37 Delivering her speech about the ageing of Côtes-du-Rhône, Magali wanders into her vines until only her upper body is visible, while Isabelle hesitates on the path. Magali emphasizes that she produces two times less than her neighbours do because she wants to ‘prove that a Côtesdu-Rhône is a wine that will age well, a bit like Burgundy. I’ve got lots of bottles, but I’m holding them to age them more, even though it’s risky’.38 Isabelle asks, ‘For how long?’ The married woman challenges her single friend about her withholding of both her wine and herself: in this context, Isabelle’s ‘You don’t have to sell me those 40 bottles’ refers to the difficulty of taking emotional risks in one’s late 40s. The setting of the vineyard allows Magali to be busy with her work but isolated, which the film expresses by framing her standing alone amidst

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her vines as she explains to Isabelle her anxieties about the vintage: ‘To tell the truth, it’ll be an experiment’. Béatrice Romand often delivers her lines humorously by enunciating slowly and exaggerating the pronunciation of syllables; in this instance, though, her delivery stresses melancholy.39 As she says ‘I doubt if that wine will get better’, Romand continues fiddling with the leaves, keeping her eyes lowered; then, as she finishes her line with ‘Not that vintage. I don’t think so’, she looks up at Isabelle. Again, the ‘vintage’ that she thinks has reached its best can refer to her worries about ageing. Magali’s concern for her wine is a metaphor for other subjects related to maturity, but her connection to the land distinguishes her artisanal business from a corporate enterprise. Artisanal wine-growing allows for sophistication of taste to become a topic of several conversations; Magali produces wine that is ‘vraiment bon’ to Grégoire and Gérald, the latter of whom demonstrates a refined palate. Uncertainties about the quality of a harvest and doubts about the ability of Magali’s wine to age well allude to anxieties about waiting. When Magali compares her neighbour’s tidy vines with her own, her justification for not using herbicide indicates her willingness to take risks for a higher quality outcome. Taking risks by waiting, or refusing herbicide, though, may lead to nothing and, as Jean-Marc Lalanne points out, Magali’s reluctance to intervene with herbicide repeats the same principal in her personal life, in that she does not want to intervene, while ‘Isabelle, on the other hand, is like the neighbour’s vine. Her principles are those of organisation and intervention’ (Lalanne 1998: 43).40 Yet, as Magali observes, not using herbicide allows other things to develop, corn rocket and wild snapdragon, the name of which Isabelle remembers at La GardeAdhémar, just as Gérald starts to doubt her impersonation. When, at another spot, Isabelle and Magali walk up the hillside of a wooded valley, with ‘the Ventoux hills’ in the background, it is Isabelle’s turn to be more adventurous. Magali cautions Isabelle not to stray from the path: ‘It’s steep, don’t fall’. As they discuss being scared of snakes or wasps, Isabelle gets tangled up in a briar; Isabelle’s ‘intervention’ leads to her entanglement after she leaves the path.41 With her practical clothing and cautious behaviour, Magali offers few opportunities for entanglement. When they return to the path, their dialogue verifies Rohmer’s resourcefulness with construction and metaphor. After Magali unhooks Isabelle, the latter exclaims, ‘What dexterity’, but Magali confesses her weaknesses and vulnerability, ‘I’m bad at things that take strength . . . Luckily, there’s Marcel. But he’s old, he’s going to retire . . . OK, make fun of me, but I need help’. Magali’s acknowledgement that she would like someone else around typifies Rohmer’s success at making innocuous-sounding dialogue reverberate beyond its immediate context. Thus, when Isabelle impersonates Magali during her second lunch with Gérald, Magali’s comment to Isabelle about lacking strength finds its partner in Isabelle’s ‘Sorry, I’m clumsy’, after she knocks over the salt. Gérald disagrees, but she explains, ‘I’m better

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at big tasks than small ones, because of my large hands’. The ‘big task’ that Isabelle is ‘better at’ refers to her ability to arrange something like this between Gérald and her friend, something for which Magali lacks strength. At the wedding reception, Magali’s wine and its quality are the focus of her first conversation with Gérald, when Isabelle and Rosine’s plots culminate in collision. When Gérald and Magali meet, their relaxed encounter takes place as he compliments her about the wine.42 The optimism that infuses their meeting grows from the good fortune that leads him to compliment her wine before he knows whose wine it is. Auspiciously for a flirtatious first meeting, a flicker of attraction sparks between them as their conversation develops with an ease that distracts us from remembering that Gérald has prepared for this meeting. Unfortunately, at the most inopportune moment, Rosine calls Magali away. Rohmer contrasts Magali’s meetings with Gérald and Etienne, in part through his use of a crowded space and an empty space.43

Conte d’automne: Gérald and Magali meet

The informal crowd that surrounds Gérald and Magali at the buffet suggests the comforting hubbub of an enveloping party; in contrast, Rosine drags Magali into an exposed position on the lawn for the awkward introduction to Etienne. For this contrasting introduction, Rohmer shows Etienne and Rosine in pale clothes that make them appear colourless. When an attractive young woman draws Etienne’s eyes, her red dress signals her significance. After Magali departs for the buffet, the film holds the framing of Etienne and Rosine, united in their pale colours, but with the young woman in red on their right in the background. Etienne and Rosine walk towards the camera and talk, but just as Rosine smiles at her renewed closeness to Etienne he eyes up the young woman in red, who is waving at him. When Etienne embraces Rosine’s rival, who jumps up from her table, Rosine skulks past the camera, annoyed. The passage ends when Rohmer

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cuts from the open lawn to Magali surrounded by the crowd near the buffet, presented in two hand-held shots which convey Magali’s experience of the crowd as an impenetrable mass. Conte d’automne makes full use, then, of its Provençal exteriors, but it also uses Isabelle’s house for her private meeting with Gérald. In this scene, Rohmer uses the drawing room setting to acknowledge the traditions of theatrical comedies, with their core components of coincidences, exits, entries and surprise meetings, of doors being opened and people seeing what they shouldn’t. The film associates Isabelle with her house as it does Magali with her vineyard, farmhouse and sprawling garden; Isabelle’s spotless white fitted kitchen, for instance, contrasts with Magali’s kitchen, just as their clothes differ. Yet the significance of the interior setting is that it allows for the surprise of the opening door. Isabelle shares this house with her husband; if Gérald and Isabelle had embraced with a polite kiss in the garden, Magali’s interruption would not have appeared as an intrusion. Isabelle claims to Gérald and to Magali that the embrace meant nothing, but the possibility remains that if her husband had opened the door, she would have been ‘compromised’, as Isabelle says to Gérald. When Magali cannot find Gérald by the buffet outside, the film cuts to an empty corridor inside the house, the edit suggesting parallel actions: while Magali looks for Gérald, he looks for Isabelle. As Gérald and Isabelle come close to acting on their desire, they perform a complex dance of retreat and advance, which ends with their embrace. The doorway opened by Magali indicates the threshold between private and public spaces; when Magali interrupts them, she assumes that their embrace is proof of an adulterous affair. After this, Isabelle restrains herself, retreating from her entanglement with Gérald. Yet when Gérald returns to Isabelle’s house that evening, Isabelle’s bedroom doorway features as a focal point of negotiation for the three principals. When Isabelle sees that Gérald and Magali get on well, she recognises her intrusive stance and withdraws from the frame, resigning herself to her role as matchmaker, stepping back from involvement with them. The dance scene concludes the film and its metaphorical treatments of wine-making. Isabelle and her husband dance to the spirited song, an upbeat celebration of their daughter’s wedding. The song commemorates the passing of time by linking growing old with the grape harvest. For most of this scene, Isabelle smiles over her husband’s shoulders, but, in the final frames, she loses her smile as she rests her head on Jean-Jacques’s shoulder, looking distant and regretful. The film’s final image implies that Isabelle may be thinking of Gérald and of how, in other circumstances, her embrace with him could have become something more. The film’s final shot of Isabelle closes a parenthesis that Rohmer opened at the end of the first scene. That scene ends with a close shot of Isabelle observing Emilia snuggling her head into her fiancé’s neck, after joking ‘See what you’re in for’. Emilia and Grégoire, the couple about to get married, cannot see

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what they are in for. Isabelle has more of an idea and Rohmer privileges her observation of her daughter’s affectionate lounging against Grégoire. She may not want a lover; she may not speak of dissatisfaction with her marriage; but the shift to a close shot isolates her and suggests that her thoughts hold her apart from her husband and her family. Rohmer says of this scene’s final shot and the film’s last shot: There are two essential shots in the film. The first, right at the beginning, when Marie Rivière announces that her daughter is getting married. She watches her daughter and smiles. We don’t know what she’s thinking. About her daughter’s wedding? About Magali? In the same way, the last shot doesn’t allow us to know what she thinks. I really care a lot about these two shots of opaque thoughts. We don’t know what’s at stake. (de Baecque and Lalanne 1998: 34) He explains his aims: I had the feeling that it would be better to organise it so that this story placed Marie Rivière in a world entirely separate from her real life and which didn’t encroach upon her married life. That it should be like a kind of daydream. Elsewhere in my films, where the tone is nevertheless not very dreamlike, one always finds a moment of absence after which it could be a dream. Here, it would be this close-up of Marie Rivière’s mysterious look at the beginning. From this point onwards, one can imagine that she imagines finding a lover for Magali and so on. (de Baecque and Lalanne 1998: 35) Rohmer’s description allows for the possibility that Isabelle daydreams of finding a lover for Magali and that the film represents her imagining of the events that comprise Conte d’automne. As far-fetched as this sounds, Rohmer allows for it, just as Hitchcock allows for the possibility that Scottie never gets down from the gutter at the start of Vertigo. As Robin Wood phrases it, ‘we do not see, and are never told, how he got down from the gutter: there seems no possible way he could have got down. The effect is of having him, throughout the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss’ (Wood 1989: 111). The abyss over which Conte d’automne suspends Isabelle is her imagining another life for herself. The last shot of Conte d’automne is ‘opaque’ in that it does not confirm what Isabelle thinks, but it hints at Isabelle’s dissatisfaction with her marriage. Isabelle’s search for a partner for Magali has been an opportunity to expand a daydream. In Gérald, Isabelle discovers a diversion from her routine, something she may not have known she was looking for. Rosine wants to extract herself from her relationship with Etienne; Isabelle constructs, as George Eliot writes of Rosamond in Middlemarch, ‘a little

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romance which seeks to vary the flatness of her life’ (Eliot 1988: 810). Conte d’automne acknowledges that, as Eliot writes, a marriage’s ‘demand for self-suppression and tolerance’ can produce ‘vague uneasy longings’. Her daughter’s wedding and Magali’s freedom cause her to reflect on her own marriage, feel the flatness of her routine. Isabelle does nothing adulterous, yet, as she confesses to Gérald, ‘It’s a little game that amused me, even though it’s a bit dangerous’. The film suggests that Isabelle feels her youth and the possibility of youthful dalliances disappearing. Marriage offers stability and a means to avoid loneliness, but being single offers the potential for the excitement of romantic entanglements; the first flush of romance is denied Isabelle, but not Magali. Isabelle responds giddily to the headiness she experiences in her meetings with Gérald, but this ends soon. The vitality of the film, however, develops less from one conclusion than from its comparisons of hints about Isabelle’s unhappiness with suggestions about Magali’s possible future happiness. The film’s conclusion mingles Isabelle’s regret with Magali’s relief, indicating that, while Isabelle may have begun to experience unexpected but exciting feelings, she may also have found a partner for Magali.44 The film does not show marriage as an imprisoning institution, but nor does it show marriage as a guarantor of happiness. The characters feel free to do as they like and pursue their own desires: no scandal attaches to Rosine’s relationship with Etienne; no laws oppress Isabelle. She could divorce Jean-Jacques and marry Gérald. Rohmer explores social norms and values, instead of exposing an oppressive ideology, and Conte d’automne offers a shaded insight into the restlessness that can accompany routine. From Magali’s viewpoint, Isabelle’s marriage looks stable, but Conte d’automne enables us to perceive Isabelle’s dissatisfaction. Magali may envy the security and confidence that Isabelle’s marriage affords her; Isabelle may envy Magali’s freedom. For Isabelle, her daydream about meeting a handsome man and revitalising her love life was, as she tells Gérald, ‘a little adventure’. In Conte d’automne, Rohmer brings Isabelle’s daydreams to life.

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8 Late experiments L’Anglaise et le Duc (2001) Asked by Stéphane Goudet if he would be interested in filming a story about North African immigrants in the suburbs, Rohmer replies: ‘It would demand research a lot more complicated than that which I have done in books for my last two films. Cinema requires considerable energy’ (Goudet 2004: 27). For most of his films, the locations and the actors provided material during the preparation of script and film, but Rohmer’s final three films rely much more on his research in books and pre-existing source material, with less need to travel and interview people. The sources were Grace Elliott’s Journal, historical accounts of the White Russians in Paris in the 1930s and Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. The first two films share an intense focus on a relationship between a man and a woman, ex-lovers in the former, husband and wife in the latter. These two films, made when Rohmer was in his 80s, are interior-set chamber dramas that integrate large-scale historical events (the French Revolution and the build-up to World War Two) with stories detailing the intimate routines of daily life. Rohmer’s final film, Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon is a pastoral revival of themes he had explored in Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver. L’Anglaise et le Duc is based on Grace Elliott’s Journal of my Life during the French Revolution, first published in 1859 although written much earlier. The film brings Grace Elliott to life as sympathetically as Jo Manning’s biography does. Manning describes Elliott’s experiences in London in the 1770s, when she was well known in upper-class social circles; in particular, Manning deals with Elliott’s arranged marriage to and subsequent divorce from the much older Dr John Elliott, and her later love affairs with Lord Valentia, Lord Cholmondeley, the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and the Duke d’Orléans. Manning’s biography shows how, despite moving in aristocratic circles, Grace had a difficult life.1 Rohmer’s film limits its focus to Grace’s immediate experiences; like the Journal, the

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film hardly refers to her life before or after the Revolution. The film does not, for instance, bring up her scandalous status in London: it leaves this to viewers to judge from the opening intertitles, which mention her divorce and her relationships with the Prince of Wales and the Duke, though not Lord Cholmondeley. Rohmer adapted a journal, yet he took the same approach that he had taken with Perceval le Gallois and Die Marquise von O. . ., strengthening the perspective of the original, as opposed to altering it.2 Sympathetic to Elliott’s account, Rohmer’s film transforms prose descriptions into conversations or actions and omits few events from her journal. Yet Rohmer makes two telling additions to the dialogue and action: the first in the opening scene; the second in the scene of the Duke’s last departure from Grace’s house. Apart from these additions, Rohmer preserves the order of the Journal’s events and conveys its tone, converting her memoir into a drama about two former lovers who hold opposing political views, yet remain close friends. Suspense develops from this tension: Grace disagrees with the Duke’s politics and is furious when he votes for the King’s execution, yet she loves him. Thus, she is upset when she hears of his arrest. The film ends before the journal ends, with Rohmer leaving Grace’s story soon after she and the Duke last see each other, whereas the journal describes the Duke’s arrest halfway through chapter six (Elliot 1859: 150). None of the events described in the remaining 56 pages appear in the film. Rohmer’s concern was the relationship between Grace and the Duke.3 Rohmer claimed that he was reacting against earlier French Revolution films, those which give omniscient direct access to events, without maintaining a single character’s viewpoint: ‘It seems, on the contrary, that for an eye biased against the lies of the screen, visual objectivity can only be attained with the filter of a first-person subjectivity’ (Rohmer 2000: 32).4 The precise periods covered by French Revolution films relate to their perspective on events. L’Anglaise et le Duc depicts the period from 13 July 1790 until 5 April 1793, with a coda of intertitles explaining Grace’s re-arrest, imprisonment and freedom after Robespierre’s fall. Orphans of the Storm (D. W. Griffith, 1921) begins before the Revolution and continues afterwards. La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938) begins on 14 July 1789, with the king receiving news of the storming of the Bastille, and ends with the battle of Valmy about to start on 20 September 1792. Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1983) depicts the few days leading up to Danton’s execution on 5 April 1794, in the middle of the Terror, which lasted from 5 September 1793 until 28 July 1794, when Robespierre was executed. Therefore, L’Anglaise et le Duc presents a perspective on the French Revolution that differs from La Marseillaise and Danton; whereas Renoir avoids the Terror, Rohmer shows it by depicting Grace’s experiences of it.5 Both Renoir and Rohmer show 10 August 1792, but whereas La Marseillaise shows the attack on the Tuileries, L’Anglaise et le Duc moves

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from 13 July 1790, when the duke returns, to 10 August 1792, when the cook rejoices as she tells the other servants that she has seen the Swiss Guards running. Danton, like L’Anglaise et le Duc, dramatizes the process whereby supporters of the Revolution start to be accused, tried and executed. Wajda shows the interactions between Danton, Robespierre and others, including Camille Desmoulins, the newspaper editor who supports Danton. Wajda uses Depardieu to differentiate Danton from Robespierre, showing the former as a charismatic man with large appetites and the latter as an ascetic monk-like puritan. Robespierre makes the case for strength and purity of purpose, not showing weakness, while Danton tells him ‘This crime will bring you crashing down’. Though different in many ways, Orphans of the Storm, La Marseillaise and Danton all assert a relationship between the French Revolution and the present. The 1921 American film is pro-Republican, though opposed to the Russian Revolution. The 1938 French film reflects Renoir’s perception that sections of French society preferred Hitler to Léon Blum. The 1982 Polish–French co-production allegorizes contemporaneous events in Poland, when Lech Wałęsa was leading protests against the USSR. In contrast, Rohmer’s allegiance to Elliott’s Journal in L’Anglaise et le Duc makes it much harder to allegorize the French Revolution for the present day. Elliott’s perspective on events interested Rohmer; as he puts it, ‘She is standing in the wings . . . What interests me is the relationship between the private and the public. I didn’t want to make a film about the big events or on the celebrated people, Danton or Robespierre’ (Blouin, Bouquet and Tesson 2001: 50 and 52). For the most part, therefore, Rohmer’s film is faithful to Grace Elliott’s perspective, and the results of this decision affect the film’s view of the French Revolution and its visual style. Rohmer’s loyalty to Grace’s account connects to his decision about the film’s use of artificial settings. The film shows 1792 Paris as Grace remembers it, with fields visible at the end of her street and unfinished buildings. Her descriptions include some details, but other sources (engravings, photographs and paintings) supplement them. The extras in the exterior shots appear as figures in a world conjured up by Grace Elliott’s recollection; the Paris of L’Anglaise et le Duc is the world according to her journal. In L’Anglaise et le Duc, Rohmer extends the method that he used for Die Marquise von O. . . and Perceval le Gallois, re-imagining Paris in the 1790s through the use of settings that imitate the art of the period.6 The computerized painted backdrops in the exterior scenes have the simplicity of an illustrated book. L’Anglaise et le Duc’s combination of photographed people and fantastic background exposes viewers to an unusual artifice, and some critics took Rohmer’s refusal to use the digital composite image to achieve verisimilitude as an innovative stylistic intervention.7 In exterior scenes, the perspective and sense of depth are odd, while differences between people and painted backdrops are marked by the varying qualities

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of texture, contrast and saturation. However, one soon gets used to these oddities because they serve the purpose of portraying Paris as Elliott’s memoir recalls it. The film follows the order in which Elliott presents events in her Journal. Serge Renko’s voice-over sets the scene at the opening, describing the period while the film shows the paintings and the interior of Grace’s house. Then the painting of the Palais Royal comes to life and people start moving. In introducing the story, Renko’s voice takes on a role close to that of a storyteller, explaining the background like a speaker at a magic lantern slide show; his voice – kindly, mature and trustworthy – recurs when Grace appears before the Comité de surveillance because Renko also plays the Girondist Pierre Vergniaud, the member of the tribunal most sympathetic to Grace and informed enough to know that British Liberal Charles Fox supports the Revolution.8 Vergniaud advocates releasing her and sending her letter on unopened. Cast according to the same principle, Eric Viellard, from L’Ami de mon amie, plays Charles-Nicolas Osselin, also sensitive to Grace’s predicament. The member of the committee most vindictive to Grace is François Chabot (Michel Demierre). All three men were soon guillotined: Vergniaud in October 1793, Chabot in April 1794, with Danton, and Osselin in June 1794. After the opening, intertitles replace the voice-over for setting the scene; those that quote Grace’s journal reproduce its first-person mode: ‘Returning from England, the Duke paid me a visit, on the eve of Federation Day, one year after the Bastille fell’. The film begins on 13 July 1790, when the Duke d’Orléans, returned from England, visits Grace. During this scene, the first of the several conversations between the Duke and Grace that comprise large parts of the film, they talk about several events which Grace’s journal reports in earlier passages. However, this scene also contains one of Rohmer’s important additions. It begins at the equivalent of page 49, chapter two of the 1859 first edition; one of the Duke’s first comments to Grace expresses in direct speech what Grace’s Journal reports as an event not witnessed by her: ‘The Duke of Orléans walked in the procession, and people were much surprised to see him, after the reports which had been circulated’ (Elliot 1859: 50). In the film, the Duke explains: ‘I came back to dispel certain rumours, alas. Word has it that I dared not return. At the Federation rally tomorrow, they’ll be surprised to see me walk in the procession. It’s the best way to squash rumours’. This conversation typifies the way in which Rohmer adapts indirect report into dialogue. Another example, taken from a different chapter, is the Duke’s bitter recollection of the King’s command to him at Versailles: ‘The King answered him with great harshness, “I want nothing of you – return from whence you came”’. The Duke was very much hurt and very angry’ (Elliott 1859: 25). In the film, this transforms into: ‘Remember, after the Bastille fell, I travelled to Versailles to ask him for my orders. He answered me harshly, “I

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have nothing to say to you”’. Grace’s mission to Brussels, on behalf of Marie Antoinette, reported by her as occurring in the spring of 1790 (Elliott 1859: 44), is transformed into a revelation by the Duke to Grace that he has heard of her ‘secret’ mission to Brussels for the Queen. Numerous other topics in their first conversation originate in opinions or events described in the first 50 pages of Grace’s journal; the Duke’s lack of interest in reading (Elliott 1859: 27), for instance, is tied to an interposed mention of Les Liaisons dangereuses, which Rohmer’s Grace calls ‘a filthy novel’. Another instance of this form of adaptation occurs when the Duke and Grace pass from her bedroom to the living room. He holds her hand and tells her: I’m so happy to see you again. I cherish your company and yet, alas, you have nothing but harsh truths for me. But they are not true. You’ve been misled, although I trust you are sincere. The Royalists have turned your head. His lines come from this passage in Grace’s journal: They [the Duke’s friends] used to tell him that as I saw none but royalists and his enemies, I should get him assassinated. However, he never would give me up; and though he heard nothing but harsh truth from me, he always came to me, and he always assured me that he believed I was sincere in thinking I gave him good advice, but that the royalists had turned my head, and would cause my ruin. (Elliott 1859: 51) For the most part, then, the film presents Grace’s indirect reports of her memory of events, conversations and opinions as the speech and actions of the characters. Rohmer’s two additions affirm his interpretation of Grace Elliott’s book. The first addition establishes Grace as a charitable reformist. To hint at her support for political reform, L’Anglaise et le Duc opens with Elliott giving lessons to a young girl. Grace explains to the Duke that she has been ‘taking care of’ this young girl, whose father has died and whose mother is raising four children in difficult conditions. The Duke commends her combination of ‘Christian charity and Revolutionary fraternity’. Grace adds that for the past two days she has also given lodgings to ‘fédérés’ who have come to Paris for the rally to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.9 The Duke again commends her and Grace replies that, ‘if new ideas are applied with moderation by the lawful authorities’, she approves of them. By ‘lawful authorities’, the Duke elucidates, she means the King. Rohmer invented this opening scene, which affords Grace an opportunity to express her support for a constitutional monarchy. One French historian, Marc Fumaroli, argues that Grace Elliott’s viewpoint represents the ‘English freedoms’ accorded by the constitutional monarchy which existed in

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England, unique in Europe, and which had been a political model for the French Enlightenment: For Grace, the king was not sanctioned by divine right, but, in the English style, was the foundation stone of the constitution and the guarantee of the elementary distinction between private and public. His death inaugurates the Grand Terror. (Fumaroli 2001: 46) Fumaroli admires Rohmer’s dramatization of Elliott’s understanding that the death of the king gives birth to a police state, which demands the scrutiny of private life. Rohmer shows Grace to understand, as the Duke does not, that the new insistence on the purity of the Revolution, practised through execution of the Revolution’s enemies, will lead to a tyrannical invasion of all forms of private life. As Fumaroli concludes: Rohmer’s objective is not a retrospective indignation. He proposes a phenomenology of the first modern Terror, and he leaves it up to spectators to draw their own conclusions about the political nature of the freedoms of the Modern world, an exercise which for us has nothing untimely or luxurious about it. (Fumaroli 2001: 46)10 The film’s first conversation ends by dissolving to an intertitle: ‘1792, the day of 10 August’. Thus begins the day of her escape to Meudon, provoked by the storming of the Tuileries palace, depicted on screen as described in her journal (Elliott 1859: 66–9), seen from Grace’s house and as she travels across Paris. Grace’s indirect reports also produce larger events in the film; for example, her description of her aid of Champcenetz, which begins halfway through chapter three (Elliott 1859: 69), includes long passages inspired by Champcenetz’s description to Grace of his escape, interspersed with Grace’s experiences, all of which she describes as ‘Incidents in the Escape of the Marquis de Chansenets’.11 On reaching the Barrier de Vaugirard, for example, Grace discovers that the guards refuse to let anyone leave Paris: ‘Their orders were such that they told me I should not be able to get out of any barrier in Paris; and they advised me to go and get myself a bed’ (Elliott 1859: 83). The film stages this description with actions and dialogue resembling Grace’s account. Parts of the Journal also recount in the first person events that occurred several years before. Grace reports conversations as indirect speech, sometimes quoting people’s direct speech, as in the Duke’s ‘that it must be a scheme of Lafayette’s’ (Elliott 1859: 38), which, in the film, becomes ‘all lies spread by Lafayette and his clique’, said by the Duke towards the end of his first conversation with Grace as they talk about the ‘October riots’. Other Journal incidents contain more direct speech; the Duke d’Orléans’s visit to Grace while Champcenetz hides upstairs contains long passages of dialogue,

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which the film reproduces. In her journal, Grace interrupts her account of her conversation with the Duke to tell us, in a separate paragraph, of her hesitation about whether she should tell her friend about Champcenetz (Elliott 1859: 101–2). She decides not to, and her account of the conversation ends with the Duke offering Grace the use of his physician as he leaves. The sequence follows the Journal, with Rohmer extracting the direct speech and converting indirect speech into dialogue: the Duke leaves, Grace talks to Champcenetz, then the Duke returns the following day. When the Duke talks to Grace and Champcenetz during her rescue of the latter, long speeches follow the journal’s dialogue, to the extent that reading the journal while listening to the film is like following a script. The Champcenetz episodes conclude with an intertitle that adapts Elliott’s description of him reaching England, at the end of her fourth chapter (Elliott 1859: 112). In addition to the dialogue and plot, details of setting and minor actions also derive from Grace’s journal; for example, when Grace and Champcenetz approach her house at night, the film depicts the scene as Grace’s prose describes it: When we came to the end of the Rue Miroménil [sic], where I lived, and of which one end went into the fields, and the other into the Champs Elysées, we saw my servants sitting out at the gates, and amongst them my Jacobin cook. I was much alarmed at seeing this. However, there was a building near my house not yet finished, and I persuaded Monsieur de Chansenets [sic] to go into it, whilst I went to my own house. (Elliott 1859: 87) In the film, the computerized painted backdrops depict the fields at the end of the cobble-stoned street and the unfinished building surrounded by scaffolding, under which Champcenetz and Grace pause before she approaches her servants. Similarly, the sequences set in January 1793, depicting Grace’s experiences at the time of the King’s condemnation and execution, follow the Journal: her reading the cards for the Duke de Biron (Alain Libolt); Orléans and Biron meeting at Grace’s house; Grace with Biron, Madame Laurent (Marie Rivière) and General Dumouriez (François Marthouret) waiting to hear the outcome of the convention’s vote about the king. The Duke’s aide-de-camp’s throwing of his uniform into the fire comes from Grace’s journal. Her retreat to Meudon and her subsequent harassment by local soldiers also come from the journal. One exception to this method is the scene in which Grace uses a telescope to look at Paris from Meudon on the day of the King’s execution. In the film, an intertitle declares: ‘Meudon is on a hill and, with a spyglass, one could see Place Louis XV’; then, the film shows Grace standing next to Nanon, her maidservant, who looks at Paris. However, in the journal, Grace writes ‘with a glass I could have seen the Place Louis Quinze’ (Elliott 1859: 122). It then describes her meeting with a man who has come from Paris and carries

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a handkerchief which he has dipped in the King’s blood. This latter scene is not in the film.12 Rohmer replaces it with the scene of Grace on top of the hill, with Nanon looking through the telescope. A drum roll is heard, then a crowd’s roar and canon fire, after which the two women return to Meudon. When Grace decides to see the Duke d’Orléans in Paris, the Journal describes, in direct and indirect speech, her long conversation with him, when they are both dressed in black. Much of the dialogue in this scene comes from Grace’s account (Elliott 1859: 126–9). However, in the Journal, there follow two incidents that Rohmer excludes: a return to Meudon and a meeting with Madame la Comtesse de Perigord, who begs her to ask the Duke for help to escape. In place of these incidents, the film cuts from Grace and the Duke’s conversation about him helping Grace to the Duke visiting Grace and telling her straight away that she must forget all thoughts of escape from France as he is losing power and influence. After General Dumouriez’s escape from France with the Duke de Chartres, the son of the Duke d’Orléans, an event which Grace reports (Elliott 1859: 134), the Journal describes the Duke’s last visit to her house, accompanied by two gendarmes. Rohmer includes in this scene his second important addition. The Journal reports the scene indirectly, with Elliott saying nothing about her loving the Duke, only describing what forms the central section of Rohmer’s scene, the Duke’s promise to secure her finances before his death (Elliott 1859: 135). To this, Rohmer incorporates important dialogue and action. When the Duke sits on Grace’s sofa, he expresses his isolation and tells her of his son’s defection, which took place on 4 April 1793: ‘I am left with nothing. No family, no friends. I shall remain alone for a short while’. Here, the film cuts to Grace, listening with concern as the Duke continues: ‘If I must perish, I shall go willingly, disavowing none of my words, deeds or thoughts, if you don’t mind’. In response, Grace kneels by his feet and takes his hands: ‘I don’t only mind. I am desolate. I loved you and I still love you. I hope God loves you and I pray for you as I hope you would for me’. He concludes: ‘Prayers would save neither of us, I fear’. They both stand. He tells her that, should he die, she will survive, and he has arranged to transfer to her the money she invested with him. Elliott’s Journal ends the scene with: ‘I own that it gave me pain to hear him talk so as, indeed, I expected his fall every day. He then went away’. Rohmer dramatizes her ‘pain’ by inserting a tender goodbye. Grace says, ‘Despite everything, remember that I love you’, and she reaches up to hold his face and kiss him softly, holding her cheek against his. He embraces her at the waist and returns her kiss on her forehead, before departing without further words. The Duke’s final gesture in this scene is remarkably poignant: after kissing her, he leaves her without raising his eyes to meet hers. Due to his height, she looks up, but he does not return her look. Instead, he turns his body and steps slowly away through her door. Grace turns to watch him and a dissolve merges the darkening image of her back with the intertitle announcing ‘That

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evening’. The combination of the slow pacing of their movements and the dissolve imbues their parting with sadness. Added to this, Rohmer films their kiss in profile, thus capturing the benefits that come from the counter-pointing in size and physique of Dreyfuss and Russell. Their height differs, but more visibly suggestive in profile is the way that Dreyfuss’s massive head and bulky torso contrast with Russell’s petite and delicate features; the irony is that, as Rohmer must have known, Grace is mentally tougher than the Duke. As she tells Biron, political leadership does not suit Orléans.

L’Anglaise et le duc: Counter-pointing of Dreyfuss and Russell

This parting, invented by Rohmer, reveals his deeper intentions. Furthermore, whereas, the Journal returns to its description of Madame de Perigord, whom, Grace recalls, was staying in her house, Rohmer ignores Madame de Perigord and instead cuts straight to Grace’s arrest that night by the local soldiers. The insertion of the declaration of love and the tender goodbye underlines the value Rohmer discovers in Grace Elliott’s humane fondness for the Duke, despite the latter having voted for the King’s death. She reprimands him for this and predicts that it will lead to his downfall, but when the Duke senses that his downfall is soon to occur, Grace expresses her continuing love for him. Apart from these two additions, the film remains loyal to Elliott’s Journal. Two results evolve from this fidelity: the first is structural, relating to the telling of the story; the second is historiographical. Apart from his ensemble films, Rohmer’s films always follow one character, although many of them use various means to separate us from the characters when the story exposes their limitations. Unlike his other films which present a single character’s viewpoint, L’Anglaise et le Duc does nothing to undermine Grace’s viewpoint; it treats her experiences of the Revolution without irony.13 Rohmer transposes the Journal’s first-person account into the film, which is limited to her perspective. It follows Grace for its entirety:

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besides the opening, she is in every scene and witnesses all the film’s events. L’Anglaise et le Duc does not alternate views of minor characters with views of well-known people or events, as do the Griffith and Renoir films. Instead L’Anglaise et le Duc tells a story about a well-known historical figure’s relationship with a less celebrated woman. The decision to follow Elliott’s account means that Rohmer’s film avoids declaring a position within historical debates about the French Revolution. All we have are the additions of the opening scene and the goodbye scene; these express Rohmer’s intention to emphasize as positive Grace’s reformist view, her kindness to others and her personal loyalty to the Duke. By remaining faithful to Elliot’s journal, Rohmer interprets events as she did, declining to offer a retrospective judgement. The film clarifies Grace’s attitude to the Terror, not Rohmer’s, thus allowing Rohmer to deflect questions about the film’s politics.14 His justification stands: ‘I wanted to make my film with Grace Elliott’s story, not against it. If anyone wants to pass judgment on historical grounds, they should judge the book on which the film was based, not the film itself’ (Ferenzi 2001). Nevertheless, through his additions, Rohmer emphasizes his compassionate appraisal of Elliott as a complex and multi-faceted individual, and someone probably less Royalist than her Journal suggests. After all, she was the lover of the Duke d’Orléans who, though executed, was a supporter of the Revolution, and Elliott wrote the Journal for an English royal audience. The film concludes soon after Grace’s arrest and imprisonment, which the Journal reports almost without direct speech, until her trial before the Comité de surveillance (Elliot 1859: 136–46). After her trial, Justin tells her that the Duke has been arrested (this took place on 5 April 1793). His announcement upsets Grace so much that she declares in English ‘Oh God’. The film has been leading to this moment of high drama. She asks Justin to re-hang the painting of the Duke, which he does. The film cuts to a close-up of the portrait; off-screen, Grace says, in English, ‘Merciful father, have pity on him’. This ends the film’s dramatization of Grace’s life. The final coda comprises intertitles and shots of Grace in prison, along with Biron and others. Over a close-up of Grace’s portrait of the Duke, the intertitles report the Duke’s execution on 6 November 1793. They then recount how Grace was re-arrested on the day of the Duke’s execution. Close-ups show the aristocrats awaiting execution until the last shot, of Grace, is followed by ‘The fall of Robespierre set her free’. L’Anglaise et le Duc reveals the fascination that Rohmer felt for this unusual dignified woman and her intriguing relationship with Orléans, one of the richest men in Europe, the cousin of King Louis XVI and the man who cast the deciding vote to send the king to his death, yet who, despite his Republican sympathies, was himself guillotined in November 1793. Throughout his career, Rohmer portrayed female characters sympathetically, whether the Marquise in Die Marquise von O. . ., Delphine in Le Rayon vert, Félicie in Conte d’hiver or Grace Elliot in L’Anglaise et le Duc.15 Rohmer

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appreciates that Grace Elliott’s life was hard because she was condemned as immoral by the double standards that judged the sexual activities of men and women differently. The film presents her with deep sincerity, and there is a political dimension to this focus on a woman’s experience. Just as Die Marquise von O. . . exposes the social prejudice which condemns the Marquise for having sex outside marriage (as her father believes), so L’Anglaise et le Duc, in its sympathy for Grace, acknowledges that Grace’s unhappy marriage to a much older man was arranged without her consent. Her divorce meant that scandal inevitably accrued to her. Rohmer’s film celebrates her individual freedom and her choice to live and think independently, by her own means, a considerable achievement for a woman in the eighteenth century. Her stance against the Terror and her loyalty to the Duke are just part of what Rohmer honours in this remarkable woman.

Triple Agent (2004) Triple Agent, like L’Anglaise et le Duc, is a historical fiction. It was inspired by the disappearance in Paris in 1937 of two White Russian generals, General Miller, the head of the White Russian veterans organization, and his assistant Nikolai Skobline.16 Triple Agent fictionalizes this ambiguous historical event, turning Skobline into Fyodor Voronine (Serge Renko) and his wife into Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou). The film’s title refers to the possibility that Skobline may have been spying for the White Russian exiles, the German secret service and the Soviet secret police. The main historical question dramatized by Triple Agent is whether Skobline was involved in the plot to kidnap General Miller. However, the essence of Rohmer’s film is its study of the effect that Fyodor’s spying has on his wife; Arsinoé’s rising anxiety about Fyodor generates the suspense. As Rohmer says: What was interesting for me was not to show what happened. I didn’t want to make a film about activities. I tried to represent the point of view of the wife, who asked more and more questions about what her husband might have done. It’s this theme of suspicion which I wanted to develop. It is already present in several of my other films, although much less than in Hitchcock, for example. (Goudet 2004: 23)17 As was the case with L’Anglaise et le Duc, Rohmer’s emphasis on the heroine’s viewpoint combines well with his adaptation of history into fiction. Just as loyalty to Grace Elliot’s Journal allows Rohmer to defer judging the French Revolution, focusing on Arsinoé’s suspicious viewpoint enables Rohmer to avoid a forceful interpretation of the mystery surrounding Skobline’s disappearance. As in La Collectionneuse, Le Beau mariage and Conte d’été, some parts of Triple Agent elaborate the protagonist’s point

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of view, while other parts withdraw from it. And, like his previous films, Triple Agent uses several Hitchcockian devices and motifs to emphasize Arsinoé’s point of view; the repeated use of staircases, mirrors and profile shots, for example, are used to signal Fyodor’s potential duplicity. Yet the presentation of Arsinoé resembles the presentation of Grace Elliot, rather than that of the heroes and heroines of Rohmer’s comedies. The director treats both historical women with sincerity rather than irony; sequences or moments that take us away from Arsinoé emphasize her incomprehension of her husband. The newsreels, for example, separate the fiction of Arsinoé and Fyodor’s marriage from contemporary history, but, like the epilogue, which is set in 1943 after Arsinoé’s death, the newsreels offer a wider perspective on historical events which show how, in Rohmer’s words, the characters are ‘swept along by history’ (Eltchaninoff 2004: 13).18 Focusing on Arsinoé’s experiences and keeping history and fiction separate are the principal means by which Rohmer turns a murky historical affair into fiction. One notable decision in his adaptation was that which changed Fyodor’s wife from a famous Russian singer to an unknown Greek painter.19 As a consequence, language becomes a topic for the film; who is saying what to whom in what language, and who can understand whom, are concerns. The film’s central question is whether Fyodor lies to Arsinoé; their different native languages separate them and emphasize their miscommunication. Arsinoé does not understand her husband when he is discussing his work, though Fyodor translates some of his Russian conversations.20 Making Arsinoé a painter also allows for the discussion of painting with the French Communist neighbours, to whom Arsinoé says that she does not like painting outside; unlike the performances of a popular singer, Arsinoé’s work is private, confined to (or trapped in) her apartment.21 However, the film’s primary method of expressing Arsinoé’s experiences is its scrutiny of her gestures. The scene of Arsinoé and Fyodor’s dinner at their neighbours’ apartment offers a distinctive example of the way in which this attention alerts us to Arsinoé’s suspicions. Rohmer’s method of filming partners the dialogue and performances to build tension and show Arsinoé’s nascent apprehension. The scene opens with a shot of the four diners: husbands and wives sit opposite each other, the two men on a diagonal. After this shot establishes the characters’ positions, the scene, which lasts four minutes, maintains individual head and shoulder shots. This rigidity of framing and the black backgrounds intensify the sense of claustrophobia and disquiet that Arsinoé feels. Shots of Fyodor and André (Emmanuel Salinger) talking politics dominate; there are three brief shots of Arsinoé and two of Janine (Amanda Langlet). The latter does not speak and Arsinoé says only two words, in the second shot of her, when she turns to André and asks ‘Even generals?’ The other two shots of Arsinoé show her looking at or listening to her husband. The substance of the scene’s drama stems from these shots of her. In the establishing shot, Fyodor asks André, ‘What do you think about

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the strikes?’ The film cuts to André, who replies, ‘My party has no hand in them. They’re a gut reaction by the workers’. He returns a look to Fyodor as he talks and the film cuts to Fyodor, who continues with, ‘Do you approve?’ André replies off-screen; the film shows Fyodor listening: he raises his eyebrows, smiles, leans back, folds his arms, tilts his head to the left, narrows his eyes and, with a confidence that falls just short of smugness, calls the strikes ‘embarrassing’ for the French Communist Party. The film then cuts to a smiling André: ‘politicians have to adapt’. Off-screen, Fyodor asks if André, as a citizen, has a ‘gut reaction’. André, still smiling, talks of his ‘surprise and expectation’. Fyodor, as if probing, asks ‘no hostility?’ Off-screen, André replies, with a phrase that sounds well rehearsed and still believed: ‘No true Communist opposes the will of the oppressed’. This line prompts a noticeable response in Fyodor and a cut to the first shot of Arsinoé. The moment shifts our concentration. As André speaks, Fyodor moves his eyes from screen right to screen left, from André to Arsinoé. Fyodor’s smile at Arsinoé is hard to interpret; he could be communicating to her his judgement that André is spouting a rote-learnt political cliché. Fyodor projects confidence, but he is too polite to reveal dissatisfaction with his host’s opinions at the dinner table. He could be checking that Arsinoé is not bored, directing his attention to her to reassure her about his questioning of André, as if to indicate that he will not mar a social occasion with her new friends by starting a political row. Part of this shot’s fascination depends upon Renko’s blue eyes. The restriction to head-and-shoulders shots and the emphasis on listeners as much as speakers mean that Renko’s blue eyes, Langlet’s brown eyes, Salinger’s green eyes and Didaskalou’s brown eyes are all important in this scene. But Renko’s inscrutable blue eyes are most noticeable, above all when he shifts his attention from André to Arsinoé while the former is talking.22

Triple Agent: Arsinoé listening to Fyodor

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Arsinoé looks beautiful though pale when she receives her husband’s look, her head turned to her right, looking at Fyodor with a slight smile. Having met her husband’s gaze, Arsinoé looks down and then up, in a diagonal across the table to Janine, thus motivating a cut to Janine. Fyodor’s look at Arsinoé, his wife’s look at him and then her glance across at Janine transform the focus of the scene; André’s off-screen comments sink into unimportance as Arsinoé’s complex silent reaction to her husband gathers our attention. Unspoken, unidentifiable, something passes between them. Arsinoé appears unsure what her husband’s look means, as if she does not know how to interpret his gaze. He looks at her as if half-listening to André. Arsinoé seems intrigued by Fyodor’s demeanour with her new friends, but her smile fades when she looks down and her look to Janine evades her husband’s look, as if realising that she is unsure how to respond to him. With this shot, Rohmer pierces the dinner party chat to uncover Arsinoé’s thoughts about her husband. At first, their shared look suggests a private communion, the exchange evoking a loving relationship. He is a clever man with a job like a vocation that requires guardedness. She admires his cleverness, his confidence. But the film portrays her experiencing the widening cracks in their relationship as she worries about his professional deceptions, not his erotic faithfulness. This scene launches her movement from admiration to doubt. When Arsinoé adjusts her gaze from Fyodor to Janine, she might be checking how Janine is coping with her own husband’s political talk, wondering about their relationship, yet it looks as if she is avoiding Fyodor’s eyes. Either way, this is the first time the film communicates her unease about her husband; we follow her gaze as we followed her husband’s gaze. The shot of Janine begins with her looking down as her husband talks. Framing, costume, hair and make-up highlight Langlet’s symmetrical features, high cheekbones and striking eyes, which she moves to look at her husband, without concern, though without complete interest. Off-screen, Fyodor asks loudly, ‘Why do you Communists oppose the Revolution?’ Janine responds to Fyodor’s sudden intervention by turning her head to look at him, thus returning the gaze to him. After Fyodor finishes his question, the film cuts to André, who explains that revolution is inadvisable at the moment because it would be ‘abortive’ and ‘would end in repression’. This succession of looks links unspoken feelings together in a causal chain of movement between the characters. Three listeners transfer three looks from one to the other. The reassigning of viewpoints transmits a powerful sense of an enclosing circularity and the editing of the sequence endows the transfer of looks with a tight rhythm that, while André talks off-screen, increases the tension. The Communist criticizes Trotsky; unlike the White Russian, the French Red is open about his opinions, guarding nothing as he talks energetically about fighting fascism. Rohmer inserts a shot of an admiring Janine, a

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cutaway that shows her confidence in her husband and prepares us for the contrasting insert of Arsinoé listening while Fyodor talks. After saying that to fight fascism the Communists will ally with disarmed White Russian generals, André asks Fyodor whether he served as a general. Fyodor enjoys André’s comparison with Napoleon, then talks of the career of his former classmate, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, chief of the Soviet army. This leads to Fyodor’s discussion of the part of his job that involves ‘detecting’. He states, ‘I won’t conceal that part of my job is to prevent Soviet agents from infiltrating us’. At which point, the film cuts to a listening Arsinoé. Off-screen, Fyodor continues, ‘It’s no secret to anyone, least of all to your party’. Then the film returns to Fyodor as he finishes: ‘But nothing happens anyway. We no longer interest the Soviets’. That cutaway to Arsinoé implies what the film later confirms: she did not know about Fyodor’s espionage. The inserted shot of a listening Arsinoé makes the point that Fyodor’s admission about spying is a revelation for her; his disclosure forms the seed from which their marital tensions grow. The scene refers to other things: the kidnapping of General Kutyepov, ‘popular and determined, therefore dangerous’, unlike ‘the innocuous General Dobrinsky’; Fyodor’s relationship with Tukhachevsky, whom we learn later is someone whom Stalin would like to get rid of and does so in the purges (Stalin’s plot to bring Tukhachevsky down may have involved Fyodor liaising with the Nazis, though he denies this). Nevertheless, the outstanding feature of this scene is the weight it gives to Arsinoé’s thoughts, expressed in the two brief shots of her. The two men talk politics; the two wives listen: that dynamic is emblematic of Rohmer’s method of showing us how intellectual talk can attempt but fail to conceal emotions. The twist on this dynamic is that the husband is a spy and we share Arsinoé’s ignorance about what he does and thinks. The lunch with Alexei (Vitaliy Cheremet), prince-turned-taxi driver, deepens Arsinoé’s suspicions about her husband, and Rohmer repeats the device of a cutaway to Arsinoé listening to her husband talk. Fyodor tells Alexei: ‘I know some of our association disagree with me’. He then begins his next sentence with ‘Dobrinsky’, before the film cuts to Arsinoé while Fyodor continues off-screen, ‘wanted me to second Franco at Salamanca. I refused. He gave in. I’m gaining power over him’. At which point the film cuts to Alexei. As during the dinner with Janine and André, Fyodor reveals something of which Arsinoé was unaware, and Rohmer points to this revelation with a shot of Arsinoé looking at her husband. As soon as Alexei leaves, she presses Fyodor about the ‘strings’ he claims he pulls behind the scenes. As he looks at her, his thoughts are indeterminable: ‘That is a trade secret, even a state secret’. In most circumstances, instances of revelation would be unsuspicious. Rohmer, however, takes an ordinary mealtime and invests it with unusual tension so that Fyodor’s reticence with Arsinoé resembles a withholding, prompting her disquiet.

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Arsinoé confronts Fyodor in the scene following their lunch with Alexei, aptly doing so across a chessboard, interrupting their game to voice her anger: ‘In company, I learn things about you that you never told me’. Rohmer uses chess as a metaphor for Fyodor’s diversionary pirouettes several times, though, as international political tensions infect domestic tensions, it becomes unclear who is playing whom.23 When Fyodor talks to Arsinoé in the conservatory about spying, he says: ‘I play it like a game of chess, where you have to hide your moves . . . you can call me a double agent, even a triple one! Everything I do is to support the White Army veterans’. He sees himself as a successful chess strategist in his spying. Twice more does Rohmer reprise the chess motif: a chessboard leans against the wall behind Fyodor at breakfast at the start of their conversation about them moving to Russia and him visiting Germany. He says that he refused to do what the Germans wanted him to do when he was in Berlin, where he saw the ‘German spymaster Reinhard Heydrich’. ‘What did I refuse to tell him? Things about my classmate Tukhachevsky, whom I’d met secretly in Paris on his way to the King of England’s funeral’. Fyodor tells Arsinoé this as if he is telling the truth, but, like a chess player, he may be deceiving her, though he speaks with conviction when he says that he doesn’t like the Nazis and will never fight with them. The film last refers to chess in the hotel room. Fyodor calls the kidnapping of Dobrinsky ‘too idiotic’: ‘It’s like chess. The stupidest moves are the hardest to beat. Anyone can lose to a beginner’. ‘Like me, remember?’ she adds, said as they are sitting together on the sofa, and again he looks as if he’s telling the truth to her, though total assurance is out of reach. Two crucial sequences follow Fyodor and disengage from Arsinoé, yet in doing so they increase suspicions about Fyodor’s secrecy. They are his journey to his work in the morning near the beginning of the film and his passage up to his office with Tchernov (Vladimir Léon), to meet Galinine (Alexandre Tcherkassoff) and Melinski (Alexander Koumpan) at night. These are also the two most important examples of Rohmer’s use of staircases.24 In Hitchcock’s Motifs, Michael Walker notes that, while the staircase is one of Hitchcock’s more famous motifs, it is also a familiar feature of myths, folk tales, art and drama, often symbolising an ascent to heaven or to wisdom and a descent to something prosaic or negative (Walker 2005: 351). He notes that, in German Expressionist films of the 1920s, staircases were sometimes used in a manner familiar from the theatre, but also, reflecting the pervasive expressionist influence in the films, as an aspect of the landscape of the mind. In this capacity, they often suggest a sense of threat or menace, intimating the dangers which may lurk either on or at the top or bottom of the stairs. (Walker 2005: 351)

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Walker comments that Hitchcock’s use of staircases is complex, not always conforming to the traditional symbolism of ascent to heaven and descent to the underworld: Very often in his films, a staircase itself generates unease, in the audience if not the characters in the film. Ascending or descending a staircase in Hitchcock is rarely a neutral act: it ratchets up the tensions of the plot. In other words, the expressionist notion of the staircase as a source of threat or menace is rarely far away. (Walker 2005: 362) These associations are present in Triple Agent’s staircases. There are three minor occasions when the film shows staircases, but the principal use of them involves Fyodor, whose movements up and down them generate unease. The first of Fyodor’s staircase sequences begins when he kisses Arsinoé goodbye as he leaves for work. The film shows Arsinoé from behind, blowing a kiss to Fyodor. Then the film cuts to an essential shot. The image is divided into two blocks of patterning: on the left is a satin window with thin bars; on the right is a dark grey wire mesh banister. Fyodor emerges from behind this mesh, turning in to his left as he proceeds down the stairs towards the camera. He passes the camera and exits screen right, glancing up and in front of him as he goes. Behind him is the blank glass, an empty space visible after Fyodor has left the frame, the shot held long enough for us to register an absence, one which reinforces the sense of Fyodor’s reticence. This shot of Fyodor inaugurates the prominent device of Fyodor ascending and descending staircases. As Rohmer says, the plot requires a scene that shows Fyodor going up to the second floor of the building that houses the veterans’ office, thus foreshadowing his later disappearance on the staircase.25 But the staircase shot is also an emblem for the part of Fyodor that is hidden and mysterious. When he leaves Arsinoé for work, Fyodor departs affectionately; seconds later, in the next shot, he is alone and inscrutable, descending the staircase and moving between, but not reconciling, home with Arsinoé and work with the White Russians. Triple Agent’s suspense develops from Arsinoé’s inability to know the truth about her husband and, by extension, our inability to know the truth about Fyodor’s involvement with the Nazis and the Soviets. The staircase shot and the sequence it belongs to insinuate his inscrutability. This ordinary journey from home to work is not clandestine, yet Rohmer’s tracing of Fyodor’s movements implies reserves of stealth. His face, presented from below as he descends, may express the blank unreadable emotionless look of a practiced deceiver or the look of someone preoccupied while going to work; it is impossible to know. The moment alone with Fyodor may reveal nothing apart from his professional discretion, yet the shot adds an unspecified significance to his look up and forwards, as if he is plotting his next move. This sequence of Fyodor’s

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journey to work establishes his patterns of movement, his characteristic way of holding himself and the geography of his regular commute, but the measured economy of its presentation invites an absorption that echoes Fyodor’s own preoccupation. After passing André on the street, reading L’Humanité, Fyodor retrieves his car from its garage and drives to the White Russians’ organization. Inside the building, filmed from below, he ascends the stairs. As he climbs, the camera pans and tilts to follow him. A shot of him continuing up a second flight of stairs follows, almost repeating the framing of the previous shot, except that Rohmer cuts before Fyodor disappears around the curve of the stairway. The cut is to a shot from the top of the stairs, looking down on him. It pans left to follow him into the office, impassive, discreet, moving at a steady pace, unhurried by anything.26 Noticeable in the presentation of the staircases of both apartment block and office building is the circular movement of character and camera. The repetition evokes the routine of Fyodor’s commute to work, with uncomfortable associations of the treadmill. Yet there are strong visual differences between the staircases of home and of work. The apartment staircase shows the building’s 1930s design: light, open, with clean lines, simple patterns and wide spaces. The decoration of André and Janine’s apartment is suitably up to date. In contrast, Fyodor and Arsinoé’s apartment is backward-looking, decorated and furnished to nineteenth-century standards of clutter, more like the office of the White Russians organization, which is housed in an elegant nineteenth-century building. Its stairwell contains marble patterns on the walls, elaborate ceiling mouldings, a coloured oval window and wrought iron banisters, all things that differ from the contemporary design of the apartment block.27 When the film follows Fyodor up his work staircase a second time, it is the middle of the night and he has left Arsinoé at the hotel to go with Tchernov to meet Galinine and Melinski. This sequence uses the same camera set-up as before when Fyodor went to work: the camera pans left as he reaches the top of stairs, follows his profile in close-up, then cuts after he has entered the association’s office. As he mounts the stairs, his face is again inscrutable and reserved, calm and measured; the profile framing again emphasizes that the truth about this enigmatic man is unreachable, a Hitchcockian profile shot used to signify a withholding.28 After Fyodor disappears, a brief shot shows Melinski and Galinine using their lighters to descend the stairs. Then, in the epilogue, Triple Agent presents Melinski ascending the stairs in the association’s building in a way identical to the presentation of Fyodor: a shot of him from below as he ascends precedes a shot of him from the top as he enters the office. It cuts before we see his face in profile, but the visual repetition suffices as a clue that Melinski was also working for the Soviets and that he had been instructed to give Fyodor to them.29 Lastly, the film shows Melinski, the

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German policeman (Jorg Schnass) and the French policeman (Georges Benoit) descending the stairs. The camera pans left with them until they enter the rooms of the landlord, Semenov. Again, by associating Melinski with the staircase, Rohmer intimates his similarity to Fyodor, though when Melinski listens to the account of Semenov’s activities, his face is as unreadable as Fyodor’s was. Finally, in addition to borrowing the staircase motif and profile shot from Hitchcock, Rohmer also adopts Hitchcock’s strategic placement of mirrored reflections to hint at deception, division or dual personality so that the mirror functions as a displaced commentary on Fyodor’s behaviour.30 Using mirrors in this way is not exclusive to Hitchcock; Deborah Thomas identifies a comparable use of mirrors in My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford) and Advise and Consent (1962, Otto Preminger). She analyses the mirror’s suggestion of narcissistic self-involvement in My Darling Clementine and its role in a scene in which the central character lies to his wife in Advise and Consent.31 Triple Agent’s mirrors signal Fyodor’s duplicity, extending into the décor Arsinoé’s concerns about her husband’s trustfulness. The mirror motif recurs several times before it features in the hotel room confrontation between Fyodor and Arsinoé; for example, a mirror features during the art discussion between Janine, Arsinoé, Fyodor and André. And in the villa when they talk about Wednesday’s cocktail party and what she will wear, Fyodor has his back to a mirror when he suggests that she have a dress made. Two perspectives are available on Fyodor’s proposal that she order it on Saturday and pick it up on Wednesday, ‘four days in Paris’, a potential manipulation for his own benefit. Similarly, at the dressmakers, while she tries on the dress in front of the mirror, she asks ‘won’t Dobrinsky be there?’ Fyodor hesitates twice during his reply: ‘No, er, I doubt it. He’s got a very busy day today’. His eye movements and hesitations hint that he may be lying, although this may be because he has just seen Dobrinsky kidnapped. The most important mirror is that placed in the hotel room when Fyodor reveals that Dobrinsky has been kidnapped. When Arsinoé awakens to find Fyodor at his desk, he confesses, ‘I think I’ve got myself into a mess’. As he starts to explain, he stands with his back to the mirror above the mantel. Moreover, his folded arms imply he is withholding himself as he explains to Arsinoé (though not to the other White Russians): ‘I’m afraid he’s been kidnapped’. The mirror is prominent again in the shot of his hands demonstrating the manoeuvres of the kidnappers around the car, the reflection emphasising that his hands are performing something like a magician’s trick. In L’Amour l’après-midi, mirrors supply additional perspectives on Frédéric, the doubling of his physical self in the set design illustrating his indecision. A similar usage is evident in Triple Agent: when Fyodor stands in front of the mirror, he might be withholding the truth from his wife. Most of the film just shrinks back from hinting at the narcissism in

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Fyodor’s confidence about his subterfuge. In the hotel room, when Arsinoé accuses Fyodor of deception, the simultaneous images of his front and back suggest not just indecision and division, but deception and dissimulation.32 Furthermore, while the mirrored reflection renders visible Fyodor’s duplicity, the long take of Arsinoé crying on the bed provides a contrasting image of her vulnerability and exposure. The last instance of the mirror comes in the office at night, when Fyodor lies to Galinine and Melinski. After Fyodor denies that he had an appointment with Dobrinsky and proposes that the letter is a forgery, the office mirror reflects a shadowy image of Galinine as he passes between camera and mirror. More important, however, is the barely visible reflection of Melinski, who calls Galinine back into the office, thus affording Fyodor the opportunity to escape. When Galinine returns to the office, Melinski stands in front of the mirror and talks to him. As with the staircase, the association of the mirror with Melinski hints that he, like Fyodor, may have been a Soviet agent, one instructed to capture the other. The stylistic feature in Triple Agent that most asserts its significance is the iris, the use of which recalls its place in La Femme de l’aviateur. In both films, Rohmer uses the iris as a cinematic device to stress the importance of time and the restriction to a character’s viewpoint. After Fyodor leaves Arsinoé at the dressmaker’s, the film closes an iris on her waiting; it opens when he returns. The iris encircles the ‘good hour’ during which Fyodor leaves Arsinoé, ‘the time’, as Tracz (2005) points out, ‘that contains the act of ultimate betrayal by Fyodor . . . The small circle of image at the centre of the black screen is suddenly a spotlight – it tells us that here, in this small nothing, is what is most important, what will influence everything’. Lies or the suspicion of lies are at the heart of Triple Agent, and the film draws on some of the conventions of the gothic melodrama, in which the wife attempts to discover the truth about her husband; the iris implies that we will never know what Fyodor does while Arsinoé waits at the dressmaker’s. Fyodor lies to his colleagues, but his demeanour with them is as convincing as it is when he describes his meeting with Dobrinsky to Arsinoé. When he disappears on the staircase, he abandons Arsinoé, though he presumably does not know that he is going to be kidnapped. The film prevents a single interpretation. Rohmer states: In cinema, there is usually one solution. I didn’t want this, especially as I didn’t have the answer myself. Everything I wrote was working towards this: you can think that he is guilty or not, that what he says is false or that half of it is true, which is probably my idea but I say nothing; the hypotheses are too numerous. (Herpe and Neyrat 2004: 9) The tragedy of Triple Agent hangs on its showing the effect of huge world events on two individuals and the restrained seriousness of the epilogue’s

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presentation of the war contributes to its achievement. The ending has a terrible finality, with the voice-over describing Arsinoé’s fate and then the Russian and Frenchman announcing together to the German: ‘She is dead’.33 That last statement ends the film abruptly, abandoning the story just as Fyodor and history abandon Arsinoé.

Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon (2007) Rohmer explains the development of Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon: For L’Astrée, I took the subject from someone – the filmmaker Pierre Zucca – who had never managed to film it; then he died. I hadn’t read L’Astrée, except in selected extracts. I noticed that the novel was very different to the script by Pierre Zucca. Honoré d’Urfé is a fantastic dialogue writer. (Blumenfeld 2007)34 After Zucca’s death, Rohmer looked again at L’Astrée: I had expected something rather off-putting and I came to see that that was not the case at all! The dialogue, in particular, was astonishingly modern – even more so when it was spoken aloud, rather than being read. From that point on, the film seemed absolutely feasible to me, provided I focussed on the Astrée and Céladon love story and scrapped all the rest. I didn’t even have to update the dialogue. (Rohmer 2008: 3) As with L’Anglaise et le duc and Triple Agent, Rohmer developed the project from interests sparked by his reading.35 Because of his diminishing physical capacity, Rohmer sent Françoise Etchegaray to video potential locations, after selecting them with the help of maps and postcards (Frodon, Giavarini and Neyrat 2007: 88).36 This was an unusual (if understandable) method for Rohmer, who until then had immersed himself in the locations, often finding themes and motifs there. However, with L’Astrée his research was confined to the library: ‘It was one of the easiest films to write. I selected, copied out, strengthened the structure and made out of a 5,000-page novel, written over twenty years, a one-and-a-half hour film’ (Frodon, Giavarini and Neyrat 2007: 87). Honoré d’Urfé’s five-volume prose romance L’Astrée was published between 1607 and 1627. Its setting is fifth-century Gaul, on the banks of the river Lignon, in the Forez district of the Lyonnais.37 D’Urfé wrote and published L’Astrée within the context of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury operatic and artistic treatments of the pastoral, contributing to a huge 2000-year-old genre. D’Urfé’s readers would have been familiar with the stock characters, settings and plots of the pastoral, which recur

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in many art forms. Whether in literature, art or music, pastoral works are set amongst uncorrupted shepherds and shepherdesses, who are depicted as living closer to the Golden Age of Greek mythology. Yet these are not authentic shepherds; as Peter Marinelli writes: ‘their dwelling place is in a golden country of the imagination called Arcadia, and their time is that timeless time of the mind in regression from reality. They are shepherds hardly at all, for their real interests are love and poetry’ (1971: 4). Shepherds and shepherdesses in the pastoral world have abandoned courtly life, stopped being knights and damsels, and retired to the country for a quiet life. As Silvie (Rosette) explains to Galathée (Véronique Reymond), Céladon (Andy Gillet) is a shepherd, ‘but of high birth. His parents are Alcippe and Amaryllis’. Galathée responds: ‘The same Alcippe who smote the mighty Visigoths?’ Silvie explains: ‘He is a shepherd, not by force of need, but to earn his rest by honest work’.38 The setting for the pastoral is an unspecified antiquity, an idealized era of innocence and purity. However, the pastoral world of L’Astrée combines the mythical Arcadian ideal with the geographically identifiable region of Forez, the area in which d’Urfé lived.39 In adapting L’Astrée, Rohmer, as with his previous adaptations, remained loyal to his source and its era. Therefore, instead of connecting locations to characters and themes in a sociological way, Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon presents its natural setting as an idealized past; as Marinelli writes: ‘The land of Arcadia is really the landscape of an idea’ (1971: 37). Yet the presence of nature is essential to Rohmer’s version of L’Astrée: ‘On the one hand, the wind made the costumes, especially the scarves, flutter in the breeze exactly as they do in the engravings of the period. On the other hand, the splendour of that unspoiled nature gave the narrative a timeless dimension’ (Rohmer 2008: 4). The film’s visual and audio textures are affecting: the colours of the forest and river are saturated and differentiated, while the natural sounds of the forest, both the abundant birdsong and the wind blowing through trees, form a tangible part of the film. The almost constant sounds of the woodland birds indicate how close is the natural world to the human. The sounds are part of Rohmer’s combination of an imaginary fantastic story with photographed nature. Uninterested in verisimilitude, Rohmer let loyalty to d’Urfé’s novel guide his choice about what to include in the film: In L’Astrée, which was written in the early seventeenth century, Honoré d’Urfé describes an imaginary Gaul. His writing is loaded with anachronisms. I immediately decided to keep those anachronisms to the letter. I also drew inspiration from the engravings of that period, from artists of the time – in particular, from Michel Lasne’s engravings. His characters are dressed exactly like those in the film, posing in front of Louis XIII castles. . . . I dressed my characters in the way people in the

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seventeenth century imagined the inhabitants of Gaul dressed. (Rohmer 2008: 3–4)40 He extracted dialogue, characters, themes and plot devices from the original text, though he did not modernize them, preferring to excavate what he wanted and transpose these with minimal adjustment.41 The reproduction of d’Urfé’s plot devices is notable; for example, the film includes Céladon’s refusal to show himself to Astrée (Stéphanie Crayencour), but does not explain it. Horowitz argues that d’Urfé’s contemporary readers would have recognized Céladon’s adherence to a courtly code of male chivalry, in which men obeyed women (1984: 52–3), but the film’s lack of explanation for plot motivations like these typifies Rohmer’s adaptation. Mythological and supernatural references occur in Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, though they are minimized. D’Urfé’s Galathée shares a name with the sea nymph in love with Acis, a shepherd, son of Faunus, and crushed to death by his rival in love, the Cyclops Polyphemus.42 Tall and imperious though she is, Galathée is not a nymph, nor are her attendants, Léonide (Cécile Cassel) and Silvie; as Galathée explains to Céladon, when the waters withdrew Diana’s naiads retreated to the ocean: ‘The goddess replaced them with the daughters of druids and knights. She named them “nymphs” and left them in charge of these lands. They may even marry’. Furthermore, Léonide’s uncle, chief druid Adamas (Serge Renko), explains the link between two belief systems, how the Pagan gods connect to the one God.43 Céladon thinks that Teutates is the equivalent of Jupiter, Esus of Mars, Belenus of Mercury and Taranis of Apollo, but Adamas says that each of these gods is a different expression of one God, which communicates the Holy Trinity. He then says: ‘We Celts are forbidden to make images of god’, but Céladon could build a shrine devoted to the Roman goddess Astrée, the last of the immortals to live amongst humans on earth and the Celtic symbol of virtue and justice: ‘we could give her the features of your fair shepherdess’. Rohmer uses a twentieth-century medium to present a seventeenthcentury imagining of the fifth century. The film combines the plausible with the implausible because the novel’s imagining of the fifth century combines them.44 Rohmer achieves a successful integration of the idealized, fantastical pastoral with the photographic medium of film. For example, Rohmer took Céladon’s song word-for-word from the novel, combining d’Urfé’s lyrics with Valero’s music, the same tune that accompanies the opening and closing credits. Céladon’s four verses derive from a nine-verse poem which d’Urfé includes in the 12th book of Part 3 (D’Urfé 1984: 104–7). To the song, Rohmer adds a filmic portrait of Astrée. When Céladon sings that Astrée is like the sun, the film superimposes her face on the sky. Her face continues to appear while Céladon sings; she smiles as if she can hear what he is saying, until he sings:

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Sometimes covering its light As if it suddenly were jealous And tried to steal away from us Just as, behind a sombre cloud The sun conceals its radiance At this point, Astrée frowns and her image fades behind the clouds. Connecting Céladon’s singing and Astrée’s listening like this means that Astrée responds to the song as if she can hear what we can hear. Similarly anachronistic is Céladon’s locket, which contains a photograph of Astrée, that is, a filmic portrait of Stéphanie Crayencour as Astrée. During the course of the five books, D’Urfé has huge digressions when he never mentions Astrée and Céladon, returning to their storyline 100 pages after last mentioning it. Several stories run parallel to and intertwine with Astrée and Céladon’s romance, involving many other characters.45 Rohmer stripped away most of the novel and devoted his film to the story of two lovers re-finding each other, after one believes the other to be dead. Despite Rohmer’s loyalty to L’Astrée, this process of selection results in a film that celebrates themes close to the heart of Rohmer’s work; as the director says: ‘If I was drawn to adapt this text, it’s, of course, because I found numerous motifs from my previous films in it’ (Rohmer 2008: 6). The integration of locations, themes and characters that one finds in his earlier films may be absent from Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, but, instead, the film presents a concentrated version of the dynamics of his romantic comedies. Fidelity and infidelity constitute essential concerns. Thus, from d’Urfé, Rohmer takes the debate about love and lust, enacted by Lycidas (Jocelyn Quinn) and Hylas (Rodolphe Pauly), who express a faith in commitment and a faith in physical pleasures. Horowitz writes that, according to Renaissance Platonism, ‘true love is always spiritual, rather than physical, and it is therefore based on inner beauty and goodness and guided by the principle of reason’ (Horowitz 1984: 49). Yet she observes that in L’Astrée the Neo-Platonic model, which conceives of love as a spiritual experience, is often challenged by physical forms of love: ‘L’Astrée remains a secular work; its god is love, but a human, terrestrial love, whose link with the deity is considerably more remote than that envisioned by true Platonists’ (Horowitz 1984: 59). The film includes Lycidas and Hylas’s opposing views of love, the former expressing the Platonic ideal of love and the latter championing erotic freedom; but it concludes by celebrating the union of the physical with the spiritual – Astrée and Céladon combine body and mind, heart and head. Neither the Platonic ideal nor pure desire dominates. The film’s concluding scene comprises 16 shots and is just over four minutes long. Rohmer’s ending is not in L’Astrée; he invented his reconciliation of Astrée and Céladon by adapting scenes described by d’Urfé in Book 11 of

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Part 3. In the original, Céladon does not reveal his true identity to Astrée in the bedroom; instead, Phillis interrupts their embrace. Further adventures take place and not until Part 5, the part written by d’Urfé’s secretary, Baro, after d’Urfé’s death, are Astrée and Céladon reconciled. Rohmer, however, adapted this bedroom scene for his conclusion. Several elements in d’Urfé’s text point to potential reasons for Rohmer’s decision, amongst them Léonide’s turning to Phillis (Mathilde Mosnier), the nudity and the cross-dressing; Horowitz’s claim about the novel’s ending provides a further clue: All too often, critics concentrate on Baro’s conclusion, as if indeed it made good sense for d’Urfé’s book. It does not, for it is these strange disguise episodes, titillating for participants and readers alike, and a genuine textual experiment in generating sexual tension, that lie at the heart of Honoré d’Urfé’s massive opus. (1984: 125)46 Thus, Rohmer’s selection and invention intensify the original’s force, instead of diluting it. The last scene begins when Céladon gets out of bed in the morning, his movements mannered as he imitates Alexis. He sees the sleeping Astrée, lying with one of her breasts uncovered. When she turns her head, it prompts him to withdraw across the room, and to put on her dress. Wearing Astrée’s dress, Céladon kneels by her side and kisses her, using the exaggerated feminine movements of Alexis. When Céladon stands alone talking to the three women in bed, his arms are crossed, his elbows tucked in, his fingers fanned out across his shoulders. Astrée, knowing that she likes her new friend Alexis, embraces him, her nightshirt slipping from her shoulder. Alexis-Céladon is surprised, though he welcomes her embrace. As their kisses increase in frequency and duration, Léonide, from off-screen, warns: ‘Be careful Alexis. Astrée might be irked by your embrace’. After Astrée replies to Léonide with ‘Nothing can irk me in Alexis’s company’, Céladon adds: ‘I would be sorry to irk you’. He kisses her, pulls her towards him, strokes her cheek, then walks towards the window, guiding Astrée by the hand. There, they embrace again. The penultimate shot of the film presents the last view of Léonide: ‘Indeed?’ she asks. She rises to her knees and closes the curtains, saying: ‘I have a lovely shepherdess right by me’. The curtains shut and Rohmer cuts to the last shot of the film. D’Urfé writes of Léonide at this moment as being ‘a bit touched by jealousy’ (D’Urfé 1966, III: 598). D’Urfé then describes how Léonide turns towards Diane (not Phillis as in the film) and takes her in her arms and covers her with kisses and caresses.47 In the film, as in the book, Léonide appears concerned about the propriety of Astrée and Alexis-Céladon’s fervent embrace. But, as she watches, she becomes jealous, until she closes the curtains. With this closure, she both enacts her own privacy and gives privacy to Astrée and Céladon.

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Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon: Last shot

The last shot of the film is a close medium shot of Céladon and Astrée by the window. It lasts for one and a quarter minutes. Alexis-Céladon kisses Astrée and she returns his kisses, but, so far, they kiss each other’s cheeks, necks and foreheads. Their embrace suggests the sudden arousal of their desire, but Astrée is troubled when she puts her hand on his chest. She stands back, but he holds her hands. Then she turns, scared that it might be a dream; she closes her eyes as she speaks. The film fades out from them kissing; the credits roll over a green background and the music begins, a delicate plucking of the melody that began the film and which Céladon sang in the woods. After Astrée hesitates, when she feels the absence of breasts on Alexis-Céladon’s chest, their dialogue is as follows: Astrée: Who are you? You are not Alexis. Céladon: I am Astrée. Is this not her dress? Astrée: No, you are Céladon. Céladon: Céladon is dead. Astrée: Yes, I am dreaming. [She turns away from him.] Almighty God, let this not be a dream. Let him be alive. [There is a pause before Céladon replies.] Céladon: I am alive. [Je vis]. Astrée: Live, live, live, live, Céladon. I order you. [Vis, vis, vis, vis, Céladon. Je te le commande] Before this dialogue, there is a short voice-over commentary. The use of voice-over commentary is important throughout the film, but its presence is vital in the final scene. The voice-over first occurs when it describes how Céladon thought he was in heaven after Galathée, Silvie

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and Léonide have rescued him. When Céladon stumbles across Astrée asleep in the woods, the voice-over comments on his desire: ‘What a sight for Céladon’. When Céladon wakes dressed as Alexis on the day of the Mistletoe Feast, the voice-over says: ‘The long-awaited day broke too slowly for the sleepless Céladon. Berating the sun’s laziness, he begged the dawn to open heaven’s gates’. He starts singing, until the three women enter. In the main hall, Astrée commits herself to spending time with AlexisCéladon, saying: ‘I never go back on my decisions’. The voice-over explains: ‘Céladon fell silent and stepped back with the same look in his eyes as when she ordered him out of her sight’. The penultimate usage occurs in the scene when Alexis-Céladon prepares to sleep in the same room as Astrée, Léonide and Phillis. Céladon undresses and gets into bed, smiling at Astrée who comes to sit on his bed while she lets her hair down. The voice-over says: Astrée, by now almost undressed, casually let slip her gown below her elbow, unveiling her breast. Alexis sat up and helped Astrée to unfasten her bows and pins. Whenever her hand came near her mouth, Alexis kissed the place where her lips had touched. Fair druid girl, Léonide spared you the pain of preventing your gaze. No snow ever equalled the whiteness of that breast, no apple in love’s orchard ever lovelier. Never did Cupid’s arrow strike Céladon’s heart as deeply as it did Alexis’s. How nearly she dropped her girlish guise for that of a shepherd. How close she came to recklessness. This commentary derives from Book 10 of Part 3 of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. Rohmer took three passages from two adjacent paragraphs (D’Urfé 1966, III: 548 and 549) and re-arranged them to make one commentary. He changed one word, added three more and excluded two phrases; otherwise, the commentary is identical to the phrasing found in d’Urfé. The voice-over enables Rohmer to acknowledge the importance of d’Urfé’s voice in the novel and to assure us of the authenticity of the adaptation; it follows from his decision to transpose dialogue, plot and action from the original. In this sense, the voice-over has a status similar to the intertitles, the opening one of which reads as follows: In 1610, Honoré d’Urfé wrote of a band of shepherds living in fifthcentury Gaul, far from Roman civilisation. We portray these Gauls as seventeenth-century readers imagined them. Sadly, we have had to move their story from the Forez plain, now disfigured by urban blight, the widening of roads, the narrowing of rivers, conifer plantations, to another part of France, whose scenery has retained its wild poetry and bucolic charm.48 The opening intertitle is a direct address to us about d’Urfé and about Rohmer’s adaptation of d’Urfé. The voice-over works in a similar way.

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Irrespective of its precise status (the warm reassuring tones are those of Alain Libolt), the voice-over evokes the presence of a storyteller who is intimate with us, gives a sense of a story being told to us. In this, a fundamental function of the voice-over is that it helps set the tone; the voice-over contributes to mood more than it imparts information. It tells us what we can see, commenting on the characters’ feelings as they act. For example, the voice-over describes what Céladon does as he does it, though his face already communicates his reaction to Astrée’s comment about never going back on her decisions; indeed, he mimes that reaction (typical of the performances in the whole film). During the last shot, as Astrée and Céladon embrace by the window, the voice-over tells us: Unaware that her caresses were closer than is usual between girls, Astrée welcomed and returned her kisses as though Alexis were a living image of Céladon. [Astrée ne prit pas garde que ses caresses étaient un peu plus serrées que celles que les filles ont accoutumé de se faire. Elle lui rendait ses baisers, tout ainsi qu’elle les recevait, non pas comme à une Alexis, mais comme au portrait vivant de Céladon.] D’Urfé writes, in Book 11 of Part 3 of L’Astrée: Elle se fût pris garde que ces caresses étaient un peu plus serrées que celles que les filles ont accoutumé de se faire; mais elle qui n’y pensait en façon quelconque, lui rendait ses baisers, tout ainsi qu’elle les recevait, non pas peut-être comme à une Alexis, mais comme au portrait vivant de Céladon. (D’Urfé 1966, III: 598) Rohmer responded to this material as generations of readers have, developing his ending from this passage; of utmost importance here is the cross-dressing disguise. As Horowitz writes: ‘When Céladon becomes Alexis, d’Urfé’s novel acquires the titillating liveliness of the best romance. The many pages devoted to the cohabitation of Astrée and Alexis-Céladon are also among the book’s most brilliant’ (Horowitz 1984: 96). In the film, Léonide’s closure of the curtains, saying: ‘I have a lovely shepherdess right by me’, hints at an erotic relation between the two women. Gregorio identifies the ‘underlying motif of latent homosexuality in the text’ as a significant, if ambiguous, issue, noting: The issue is at the centre of what is perhaps the most extraordinary passage of L’Astrée. It is the moment when Alexis embraces Astrée with ‘caresses . . . plus serrées que celles que les filles ont accoutumé de se faire’ (III, 598) inspiring jealousy on the part of Léonide and Dianne, and eliciting a rather spirited response in Astrée. (1992: 81)

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Like Gregorio, Horowitz identifies this passage as central to L’Astrée.49 She argues (1984: 112–13) that, despite the literary and social conventionality of the friendship between Astrée and Alexis-Céladon, d’Urfé hints at homosexuality, at both fictional and grammatical levels; thus, when the pair caress and kiss, d’Urfé uses the female pronoun for Alexis-Céladon and refers to them together as ‘elles’. Horowitz concludes, ‘As hetero-, homo-, and auto-sexual levels coexist in an erotic mass, the tension is all the greater, the fantasy all the more potent. In an atmosphere where sexuality – at least overt – is taboo, the text is nonetheless bathed in it’ (1984: 117). The costumes and the cross-dressing enable the atmosphere of erotic freedom. Rohmer’s characters wear costumes modelled on late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings of classical and mythological subjects, with golden hair falling in ringlets, diaphanous flowing dresses and scarves fluttering in the wind.50 The thin white cotton nightdresses worn by Astrée and Alexis-Céladon in the morning are idealized costumes for Arcadian lovers. With her blonde ringlets, her light pink skin and her white costume, whose folds and ripples swell and drift around her, Astrée resembles countless idealized figures in mythological Renaissance paintings. In the reconciliation scene, Astrée’s loose-fitting nightdress repeatedly falls from her shoulder to reveals her breasts. Breasts are often uncovered in the paintings of d’Urfé’s period and d’Urfé refers to breasts uncovered; for example, when he describes the uncovered breasts of the three nymphs who find Céladon by the river (Urfé 1984: 44). Rohmer says: It [the film’s eroticism] is identical to the eroticism in the novel – no more, no less. I really don’t like directors, especially in the theatre, who feel so comfortable with classical material that they throw in gratuitous nudity when it’s completely unnecessary. When Honoré d’Urfé writes that one of his heroines reveals a breast, I follow that to a tee: I don’t add a thing. But nudity isn’t taboo in Honoré d’Urfé’s writings, any more than it was in the painting of the time. So I had no reason to make it taboo. The text has a delicate, subtle eroticism; I had to represent that with the same light hand. (Rohmer 2008: 4)51 That eroticism is marked in the scenes that Rohmer developed for his conclusion. Horowitz argues that ‘The entire Alexis episode is maintained through a sexual suspense often deliberately equivocal and therefore all the more powerful, and which is always on the verge of exploding’ (Horowitz 1984: 113). She notes that the occasional comment by the voice of the storyteller, of the type one hears in the film, does little ‘to dampen the explosively sensual scene’ (1984: 113). Rohmer takes this scene ‘on the verge of exploding’ and makes it explode. The device of the cross-dressing disguise comes from d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, in which physical disguise is common. Horowitz argues that ‘D’Urfé’s novel lies

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on a foundation of disguise’ (1984: 96), while Gregorio notes (1992: 27) that there are 12 cases of disguise across gender lines in the first four volumes, the most famous and extended of which is Céladon’s disguise as Alexis.52 In the film, cross-dressing first manifests itself in the account given of Céladon’s previous cross-dressing. This comes as Léonide helps Céladon escape from Galathée’s castle by dressing him as a woman, asking him, ‘Have you ever dressed as a girl before?’ He hesitates as if lying, before replying: ‘Er, no’. Later, standing in front of a painting of the Judgement of Paris, Adamas confirms to Léonide that Céladon met Astrée when he dressed as a girl to play Paris in a staging of the Judgement of Paris at the shepherds’ Feast of Venus.53 Though Paris was a man, a girl was meant to play him, as he would see naked the three shepherdesses who were playing the three goddesses, including Astrée, playing Venus. Paris-Céladon, dressed as a girl to be chosen for the part, then dressed as a man with a false beard and a turban, chose VenusAstrée. Adamas explains to Léonide that Astrée first fell in love with Céladon at this festival, when he was dressed as a girl; it is appropriate, therefore, that in the final scene, as she is kissing Alexis-Céladon, she re-finds her lover while he is disguised as Alexis and wearing Astrée’s dress. Dressed as a woman, Céladon can experience things that would not otherwise be available to him, such as seeing Astrée nude, either during the Judgement of Paris or during the time he spends in her bedroom. Disguised as Alexis, Céladon can cross boundaries and do more than a man would be allowed to do. The cross-dressing disguise brings suggestions of youthful freedom from social and gender roles, and equality between the genders, the youthfulness of the characters implying that their sexuality has not yet become fixed.54 Furthermore, the chief druid, Adamas, sanctions this crossdressing; as Gregorio points out, Adamas, ‘the character closest to being the incarnation of moral authority’ (1992: 21), persuades Céladon to take on the disguise of his daughter.55 The cross-dressing thus combines transgressive eroticism and sanctioned innocence. In addition to the general eroticism of the cross-dressing, Rohmer gives Céladon’s disguise on film a special inflection. The words ‘un portrait vivant’ are heard twice in prominent places in the film, though the English subtitles obscure this repetition by translating them first as ‘likeness’ and then as ‘living image’. The second reference to ‘un portrait vivant’ comes during the last shot, when the voice-over describes how Astrée kisses Alexis as though she were a ‘living portrait of Céladon’. The earlier reference to ‘un portrait vivant’ occurs when Adamas visits Céladon at the forest hut. Céladon rejects the druid’s counsel that he return to his village. Adamas says that he would like to visit Céladon because Céladon reminds him of his daughter, Alexis, who is a novice in a convent of druids. Adamas justifies this by saying that it would give him the pleasure of seeing a ‘living portrait’ of the one whom he loves most in the world. The scene ends with Adamas saying ‘un portrait vivant’; then an intertitle appears with ‘Thereafter,

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frequent visits from Léonide and the druid lifted Céladon’s spirits’, after which Céladon sings and Astrée listens in the sky. In both scenes, D’Urfé uses the precise words ‘un portrait vivant’ and Rohmer preserves d’Urfé’s words. In Book 8 of Part 2 of L’Astrée, Adamas says: Cela est cause que je vous conjure par tout ce qui a plus de puissance sur vous d’avoir agréable que je vienne quelquefois interrompre votre solitude, pour me donner cette satisfaction de voir en votre visage un portrait vivant de ce que j’aime le plus au monde. (D’Urfé 1966, II: 319) In Rohmer’s film, Adamas says: Cela est cause que je vous conjure d’avoir agréable que je vienne quelquefois interrompre votre solitude, pour me donner cette satisfaction de voir en vous un portrait vivant de ce que j’aime le plus au monde. [I hope you will not mind if I disturb you now and then for the pleasure of seeing my dearest treasure’s likeness.] The repetition of ‘portrait vivant’ may be lost in the English subtitles, but there is no doubting Rohmer’s attachment to this phrase, given its prominence in the film. Adamas’s words end the scene, with the image of him and Céladon dissolving to the intertitle. Describing what we see, the voice-over speaks of the transformation of a portrait into a living being. Related to this, Gregorio writes of the aesthetic function of disguise in the pastoral: ‘its obvious testing of verisimilitude, to the extreme is one means of underscoring the imaginative, artistic nature of the text’ (1992: 9). He adds ‘The world the reader is invited to enter is one where such disguise can easily be brought off – precisely for the reason that this world has a measure of the fantastic about it’ (Gregorio 1992: 11).56 D’Urfé’s disguises may be implausible, but the pastoral world allows for this. However, disguise in novels and plays differs from disguise in film; they require different kinds of suspension of disbelief. Rohmer, aware of the convention in d’Urfé, faced a challenge when combining disguise with cinematic photography. When transposed to film, the convention of disguise in L’Astrée assumes additional importance. Gregorio observes that, within L’Astrée, the ‘psychology of recognition is complex within the text, certainly unlike that in the extratextual world where perception and recognition are customarily more closely related’ (1992: 12). Rohmer’s film must deal with cinematic expectations that perception and recognition be closely related. What we would consider on film to be a flimsy disguise is, in the original, a disguise so total that the person in disguise takes on some of the characteristics of their new identity, the male Céladon absorbing characteristics of the female Alexis.

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The conclusion of Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon invites us to suspend enough of our habitual doubts to accept that Astrée does not recognize Céladon as Alexis, just as Hopsy (Henry Fonda) does not recognize Jean as Eve (Barbara Stanwyck) in The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1944) or Scottie (James Stewart) does not recognize Judy as Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Rohmer’s means of dealing with this are to dramatize Astrée’s experiences of this metamorphosis as a raising of Céladon from the dead. Dramatising the reconciliation in this way, focusing so much on d’Urfé’s ‘portrait vivant’, Rohmer asks us to consider whether living portraits are the same as moving images. In the last shot of the last scene of his last film, Rohmer returns to the idea of metamorphosis that he encountered in Ordet, Vertigo and The Winter’s Tale.57 At the end of Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, Rohmer uses film to bring someone back to life, to celebrate film’s re-vivifying potential. Astrée is drawn to Alexis-Céladon because he resembles ‘a living portrait of Céladon’. Rohmer was drawn to L’Astrée because of the idea of a transformation (as in Conte d’hiver, Ordet and Random Harvest) of someone into a ‘living portrait’. Through his emphasis on the ‘portrait vivant’, Rohmer gives a special filmic twist to L’Astrée. He says: ‘I allowed myself to invent an ending because in L’Astrée there isn’t one. D’Urfé didn’t finish the novel. One written phrase supplied the key phrase of the film: “Ne reparais pas devant moi à moins que je te le commande [Don’t re-appear in front of me unless I bid you otherwise]”’ (Frodon, Giavarini and Neyrat 2007: 87). Novel and film use ‘je te le commande’ when Astrée accuses Céladon of being unfaithful. D’Urfé writes: ‘garde-toi bien de te faire jamais voir à moi que je ne te le commande’ [Make sure that I never see you unless I order you]’ (1984: 40). The film repeats this phrase as Astrée’s last words to Céladon and the film’s last words to us: ‘Vis, vis, vis, vis, Céladon. Je te le commande’. Everything leading up to the last shot is present in d’Urfé: their close embrace as Alexis and Astrée, Léonide’s comments and her turning away, the voice-over’s description of a ‘living portrait’, but not Astrée’s command to him to live, nor the presentation of their reconciliation. Rohmer chose to end the film here, when Astrée embraces ‘a living portrait of Céladon’ and orders him to live, the phrases selected from countless other opportunities in the 5000-page text. Tom Milne’s description of Ordet’s ending is relevant to Astrée and Céladon’s embrace: Ordet may be a demonstration of the miraculous power of faith, but the eager devouring kiss, almost a ravenous bite, with which the wife reclaims her husband on being brought back from the grave, has nothing to do with spirituality. (1971: 13) At the start of the film, Astrée receives bad advice about Céladon from Sémyre (Arthur Dupont), which leads her to doubt his love. Astrée’s

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doubts about Céladon’s fidelity provoke the drama. The doubt placed in Astrée’s mind by Sémyre and the staging of a reconciliation as a re-finding of someone assumed dead confirm that Rohmer had in mind his previous considerations of film’s ability to create living portraits. The pastoral is about returning to an earlier era, a remembered part of life or an idealized past that never was. Both d’Urfé and Rohmer represent an ideal past. Yet Rohmer’s film combines photography of natural locations with the artificial conventions of the pastoral genre, bringing to life shepherds, nymphs and druids and the sound of the wind in the trees. Taking his lead from neo-classical forms of painting, which adapt the idealized types found in ancient statues and monuments, Rohmer creates an imaginary pagan existence in an idealized countryside populated by rustic shepherds. Gombrich describes Poussin’s painting of three shepherds looking at a tomb and its inscription: ‘et in Arcadia ego [Even in Arcady I am]’: I, Death, reign even in the idyllic dreamland of the pastorals, in Arcady. Now we understand the wonderful gesture of awe and contemplation with which the framing figures gaze at the tomb, and we admire even more the beauty with which the reading figures answer each other’s movements. The arrangement seems simple enough but it is simplicity born of immense artistic knowledge. Only such knowledge could evoke this nostalgic vision of calm repose in which death has lost its terror. (Gombrich 1989: 309) Rohmer brings his own ‘immense artistic knowledge’ to the ending of his last film. He evokes in Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon a ‘nostalgic vision of calm repose’, in which, as in Ordet, love triumphs over death. At the age of 86 and aware that this might be his final film, Rohmer’s faith remained in life and love. For the final scene is about love as life, reconciliation as resurrection; live, live, live, live, Astrée tells Céladon. In the middle of becoming aroused in her embrace with Alexis-Céladon, Astrée finds that joy awakens her from grief. Her joy, her erotic excitement, her fear that this might not be Céladon: the film creates these emotions as it makes the impossible appear possible and conceives a living portrait. We know it can’t happen, yet we want it to happen. Rohmer died three years after finishing Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, in January 2010. We have with his last film a tremendous declaration for love and life, the last moments of which effervesce with energy and emotion. The tension that has grown is abruptly resolved, the condensed conclusion always Rohmer’s favourite type of ending. Delightful, magical, euphoric and impossible to predict, the ending of Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon is deeply romantic, so different to the endings of his previous films, some of which are tinged with a bitter irony, ambivalent about the

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choices characters have made, others of which convey a sense of missed opportunity or of loss and regret. His two preceding films, Triple Agent and L’Anglaise et le duc, have tragic endings.58 In Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, however, the final scene, in its eroticism and its celebratory atmosphere, adapted as much from Ordet and The Winter’s Tale as from L’Astrée and expressed by Astrée’s command to Céladon to live, communicates Rohmer’s optimism, hope and faith in humanity. Its ending takes its place with the endings of Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver, drawing on the same reserve of possibilities, celebrating life with a generous encouragement to resist doubts and black moods. With Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon, Rohmer ends on a note of high optimism, the perfect conclusion to one of the most successful careers in cinema. For long-time lovers of Rohmer’s films, one could not have asked for a more appropriate farewell gift.

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Notes

Introduction  i All 23 of Rohmer’s feature films are available on video or DVD. Only L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque is unavailable with English subtitles. L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque is available on DVD in France and L’Avant-scène du cinéma 429, February 1994, published a full script, in French.  ii See Mast (1979) for discussion of the ironic tradition in film. Schilling (2007: 149) also notes that Rohmer transposed the structures of theatrical comedies to cinema by filming on location. He notes Rohmer’s use of mistaken identity and ‘situational irony’ in the Comédies et proverbes (Schilling 2007: 142).  iii Rothman (2004: 338) and Andrew (2008: 30) both argue this.  iv Chabrol says: ‘Rohmer did most of it. I did the English period; also Notorious, Stage Fright . . . and Rebecca, I think’ (Nogueira and Zalaffi 1971: 3).  v Klevan cites Pascal Bonitzer’s discussion of Rohmer’s interest in the detective novel (Bonitzer 1999: 29–30; in Klevan 2000: 202, n. 3). Referring to The 39 Steps (1935) and Strangers on a Train (1952), Klevan (2000: 181) describes how Conte de printemps uses the structure of a thriller but decriminalizes it. Aubron (2004: 15) also notes how often spying features in Rohmer’s films. Schilling (2007: 3) writes of Hitchcock’s influence on Rohmer’s films. Bergala calls Rohmer a ‘hitchcocko-rossellinien’ (Cléder 2007: 21).  vi De Baecque, who calls Rohmer’s five-part ‘Celluloid and Marble’ series of essays ‘the most important theoretical essay of the 1950s’ (1991: 224), analyses Rohmer’s criticism (1991: 224–8). Ostrowska (2008: 30–6), in a section on Rohmer called ‘Eric Rohmer and Cinema as a Visual Novel’, describes how the critics of Cahiers du cinema ‘were involved in the project of defining the place of cinema in the French cultural context’ (Ostrowska 2008: 30). Kovács (2007) connects Rohmer’s criticism to wider debates about the development of post-WWII European cinema. Andrew (2010: 7–9) relates the emergence of the nouvelle vague to the history of film study and comments on Rohmer’s importance as a critic and editor. For more on Rohmer’s criticism, see Williams (1980), Hillier (1986), Crisp (1988) and Schilling (2007). vii Long-term collaborator Béatrice Romand has said that Rohmer is a Christian: ‘we’ve clashed a bit over this . . . he has fewer doubts than me’ (Carbonnier 1984: 12). viii As Ennis (1996: 316) notes, Loïc in Conte d’hiver and the protagonist of

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Ma Nuit chez Maud are Rohmer’s only portrayals of practising Catholics. Mazierska writes: ‘His films are devoid of nostalgia for traditional institutions, such as marriage (many of his most charming characters are co-habiting or single), religion (Rohmer’s most religious characters, such as Félicie in A Winter’s Tale rarely go to church and real Catholics, such as Loic in the same film or Jean-Louis in My Night with Maud, prove to be lacking any spirituality) or closely-knit community, where everybody knows everybody else. Nevertheless, Rohmer insists on the relevance of some of the values that these institutions promote, such as loyalty, honesty, modesty, seriousness and altruism, in modern life’ (Mazierska 2002: 240).  ix Several critics have compared Rohmer with Yasujiro Ozu (Monaco 1976: 303; Hoberman 1988: 60; Lalanne 1998: 43; Klevan 2000; Andrew 2002: 29). An analogous debate about religious content has taken place about the films of Ozu and Rossellini. Schrader, for example, argues that Ozu’s films have a transcendental style that ‘express[es] the Holy’ (Schrader 1988: 3), basing much of his claim on the repeated shots of landscapes and buildings in Ozu’s films. Klevan (2000), among others, challenges this interpretation, arguing that the repetition of shots of the landscape or settings in Ozu’s work places the smallest human incidents stylistically and thematically ‘in the centre of a wider world’ (Klevan 2000: 144). Rossellini and Rohmer have often been compared as religious artists. See, for example, CinémaAction 80 (1 July 1996), a special issue on Christianity and cinema that includes articles about Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini, Bresson, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Pasolini, Cavalier, Dreyer and Rohmer. Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) ends with the lead character, Karin (Ingrid Bergman), having some kind of experience on the island’s volcano. She calls out to God, but it is not clear that she is having a religious experience. As most Rossellini scholars note, the film is ambivalent about Karin’s experiences, just as Rossellini himself was. Tag Gallagher (1998) describes how Rossellini’s responses changed as time passed and his religious commitment weakened until, in 1974, Rossellini declares that he does not believe in God and that he did not when he made Stromboli (Rossellini 1995: 230). Rohmer wrote a review of Stromboli for Cahiers du cinéma on its release, reprinted in The Taste of Beauty (1989). Thirty years later, in 1983, during an interview with Jean Narboni, Rohmer describes Stromboli’s influence on him.  x Schilling also questions ‘whether the director should be considered central to the New Wave’, arguing that it depends on how one defines the nouvelle vague (2007: 4–5).  xi For more on the genesis of Cahiers du cinema, see Hillier (1986: 1–17), Andrew (1990: 144–71), MacCabe (2003: 42–96) and Brody (2008). For more on La Revue du cinéma, other precursors to Cahiers du cinéma and Rohmer’s involvement with film clubs, see Andrew (1990: 144–6) and Neupert (2007: 26–36). In French, Antoine de Baecque has written a two-volume history of the magazine (1991) and (2001), as well as a book on the nouvelle vague (1998) and another on cinephilia (2003), all of which trace the pre-history of Cahiers du cinéma. Rohmer (1989: 1–18) talks about La Gazette du cinéma and La Revue du cinéma in the interview with Jean Narboni. De Baecque and Toubiana (1999: 50) write of Rohmer’s influence on

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Truffaut during this period: ‘Truffaut began as a typical Eric Rohmer disciple, since his first two film reviews were accepted by the Bulletin du CCQL and published in the spring of 1950’. Keathley (2006: 82–111) also analyses 1950s Cahiers du cinema in relation to cinephilia. A history of the magazine in English is Bickerton (2006). xii De Baecque (2003: 296–7) and Neupert (2007: 250) describe Rohmer’s period as editor at Cahiers du cinéma and his departure from the magazine in 1963, when, as Hillier notes, concern for a ‘new cinema’ became ‘an intensely political concern’ (1992b: 9). De Baecque (1991 and 2001) explains in detail the changes in the editorial team at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and 1960s. On Rohmer’s period as editor, see de Baecque (1991: 13–89). For a description of the end of Rohmer’s period of editing Cahiers du cinéma, see de Baecque (2001: 20–9; 74–86) and (2003: 304–15). For an account of the evolution of Cahiers du cinéma in the later 1960s see Hillier (1992b: 1–24). De Baecque (2001: 94–5) and Brody (2008: 206) both note that in financial stewardship Rohmer was a better editor than Rivette. The financial status of Cahiers du cinéma deteriorated after Rohmer’s departure. See Ross (2002: 40–8) for details of contemporary political events. xiii See de Baecque (1998: 57–9), Marie (2003: 9–13) and Neupert (2007: 14–15), who places Françoise Giroud’s articles and book in the context of the rise of the American teenager. xiv See also Marie (2003: 53–5). Rohmer has said that he was refused avances des recettes for his first two films and subsequently never applied (Lennon 1992: 4). xv Jean Fourastié, in Les Trentes glorieuses: ou la revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (1980).

Chapter 1  1 Many nouvelle vague directors began making short films (the exception was Claude Chabrol). Bluher and Thomas (2005) and Pirot (2006) give detailed accounts of the nouvelle vague short films. Schilling (2007: 10–18) offers a concise account of Rohmer’s early career.  2 Thomas (2005: 34) notes it is lost. Beylie and d’Hugues describe it as being ‘vaguely inspired by Kierkegaard’ (2000: 190).  3 Tortajada (2004b: 346) notes that ‘La Roseraie’, co-written by Rohmer and Gégauff, is an early version of Rohmer’s story for Le Genou de Claire.  4 See Austin (1999: 6-8) on Gégauff’s collaboration with Chabrol. See Brody (2008: 21-3) for a description of Gégauff’s relationship with Godard. Wood and Walker (1970: 113–14) discuss the importance of Gégauff’s contribution to Chabrol’s films, distinguishing between Chabrol’s films written by Chabrol and those written by Chabrol and Gégauff, the latter of which they argue are more cynical and caricatured. After Rohmer’s death, Chabrol said: ‘Paul Gégauff, our mutual friend, was almost more important for Momo [Rohmer] than for me: they were very close’ (Garson 2010: 13).

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 5 De Baecque (1991: 221–2), Magny (1995a: 11) and MacCabe (2003: 54) cite Gégauff’s description of Rohmer.  6 For further details of this film, see Beylie (1986a), Beylie and d’Hugues (2000: 187–92) and Thomas (2005: 32–47). The story concerns the adventures of four young girls. Two of them are sisters, Camille and Madeleine, who live with their mother, Madame de Fleurville. One day a coach crashes outside their house. The woman injured in the crash, Madame de Rosbourg, and her daughter, Marguerite, end up living with Madame de Fleurville, Camille and Madeleine. Subsequently, a fourth young girl, Sophie, joins them when her widowed stepmother abandons her and remarries, in Italy to a count. It is hard to point to anything that links Les Petites filles modèles to Rohmer’s later choice of subjects, but some things may have appealed to him: the novel is written like a script and in a language that is simple, but not childish. The story has a unity of place: most of the action takes place in and around the house of Madame de Fleurville. Lastly, despite one fatal accident and one near fatal accident, the author is often gently ironic about the adventures and misadventures of the four young girls. The production stills included by Thomas (2005) evoke the lost film. Schilling (2007-13-14) also presents Thomas’s research on the fortunes of Les Petites filles modèles.  7 Thomas points out that some Rohmer filmographies mistakenly credit Guilbaud as a co-director of Les Petites filles modèles. Thomas interviewed Guilbaud and had his article checked by Rohmer before publication; he confirms that Guilbaud was technical advisor, not co-director (2005: 33).  8 Marie (2003: 48) notes the hostility to the nouvelle vague from industry professionals.  9 A comparative, though more successful, example is Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte, made in 1954 and shown in Paris for two weeks at one cinema in 1956. However, as Marie reports (2003: 51–2), Varda made La Pointe courte outside the film industry, unlike Rohmer, who tried to work with industry professionals on Les Petites filles modèles. Nevertheless, Varda, like Rohmer, returned to making short films before making another feature film, Cléo de 5 à 7, in 1962. 10 See Le Roux (2005: 275). 11 Véronique was the name of Godard’s younger sister. Carlos Vilardebo also made a short film called Véronique ou les jeunes filles (1963), although according to Pirot (2006: 34) this is a documentary about young French women. 12 Pirot (2006: 51) notes how common the theme of the pick-up was in the short films by nouvelle vague directors: Truffaut’s Antoine et Colette, Rohmer’s La Boulangère de Monceau, Godard’s Charlotte et Véronique, Rozier’s Blue Jeans (1957) and the portmanteau film Les Baisers (1964). 13 See Brody for more discussion of Charlotte et Véronique and Charlotte et son Jules (2008: 42–6). 14 Famously, Chabrol was able to produce his own first film, Le Beau Serge, because of a family inheritance. See Marie (2003: 58–60) for more details

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of Chabrol’s company, AJYM, and its role in producing several nouvelle vague films. Marie notes that Truffaut’s company, Les Films du Carrosse, was also helped by his wife’s father’s company, Cocinor, a large film distribution company in France (2003: 60–1). Rohmer (1977) says: ‘Chabrol made it possible for me to make Le Signe du Lion. He produced it’. 15 Le Signe du Lion credits Paul Gégauff with ‘dialogue’, but Rohmer insists that Gégauff only reviewed the script one afternoon (Mauro 1985: 90), although, as Rohmer has pointed out, Gégauff was the inspiration for the central character in Le Signe du Lion (Thomas 2005: 41). 16 Ramasse (1983: 4) points to the resemblance between the story of Le Signe du Lion and that of Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). Thomsen (1997: 66) points out that Fassbinder dedicated his first film (Love is Colder than Death, 1969) to Chabrol and Rohmer. He also remarks that, at the time, Le Signe du Lion and Les Bonnes Femmes were Fassbinder’s favourite films. Kent Jones also mentions that Le Signe du Lion was one of Fassbinder’s favourite films (Jones 2001: 138). There is some similarity between Le Signe du Lion and Fox and his Friends (R. W. Fassbinder, 1975). 17 Crisp (1988: 28), Magny (1995a: 107) and Neupert (2007: 254) discuss the problems with the film. Rohmer asked a composer (Louis Saguer) to write the violin sonata for Le Signe du lion (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 26). According to Rohmer (1977), the music was one of the things about which he disagreed with his producer, who tried to remove Rohmer’s atonal music and replace it with a conventional score, in addition to shortening the film. Eventually, Rohmer reached an agreement with the producer that his version would be shown at La Pagode cinema in Paris and the producer’s version could be shown elsewhere, although at the time of speaking he does not know where else it was shown. 18 For further details, see Rohmer’s interview with Carcassonne and Fieschi (1981: 19–20) in a special issue of Cinématographe dedicated to Dostoevsky. 19 A point made by de Baecque (2003: 321), Brody (2008: 177) and Rohmer, who said: ‘But in the end I wasn’t really angry with him [Truffaut], because he’d done me a great favour. I was wasting my time at the magazine, caught up in boring administrative duties’ (Rohmer 2006). 20 Pierre Cottrell, who worked with Rohmer as an associate producer, recalls: ‘When he was chief editor, he got 1000 francs a month. With that he could support his wife and two children. His principle food was plain biscuits. Le Signe du Lion took three years to come out and it was a bitter failure. During the first half of the 1960s, Rohmer was a little like the disinherited child of the nouvelle vague’ (Bozon 2010: 17). 21 As Thomas puts it, ‘after the forced poverty of the years between 1950 and 1960, he opted for a voluntary poverty’ (2005: 45). 22 See, for instance, Chase and Feiden (1972: 43). 23 See Puaux (1995) and Léon (2005) for further discussion of Victor Hugo architecte. 24 Robic (2002) and Macé (2004) also note this.

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25 In 1933, Marcel Carné, in an article which laments the trend in early sound films to use studios rather than locations, praised Eugène Dabit’s novel Hôtel du nord (1931) for its descriptions of Paris: ‘in a decor of factories, garages, slender footbridges, and unloading carts [throbs] the whole picturesque, restless world of approaches to the Saint-Martin canal’ (Carné 1988/1933: 129). In 1938, Carné filmed Dabit’s novel on elaborate studio versions of the Canal Saint-Martin area, designed by Alexandre Trauner and built in the Bilancourt film studios. 26 For more details on Langlois’s life and career, see Roud (1983), who discusses some of Langlois’s apparently infamous character traits. 27 They were collected and published in book form in 1974 and are now available with the Criterion DVD of the Six contes moraux. 28 See Bonitzer and Chion (1983: 18). As Neupert (2007: 255) observes, the basic plot of the Six contes moraux resembles Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). Murnau was one of Rohmer’s favourite filmmakers and he wrote a thesis, then a book on Murnau’s Faust (1926). Sunrise tells a story of a married man tempted by another woman to leave his wife. He meets the other woman and has an affair with her. She persuades him to kill his wife. As he is about to drown her, the husband’s remorse overwhelms him. He lets her go and begs for forgiveness. 29 Puaux (1995: 182) describes the ‘scientific precision’ with which the opening establishes the setting. 30 Neupert (2007: 260) also comments on the high-angled shot becoming Sylvie’s point of view in retrospect, although he does not mention the voice-over. 31 Sellier (2008: 122) disagrees with this interpretation, writing ‘the spectator’s empathy with the male character is inevitable since it is he who tells the story of what happens to him, the two young women being nothing but the flip sides of his desire’. 32 Mann argues that La Carrière de Suzanne looks forward to the Comédies et proverbes because it focuses on a woman, Suzanne: she ‘is the principal character around whom gravitate two male protagonists’ (Mann 1999: 104). This is true: the men do gravitate around the title character, yet in viewpoint and structure the film focuses on Bertrand; his voice-over describes events and the film follows him continuously. As Neupert writes: ‘the viewer is almost as clueless about the women as is poor Bertrand’ (2007: 265). 33 See Neupert (2007: 265–6). 34 Rohmer (2006) notes that ‘Place de l’Etoile’ was shot on colour reversal film stock. 35 Marie calls ‘Gare du Nord’ ‘one of the strongest works of 1960s French cinema’ (2003: 71), though he does not explain his judgement. 36 See Magny (1995a: 27), Bonitzer (1999: 90–2) and Neupert (2007: 267–8). The latter two cite the first. 37 Schilling also notes that the three documentaries on contemporary women were ‘influential on projects to come’ (2007: 19).

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38 Pirot notes (2006: 47) that Douchet’s first film was the short Le Mannequin de Belleville (1962). 39 Pirot describes how between 1964 and 1978 the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in collaboration with Pathé Cinema, produced a film magazine, Chroniques de France, which was distributed abroad (2006: 14). She remarks that a number of these short films (‘on all aspects of French regional, cultural and artistic life’) were directed by filmmakers associated with the nouvelle vague: Maurice Pialat, Agnès Varda, Guy Gilles, Jacques Baratier, Carlos Vilardebo; several were produced by Pierre Braunberger (Pirot 2006: 14). According to Pirot, Rohmer’s Nadja à Paris, Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui and Fermière à Montfaucon were made for this series.

Chapter 2  1 Rohmer distinguishes between a moralist in English and a moraliste in French: ‘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’ (Petrie 1971: 38). Monaco compares Rohmer with Henry James, on the basis that the director is someone ‘who is concerned with states of mind’ (1976: 293). Crisp notes, ‘Rohmer considers intellectuals (like himself) all the more likely to lead themselves astray by their endless rationalizations’ (1988: 31).  2 Love in the Afternoon is the American title of a 1957 Billy Wilder romantic comedy set in Paris starring Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier. The French release title of Wilder’s film was Ariane, the name of the young heroine played by Hepburn. Rohmer acknowledges Wilder’s film in L’Amour, l’après-midi by naming Frédéric and Hélène’s daughter Ariane, something also noted by Legrand (1972: 121). In both films, Ariane (the French translation of Ariadne) is a daughter, echoing the mythological Greek Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete.  3 Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959) are examples: the former could not be more British; the latter is completely American, as comfortable with American landscape, culture and society as any film by an American director. Hawks’s celebrated examples are Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944) and Rio Bravo (1959), films belonging to different genres but with similar plot devices.  4 The film is set in high summer, though Rohmer shot it in June (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 8).  5 Rohmer and Schroeder made La Collectionneuse cheaply, with little film stock and renting a house in the South of France, which cast and crew lived in and used as the main location (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7). They produced La Collectionneuse in the same way that they produced the first two contes moraux, scraping together just enough money for the shoot. With the film stuck in the laboratory, they tried to raise money to pay for post-production; it remained as a black-and-white, and silent, work print

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for a year. They showed this rough cut to Georges de Beauregard, who paid for the colour printing and the sound recording. Both Almendros (Fieschi, Bezombes and Carcassonne 1979: 39) and Schroeder (Rohmer 2006) confirm this. La Collectionneuse was successful, though Rohmer’s first big international success was Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969). La Collectionneuse was released in the UK in 1969 with Adrien’s voice-over in English and the dialogue in French. After the international success of Ma Nuit chez Maud and Le Genou de Claire, Pathé released La Collectionneuse in New York in April 1971. Ma Nuit chez Maud was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar and Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and Rohmer’s subsequent two films, Le Genou de Claire and L’Amour, l’après-midi, were distributed by Columbia in the US.  6 Perhaps relevant as inspiration to Rohmer is the vase in George Meredith’s The Egoist, the breaking of which has symbolic importance. Rohmer (1994) says of The Egoist, ‘I have been very influenced by it. I used to read a French translation’. In Chapter 17, entitled ‘The Porcelain Vase’, Flitch recounts how the vase broke as he ran to save Clara Middleton, Sir Willoughby’s fiancée. The porcelain vase was being brought as a wedding present by Horace de Craye for Clara and Sir Willoughby, even though Clara had asked Sir Willoughby to end the engagement. More generally, The Egoist is relevant to Rohmer’s work because it is about a man who keeps holding out for what he thinks will be someone more beautiful, more clever or wealthy; this woman is Clara Middleton, whom he prizes not because he loves her but because he values her as a beautiful object.  7 Pommereulle made occasional appearances as an actor (he is in Godard’s Weekend, 1967, and in Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir, 1968, playing an artist called Daniel). He also directed two films, one of which, Vite (1969), I have seen and which is a mixture of abstract images and psychedelia, filmed in Morocco. Vite is different to La Collectionneuse, yet it expresses Pommereulle’s dandyesque playfulness, apparent in his comportment in La Collectionneuse. See Shafto (2007: 197–8) for a discussion of Vite.  8 Rohmer describes his method in Ostria (1986: 34), Carcassone and Fieschi (1981: 28) and Prieur and Blum (1983: 60), stating: ‘It is necessary to distinguish two sorts of texts, two sorts of dialogue: the dialogue of the conversation or the interview and the dialogue which will be a dialogue of passion . . . Now this idea of the interview was an idea absolutely excluded by the generation of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s’ (Prieur and Blum 1983: 61). He also says: ‘It didn’t give me the idea, but what encouraged me, what gave me the courage to use very long conversations in a film, was being at Cahiers du cinéma and interviewing directors. That was my job. I dealt with lots of people, but I also transcribed the recordings and edited the interviews. That taught me how people speak’ (Rohmer 1977).  9 A potential film to compare with La Collectionneuse is Barbet Schroeder’s first feature film as a director, More (1969), which shares with La Collectionneuse a number of personnel, motifs and themes. 10 IMDB and the film credits list several people in La Collectionneuse as extras

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who also helped as assistants: Laszlo Benko, Patrice de Bailliencourt, Alfred de Graaff. 11 Bauchau recalls that during his last years as a student at Oxford he met like-minded people who were interested in the nouvelle vague, including Peter Wollen, Clare Peploe, Ariane Mnouchkine and Ilona Halberstad (Walker 1998: 40). Wollen remembers: ‘I was introduced to film in the first instance by people I knew at Oxford. Most important of all was Patrick Bauchau, who later became a film actor and is now an actor on American television. Although Patrick is Belgian, he used to spend quite a lot of time in Paris and he introduced the Cahiers du cinéma’s love of Hollywood to his friends in Oxford in the late 50s. That is, between 1956 and 1959’ (Mulvey, Wollen and Grieveson 2008: 221). Eugene Archer was a film critic and journalist for the New York Times from 1960 to 1970. Andrew Sarris thanks Bauchau and Archer in the acknowledgements of The American Cinema (1968). Bauchau and Sarris became friends when both attended the Cinémathèque Française in the early 1960s (Walker 1998: 40). When Sarris returned to New York, Bauchau went too and became friends with Eugene Archer. It seems that Archer then moved to Paris in 1965, from where he sent back reports on the Paris film scene for the New York Times. In one report from Paris, Archer reviews new French films, including La Collectionneuse, in which he appears (though he does not mention this in his article) and of which he says: ‘this surprisingly commercial moral tale about the long-haired boys and the shorthaired girls of St. Tropez, filmed on credit and little else by former Cahiers du cinéma editor Eric Rohmer, was strongly disliked in some quarters for its coldly analytical approach, but its colour photography earned it higher praise than most productions costing ten times as much’ (Archer 1967: 76). In addition to appearing in La Collectionneuse, Archer wrote screenplays for Schroeder and Chabrol. He died aged 42 in 1973. 12 See Rudling (2009). Denis Berry later married Jean Seberg and Anna Karina, with whom he made Last Song (1987). 13 Opinions differ about whether Donald Cammell appears in La Collectionneuse in the café scene in San Tropez; he was a friend of Bauchau’s, knew members of the Zanzibar group and had a studio in Paris. According to IMDB he is in La Collectionneuse. However, the BFI database contains a note to say that this is not true. Comparison of photographs of the young Cammell with the man in the white sweater embracing Haydée suggests it is Cammell. The two other men in the scene could be Benko or de Bailliencourt. Brody (2008: 320) says that La Collectionneuse was part-funded by producer Beauregard and part-funded by ‘the cinephile heiress Sylvina de Boissonnas’. However, he does not give a source for this claim and Boissonnas is not listed in the credits. I have not found anything to confirm it. 14 Crisp (1988: 43) suggests Haydée’s prologue ‘dissects’ and fetishizes her body. Thirion (2004: 27) suggests the prologue presents her as a mythological creature. Tester notes that Haydée’s body is ‘reduced to pieces’ so that audiences can ask ‘a reflexive question about whether this is an appropriate way of seeing another human’ (2008: 93).

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15 Shafto (2007: 32) includes a picture of Pommereulle’s piece. She notes (2007: 234, n.76) that Pommereulle exhibited it at the ‘Objectors’ exhibition at the Ranson Gallery. 16 Lefevre (1967: 120) is correct when he writes: ‘these three prologues are like the hypotheses of a mathematical formula, or the postulates of a philosophical reflection’. 17 The description is Paul Gardner’s, quoted by Walker (1998: 42). 18 Rohmer added all sounds in post-production, including the sound of two aeroplanes passing overhead and off-screen during Adrien’s prologue. Once one knows the story, the sound of these aeroplanes foreshadows Adrien’s making arrangements to fly to London. The addition of the aeroplanes is a characteristic piece of Rohmerien humour. The first passes during the first shot of Adrien and Mijanou walking in the garden; the second is heard as Adrien enters the bedroom where he picks up the naked statue and sees Haydée making love. 19 Costa (2007: 155) also discusses the inserts used when Adrien declares his summer plans. 20 Several critics have commented upon Rohmer’s holiday settings. Charney writes of Le Genou de Claire: ‘the action of the film is steeped in a holiday atmosphere that leaves aside the normal life of most of the characters and constitutes a temporal stasis’ (1973: 102). Milne notes the importance to La Collectionneuse of the ‘airy, inconsequential sensuality of an almost tangibly evoked St Tropez summer’ (1981: 192). Bonitzer calls Rohmer ‘the greatest cineaste of the French summer’ (1986: 31). Crisp calls the holidays in Rohmer’s films ‘holes in time’ (1988: 69). In an excellent essay on the topic, Fawell writes: ‘Summer tends to find his typically very reflective characters with too much time on their hands and too many thoughts in their heads’ (1993: 777). See also Mazierska (2002). The holiday club/campsite, which became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, features as a setting for broad comedies, such as Camping (Fabien Onteniente, 2006) or, one of the most famous French holiday films, Les Bronzés (Patrice Leconte, 1978), which is set in a Club Med camp. The annual summer holiday is important in most Western countries, but has a ritualistic significance in France: ‘We are the first to have made holidays a national institution, a collective dream; psychologically we think about them all through the year’, says one Frenchman in Ardagh’s book on France (1995: 402). Ardagh points out that, although the post-war growth of tourism is not confined to the French, there are few countries where the urge to go on an annual holiday is so great (Ardagh 1995: 402). Buss reports of French cinema’s use of holidays: ‘already by the 1950s, Antoine Doinel’s longing to see the sea marks him out as an underprivileged child. The privileged majority saw provincial France in August and as tourists’ (1988: 52). 21 One example of this convention is Summer with Monika (1953), in which Ingmar Bergman uses the holiday season as the opportunity for a summer romance between the young couple who escape from adult responsibilities. At the end of summer, the couple return to Stockholm. De Baecque (2003:

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27–31) discusses how important Summer with Monika was to the ‘young Turks’ writing for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. De Baecque (1998: 35) includes a still of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) stealing a picture of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika from a cinema foyer. Andrew (2010: xxi) also notes Truffaut’s homage to Andersson and Bergman in Les 400 Coups. 22 Mazierska also notes this, writing: ‘Adrien in The Collector rejects all efforts and goes to any length to justify the moral superiority of his own, idle holiday, as well as of his idle existence (2002: 229). 23 Milne suggests that La Collectionneuse orchestrates a clash between ‘the emotional sterility of the thinking man’s dandyism’, referring to Laclos’s Les Liasions dangereuses, and the ‘simplicity of instinct’, referring to Rousseau’s Emile (1981: 192). 24 This shot exemplifies the success of Almendros and Rohmer’s collaboration, for as part of La Collectionneuse’s conjuring up of a holiday atmosphere it is important that the lighting is set so that exterior and interior are visible at the same time; it conveys the closeness of interior and exterior in a villa like this, where wandering between the two is easy and frequent. The warmth of the holiday permits doors and windows to be left open; the time of the holiday permits long conversations, aperitifs and mealtimes. 25 Vidal categorizes Haydée as a passive seducer, though she adds that ‘the personality of la collectionneuse (Haydée Politoff) is the most difficult to work out’ (1986: 49). 26 As Charney notes, ‘Adrien reads the complete works of Rousseau and a book on German Romanticism, but these titles only serve to indicate his general frame of mind, as would a certain gesture or setting’ (1973: 109). Haydée reads the book on German Romanticism, though it does not detract from Charney’s point. 27 Schilling also notes this, writing: ‘she remains playfully indifferent to her elders’ high-cultural pursuits, causing the precious Chinese vase to fall to the floor, as if to remind those present that she is no empty vessel to be exchanged between men’ (Schilling 2007: 135). 28 Shafto writes: ‘the force, extreme and unexpected, of his response indicates that this noise is but an auditory homologue to his paint can, adorned with razor blades. This sound operates as well in another direction, recalling the guillotine of the Revolution, another augur for the violence of May 68’ (Shafto 2007: 180–1). 29 Shafto suggests ‘his contempt for the market is also in synch with and premonitory of the attitudes of May 68, when Alain Jouffroy called for “the abolition of art”’ (2007: 180). 30 Crisp (1988) relates Rohmer’s films to his religious beliefs and to Bazin’s influence on Rohmer’s criticism and filmmaking. Cardullo (1995) and (2004) emphasizes Rohmer’s Catholicism and argues that Rohmer attempts ‘to portray the manifestation of divine grace’ (1995: 294). Mann (1999), writing of the seasons in Rohmer’s films, follows Crisp and links Rohmer’s use of the

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seasons to Catholicism. Goodenough argues that Rohmer plays a God-like role when he ‘shamelessly uses coincidence’ to bring Françoise and the hero together (2005: 8). Kline (1992), Ennis (1996), Tester (2008) and Norton (2009) all discuss the relevance of Pascal, religion and philosophy to Ma Nuit chez Maud. 31 Larkin writes: ‘in the course of the 1960s, weekly attendance at mass fell from well over 20 per cent of the adult population to less than 15 per cent – dropping further from 11 to 8 per cent between 1986 and 1994’ (2003: 223). Ravitch (1990) writes: ‘while the percentage of male and female heads of household above the age of 40 who attended mass regularly dropped moderately from 1966 to 1978, the percentage of those under 40 years of age dropped dramatically, from 18 to 4 per cent among males and 17 to 7 per cent among women’ (1990: 156–7). Ravitch also notes that ‘the events of May 1968 had revealed the impotence of the Church . . . The church was able to avoid confronting the real issues of the social upheaval of May 1968, but at the price of increasing and embarrassing irrelevance’ (1990: 164). 32 Ross explains that what was happening in Paris in May 1968 was also happening elsewhere: ‘in Nantes, Rennes, and throughout the provinces, crowds of students, workers and frequently farmers occupied the streets for a longer period than in Paris. From May 6 on, young workers and unemployed joined students in Clermont-Ferrand and in Grenoble; in the May 7 demonstration in Toulouse it was impossible to distinguish student from “non-student” or worker on the streets’ (Ross 2002: 72). 33 As Desbarats writes, ‘In 1969, at the moment that the non-commercial cinema was most politically engaged, Rohmer, in total discordance with the rise of the avant-garde and the cultural tabula rasa which accompanied it, made a film which would become mythical, Ma Nuit chez Maud’ (1990: 10–11). Vincendeau writes that at the end of the 1960s, in the aftermath of May 1968, a political agenda was adopted by some nouvelle vague directors, notably Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard; Truffaut and Rohmer, she writes, ‘turned their backs on politics’ (2009: 14). For more details of how French filmmakers responded to the events of May 1968, see Harvey (1980), Atack (1999), Ross (2002) and Smith (2005), who notes that Rohmer was involved with some of the political events of the time. She describes a meeting at the Ecole Nationale de Photographie et de Cinématographie – the French film school – on 17 May 1968, organized by a union (the Confédération générale du travail or CGT) and the journalists of Cahiers du cinéma. This led to the launch of a committee called the Etats-Généraux du cinéma or EG. Rohmer, with Rivette and Chabrol, signed the founding document of the EG, which remained in existence throughout May and June, organising ‘guerrilla-filming activity’ (Smith 2005: 7). See Harvey (1980: 16–27) and Hayward (1993: 234–5) for further discussion of the EG. Rohmer also helped his editor, Jackie Raynal, who recalls: ‘During one of the first meetings of the Etats-Généraux du cinema (at Maubert-Mutulalité), I recounted what I had seen [police beatings of protestors]. The next day, an article was published in France Soir with a big photo of me. Eric Rohmer called me at 7.30 in the morning

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in order to warn me: “leave your flat, or they’ll arrest you”. He was right: I left right away, and the concierge of my building later told me that the police had come to question me (!?). In retrospect, this is also what motivated me to leave France’ (Shafto 2007: 186). Rohmer’s brother, the philosopher René Schérer, was also involved with the May 1968 events. 34 As an example, Ross describes the career of Maurice Papon, prefect of police between 1958 and 1967: ‘Under Papon, the ranks of the Parisian police swelled with more and more anciens combatants from Indochina and ex-army officials and parachutists from Algeria’ (Ross 2002: 52). 35 Rohmer wanted his characters to be ordinary: ‘I made Trintignant’s character an engineer to show a social class which French cinema often ignored . . . if the characters of La Collectionneuse were exceptions, the characters of Ma Nuit chez Maud represent the rule’ (Langlois 1969). 36 As Atack writes: ‘In the period preceding May 1968, debates about society, politics, and culture in the arts and social sciences, in creative and critical writings, and in the media, were formed by an amalgam of many strands and themes, including the university, Vietnam, consumer society, the modernization of France, capitalism and imperialism, memories of the Algerian war, as well as theoretical and philosophical work on culture and society’ (1999: 9). 37 Vitez began as an actor, directed plays throughout the 1970s and 1980s, before becoming chief administrator of the Comedie Française. He died in 1990. Rohmer had worked with Vitez before, using him for the voice-overs on several programmes he made for schools television – his adaptation of Perceval, broadcast in 1964, and his programmes on Edgar Allan Poe, Jean De La Bruyère and Victor Hugo. See also Rohmer’s 1970 interview for Cahiers du cinéma (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 118), in which he explains that the idea for Vitez’s character came from Lucien Goldmann, a French Marxist who wrote The Hidden God (1956) about Pascal and Racine. The Cahiers du cinéma interviewers criticize Rohmer for not showing a proper Marxist. Rohmer replies: ‘I took Vitez’s words as those of a Marxist – a good or a bad Marxist, who cares? Now, if you don’t consider him a Marxist, that’s your business. All I can say is that for me the most important thing is the question of loyalty. To a woman, but also to an idea, to a dogma. All the characters are presented as hesitant dogmatists: the Catholic on one side, the Marxist on the other, but also Maud, who clings to her upbringing as a free-thinking radical socialist’ (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 119). At the time of this interview in 1970, the Cahiers du cinéma interviewers were influenced by left-wing ideas. As de Baecque puts it, ‘with some practiced words from grand socialist texts in their heads (Marx, Engels and Lenin comprise the inevitable references), the editors meet a director who has just had his first real success with Ma Nuit chez Maud. The result is an exercise in mutual incomprehension that is quite exciting’ (2001: 210). 38 ‘I chose Trintignant two years after having written [the script], but I had been thinking of him for a long time’ (Carcassonne and Fieschi 1981: 30). Schroeder states, ‘the success of La Collectionneuse enabled the filming of

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Ma Nuit chez Maud, a film for which it was necessary to employ professional actors’ (Simsolo 1969: 65). 39 Smith (2005) points to Trintignant’s similar roles in a number of French films in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969), The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) and L’Attentat (Yves Boisset, 1972). Jones writes, ‘Rohmer is not the only filmmaker who has mined this trait in Trintignant – it certainly served Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, and it has also worked well for André Techiné, Truffaut, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. But it is employed in those other films for its sinister edge under extreme melodramatic conditions, while in My Night at Maud’s it is the ordinary trait of a fairly common type of man seen under unremarkable everyday circumstances. Rohmer almost always works with good actors, and Trintignant is no exception. But the core of his presence here is something that is more or less unactable, which puts the film closer to Bresson than one might think. In other words, who Trintignant is, as opposed to his considerable ability as an actor, sits at the heart of this character and this film’ (2006: 16–17). Wood refers to relevant characteristics of the actor in a review of The Conformist: ‘our hero, Marcello Clerici, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant with a tidy, jumpy precision that is itself a form of eccentricity, not only wants to be normal, he wants to be “pardoned by society”’ (2008: 34). 40 Barrault says: ‘Eric Rohmer, when he looks for an actor, he really wants to look [for] exactly what he wants. And after he does not do anything; he just puts the people in front of the camera and he says “I don’t do anything”. It’s not true because he’s a very good director’ (Barrault 1976). 41 Several critics have commented on Ma Nuit chez Maud’s irony. Monaco writes, ‘the protagonist views himself from an angle which is distinctly different from ours’ (1976: 296). Austin notes, ‘although based on Rohmer’s own first-person, male-narrated texts, the films tend to complicate or qualify the male protagonist’s perspective’ (1996: 67). Ennis notes the distance between ‘Jean-Louis’ and ‘the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator’ (1996: 312). King writes, ‘it [the film] establishes a complicity between the spectator and the image at the expense of the protagonists’ (1990: 236). Bonitzer remarks that Rohmer’s characters, like everyone, often have blinkers on, pointing to the use of ice (1999: 14). Jones (2006) discusses the way in which chance is a factor in Ma Nuit chez Maud’s irony. 42 Smith (2000), developing work by Wilson (1988) and Pye (2000), explains in detail how Hitchcock’s films use irony. Rope is one of her central examples. 43 Rohmer distinguishes between the protagonist’s viewpoint and the film’s: ‘in the Moral Tales, the character felt rather sure of himself – in an often rather pretentious way and which he has been criticized for – but which is attributable to the character and not the author’ (Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 220). Heinemann (2007) also writes about point of view in the Six contes moraux. 44 Molinier (2001), like this author, refuses to call Trintignant’s character Jean-Louis as he is not named in the film and his namelessness is significant, just as it is for Fontaine’s character in Rebecca.

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45 ‘We ran a big risk, because we could have easily had a season without snow and I didn’t want to use false snow’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 8). Almendros describes how Rohmer ‘scheduled the exact date for shooting the scene when it snows: that day, right on time, it snowed, and the snow lasted all day long, not just a few minutes’ (1985: 79). Maud’s apartment was built in a small studio on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris; they filmed the rest on location: ‘I found it impossible to find a suitable location because it was necessary, at the time, to be really precise (the bed had to be in a certain place) and absolutely silent, more because the scene was set at night and I was using direct sound’ (Langlois 1969). 46 I am grateful to James Williams for first alerting me to the connection between Rohmer’s and Ophuls’s films. To viewers at the time, French and international, the connection between the two films may have been apparent. Crist, for example, writes in 1972, when Ophuls’s film was shown in the US, that Ophuls has used Clermont-Ferrand ‘recognisable from Ma Nuit chez Maud’ (1972: 68). The press release for the DVD edition of Le Chagrin et la pitié by Milestone in 2000 contains this statement: ‘Clermont-Ferrand is the locale of Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s and is often the home town of the hick relative in Feydeau farces’ (http://www.milestonefilms.com/pdf/ SorrowPity.pdf). It would be typical of Rohmer to have been aware of the connection between Clermont-Ferrand and Feydeau, for his film presents Trintignant’s character as a conservative ‘hick’. Lassalle notes that he is from ClermontFerrand, ‘the city of Ma Nuit chez Maud and Le Chagrin et la pitié’ (1992: 1). Atack (1999: 102–22) includes a chapter on Le Chagrin et la pitié, in which she argues that there are two stories being told in the film: a story about the 1940–4 period and a story about the post-war period, ‘which emerges as a narrative of false consciousness, or myth’ (Atack 1999: 105). 47 Noting, as others have done (for example, Austin 1996: 101), that the hero’s pursuit of the idealized Françoise alludes to Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine in Vertigo, Vonderheide concludes: ‘The gendered perspective that exists in Hitchcock’s Vertigo becomes politicised when Rohmer joins it to the subtext of fascism in Vichy France, which runs throughout Ma Nuit chez Maud’ (2008: 35). Vonderheide refers to John Sweets’s Choices in Vichy France (1986), a history of Clermont-Ferrand during the Second World War, which Sweets wrote partly to challenge Ophuls’s film. Sweets states: ‘the film is highly unsatisfactory from a historical perspective. The examples chosen by Ophuls for dramatic and entertainment value often abuse the historical reality beyond recognition’ (1986: viii–ix). 48 The hero’s smoking is a characteristic device of Rohmer’s for connecting the hero’s stays with Maud and Françoise: at Maud’s, after his second dinner there, he asks Maud for a light; later that night, at Françoise’s, he comes into her room and asks her for a light. 49 Reviewing La Collectionneuse, Lefevre (1967: 119) lists the Six contes moraux. What will become Ma Nuit chez Maud is still being developed and at that stage it is called ‘La Fille à bicyclette’.

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50 Rohmer says: ‘the only film that I wanted to make in black and white – and curiously it was at the time when colour was beginning to be required – is Ma Nuit chez Maud . . . it needed a certain Jansenism in the image, a kind of simplification . . . In other words, the ideal for me, on Ma Nuit chez Maud, would have been to have filmed in colour with blacks and whites. The characters are dressed in black and white, so, if I had made it in colour, the film would have been in black and white . . . for me, in this case, black and white were the colours’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 23). 51 Goodenough also notes the use of black and white and lists a number of oppositions: ‘the narrator seeks to escape from the artificial – Maud – to the natural – Françoise’ (Goodenough 2005: 9). He interprets Maud as representing ‘appetites and sensuality’ and therefore as ‘unnatural, urban, societal, living in a world ruled by mechanistic logic’ (Goodenough 2005: 9). 52 Ennis suggests that it is for this reason that the protagonist dislikes Pascal, who, according to Ennis (1996: 312), wrote against this activity. 53 Goodenough points out that Trintignant is ‘unreliable in a number of ways’ (2005: 8): he is uncomfortable in church; he lacks self-discipline; and he worries about free will, for example, whether or not to have sex with Maud. 54 Buache notes: ‘Vidal is a sort of negative image of Jean-Louis and simultaneously he does not hide his attraction to Jansenism, whereas, Jean-Louis openly flaunts the repulsion which this rigorousness arouses in him. Strong in their opposite convictions, and, eventually, very close, they engage in an oral joust, of which the beautiful Maud aims to demonstrate the inanity simply by sliding into her bed during their discussion’ (Buache 1990: 102). Robic also identifies Vidal as the ‘true partisan’ of Pascal’s wager and she calls the protagonist’s decision not to discuss the truth with Françoise ‘anti-Pascalian par excellence’ (Robic 2002: 83). 55 Rohmer shot the ending three months before the rest of the film on Belle Ile, in Brittany, where Trintignant had a house: ‘in fact, I think immediately of the ending of my films and the final scene. I define my films by the ends: if I don’t find the ending, I don’t find anything. I began to write the script of Ma Nuit chez Maud because I had found the last scene, Le Genou de Claire was written according to the final scene, and even the story of L’Amour, l’après-midi was entirely written in a prose treatment except for the last scene which was composed in detail with all its dialogue’ (Mauro 1985: 92). Several critics comment on Ma Nuit chez Maud’s ending, including Hillier (1970–1). Cunningham argues that the film exposes how ‘Maud’s dream, her wish for a sustained and sustaining dynamic relationship with a man, combining intellectual, ethical, and sensual levels of experience is rendered impossible in the spiritual world of Clermont’ (1986: 83). Williams summarizes: ‘The main character has arbitrarily decided at the age of 35 that he will cease having affairs in order to become worthy of the pure Catholic he wishes to marry. This renunciation of sexual pleasure is presented as totally gratuitous and contrasts with his insistence that Christianity does not entail, as Pascal had thought, giving up the good things in life, such as the local Chanturgue wine. Set against this self-imposed chastity, which rings false in the new France

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of the 60s, is Maud’s more authentic and open attitude’ (Williams 2002). Handyside calls the ending ‘understatedly tragic’ (2009: 150). 56 Cunningham (1986: 79) also uses this Rohmer quotation, on the first page of his essay. 57 As Gilles Mouëllic says of Rohmer’s films: ‘Desire expressed by the body often contradicts the character’s statements, as if the body is not controllable, as if the body expresses the truth of a desire denied by speech’ (Cléder 2007: 117). 58 As Crisp notes, the heroes of the Six contes moraux justify their actions according to moral principles and yet, ‘however moral is his choice in the abstract, his lack of self-awareness makes it probable that his motivations are nowhere near so simple or so admirable as he claims’ (1988: 33). Bonitzer also argues that Rohmer makes the blindness of his male characters explicit in this scene (1999: 17). 59 Rohmer says: ‘In Le Genou de Claire I wanted to divide the narrator into two’ (Pruks 1977: 127). Crisp suggests that Aurora can see the future of her characters and ‘orchestrate it’ (1988: 62). Bonitzer notes: ‘Aurora expresses the aesthetic principle, the ethical principal and the principal of writing for the contes moraux’ (1999: 97). Heinemann (2007: 77) says that Aurora’s presence in the film encourages scepticism towards Jérôme’s self-justification. 60 Crisp writes that Jérôme’s touching of Claire’s knee is ‘a product of Freudian displacement’ (1988: 64). Charney, however, suggests that: ‘the eccentricity of Jérôme’s obsession with Claire’s knee is almost a parody of the arbitrariness of fleeting desire’ (1973: 102). 61 Rohmer says, ‘When he tells Aurora afterwards that he behaved in a heroic fashion with Claire, he doesn’t really mean it seriously. He says it with a certain amount of humour. He thinks that his cruelty shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But the question you have to ask yourself finally is that if this girl cries it’s because he has nevertheless been cruel, and there, if you like, is the fly in the ointment’ (Rohmer 1976). 62 Rohmer (1994) credits the camera style to his setting: ‘I could divide my films into two sorts: plain films and mountain films. Le Genou de Claire is a mountain film, to use the term of an architect I once filmed, with an oblique function. Everything happens in one plane, in the vertical plane.’ 63 Charney suggests that Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse may be another influence on the film. She writes, ‘Annecy is indeed Rousseau country; it is the country in which uncontested and almost pretty beauty responds tamely to the outpourings of the character’s soul’ (1973: 104–5). For Tortajada, Rohmer’s films are examples of libertinage; they ‘seem to explore the multiple variations and possibilities of seduction, especially the type that I have called seduction through ambiguity, the model of which is principally the libertinage of eighteenth-century French literature’ (Tortajada 2004a: 229). Tortajada links Le Genou de Claire to Laclos’s Liasons dangereuses (Tortajada 2004b: 345–6) and discusses the way that Rohmer’s film sets up Jérôme and Aurora’s conversations as similar to Madame de Merteuil and Valmont’s conversations. However, Charney argues that, while the plot may summon up Laclos, Les

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Liasons dangereuses is far removed from the main themes of Le Genou de Claire and ‘the analogy is not particularly illuminating’ (1973: 102). She also notes that ‘Jérôme has none of the frightening lucidity of Laclos’s characters . . . The members of this group, in other words, far from being “enemies” setting out to “conquer” and “seduce”, as persons do in Laclos, are friends, like Rousseau’s well-meaning characters’ (Charney 1973: 105). 64 Almendros says Rohmer told him that he wanted a ‘Gaugin look’ on Le Genou de Claire (1985: 89). Crisp also notes the visual style (1988: 63). The colours evoke Gaugin’s paintings, but also Paul Cézanne’s 1896 painting Lac d’Annecy, which may have inspired Rohmer. Warburton describes Lac d’Annecy in words that could describe Rohmer’s work: ‘Forms have been simplified and abstracted, but the subject matter is still recognisable. At the same time this is a vibrant painting dominated by planes of rich blues and gentler greens’ (Warburton 2003: 16). 65 Brialy used his own clothes on Le Genou de Claire (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7). 66 The ripening cherries are important to the plot, so too are the budding roses in Jérôme’s garden. He offers to pick Laura a bouquet of roses. She wonders what her mother would think. Instead, she takes one small, unopened rose. Almendros says that Rohmer planted the roses in Le Genou de Claire a year before shooting (Fieschi, Bezombes and Carcassonne 1979: 40) and ‘all the effects Rohmer had calculated beforehand occurred like clockwork: the roses planted a year earlier bloomed exactly when we needed them, the cherries ripened and reddened just when they should, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) arrived at Talloires exactly when she first appears on the screen’ (Almendros 1985: 91). Rohmer, however, says he did not plant the roses: ‘I asked when they would be blooming and planned accordingly’ (Dupont 1983: 13; Rohmer 2006). 67 Marie (2003: 113) calls Brialy ‘a real “New Wave type” actor’. In Le Journal du cinema, 13 December 1970, directed by Gérard Collin (available on the Criterion DVD of Le Genou de Claire), Brialy says that Rohmer came to see him and said ‘I’ve written my fifth conte moral: “will you be free in three years’ time?” Two years ago he said, we’ll shoot in June 1970 near Annecy’. Brialy was then performing in Feydeau’s A Flea in Your Ear with Françoise Fabian, and Rohmer visited them backstage to talk to him and Fabian. On the same programme, Monaghan and Romand disagree vehemently (and amusingly) about Rohmer. The two actresses must have had different experiences working with him, for Romand is far more sympathetic to Rohmer than Monaghan. 68 Béatrice Romand, like her characters in Le Beau mariage and Conte d’automne, was born in Algeria in 1952 and came to France in 1960. In Paris, Romand studied dance, art and photography. In 1970, Rohmer cast her in Le Genou de Claire, after seeing her modelling as a teenager. Romand says of her preparation with Rohmer: ‘Between January and June [1970], we saw each other practically every day, to talk; he recorded us also. He wrote the dialogue for my character by following my speeches about my interests, my

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mother . . . But he was the author of the dialogue and I learnt his new text by heart, like a school child. There was only one improvised scene in the film, the one with the campers’ (Béghin 2010: 24). Fabrice Luchini recalls: ‘I had only worked in a hairdresser’s when Philippe Labro gave me a small part in Tout peut arriver (1969). I was neither a cinephile nor an intellectual, but at the time I had discovered Nietzsche. So, I met Eric Rohmer without knowing who he was, in a state of total relaxation and, I don’t really know why, I cited the first sentence from Zarathustra. Then, he interrupted me, and ran to look for a book which he showed me, saying “We’re reading the same book, but I’m reading it in German”. But of course! From that day on, I spent all my afternoons at Films du Losange, in his offices, with his little clan. He was preparing Le Genou de Claire, and I remember that one day he dragged us all along to the swimming pool. It was to look at the knees of Laurence de Monaghan, who was playing Claire. Because he would have never have dared – it would have been the height of obscenity – to ask her to show him her knees in his place of work. So, we all went to the swimming pool and he was able to eye her up quietly’ (Murat 2010). Of the writing of Le Genou de Claire, Rohmer remarks: ‘Claire is really a mixture of everything: scenes I wrote earlier, and scenes which I worked out with the actors, sometimes weeks and sometimes only a day or two before shooting. We would get together and talk around a cassette recorder, and I could see what was natural and what was less so and make a choice’ (Nogueira 1971: 120). He wrote the script of Le Genou de Claire after getting to know the actors, but he says: ‘I didn’t want to make a psychodrama but a work of pure fiction, with the conscious collaboration of the cast’ (Nogueira 1971: 120) and ‘The people who were in Le Genou de Claire were people who were capable of improvisation; they had lots of ideas and they brought a lot to the film’ (Ostria 1986: 4). 69 Heinemann also notes the importance of this shot (2007: 76). 70 Schilling also notes that ‘the film’s revelation was the wild-haired Béatrice Romand’ (2007: 23). 71 Irène Skobline, who appears in L’Amour l’après-midi and Le Rayon vert, thought that Rohmer based both Laura and Claire on her: ‘one of them had my personality, the other one, the blonde, had my physique’ (Herpe, Morrissey and Neyrat 2004: 24). Skobline describes how she met Rohmer when her mother re-married one of his friends: ‘I was fifteen years old and I had a platonic crush on Eric, who often came to see us and whom I found magnificent, brilliant’ (Herpe, Morrissey and Neyrat 2004: 23–4). 72 As Bonitzer argues, ‘If the moral of the tale is reactionary (which it is without doubt), it is nonetheless necessary to recognise that Rohmer is therefore one of the rare filmmakers today to film consciously, explicitly, bourgeois life, and more precisely bourgeois sexuality, bourgeois love, that is the structure of the institution of marriage’ (1976: 27). 73 Some changes were made before the 1960s: divorce was re-introduced in 1884; a wife was allowed to control her own income from 1907; French women got the right to vote in 1944. But after World War Two, a husband

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could still control his wife’s assets, prevent his wife from working and children automatically belonged to the husband. The significance of the 1965 marriage law was that it gave wives control of their assets. Laubier writes, ‘Until the 1960s French tradition was based firmly on women’s confinement in the home, and her material dependence on her husband as breadwinner and financial administrator’ (1990: 146). After 1965, ‘the husband no longer had the right to dispose of joint property without his wife’s consent and could no longer administer property that his wife had acquired before marriage’ (Laubier 1990: 49). The husband also lost the right to oppose his wife’s desire to work. But, Duchen notes, ‘the husband remained the head of the household; he retained the right to choose the family’s domicile; he could oppose his wife’s choice of employment “in the interests of the family” (a right which was not reciprocal)’ (1994: 177). None of this put women off marriage, though, and the marriage rate in France continued to rise until the 1980s (Duchen 1994: 114). 74 Truffaut’s L’Amour en fuite (1979) has a sequence dealing with the new divorce law. 75 Duchen argues that May 1968 was the beginning of the second wave of feminism in France. For more details, see Duchen’s chapter on ‘May ’68’ (1994: 190–211). As Laubier notes: ‘In the momentary euphoria of 1968 all aspects of everyday life, work, home, leisure, and the family were questioned; there was a belief that the status quo could indeed be changed and no longer needed to be accepted as inevitable’ (Laubier 1990: 47). Duchen (1986) recounts how the name Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) was first used to describe feminists in France in August 1970, when a group of women went to the Arc de Triomphe and placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which they dedicated to the soldier’s unknown wife (1986: 9). The media attention given to gender, feminism and feminist protest increased in April 1971 when Le Nouvel Observateur published a manifesto signed by 343 women, all of whom declared that they had had illegal abortions. This manifesto inaugurated the campaign for free legal abortions in France, which Duchen describes as the ‘mobilising issue’ (Duchen 1986: 58). In 1975, the loi Veil was passed; named after the then Minister of Health, Simone Veil, it made abortions legal, though it allowed doctors to abstain from performing abortions if it was a matter of conscience, and women were unable to reclaim the cost from the French national health system. 76 Duchen writes, ‘the woman who was 100 per cent available to her children was less and less visible and less and less prized. The selflessness of the wife and mother giving up her own life in order to devote herself to the needs of the family was no longer proposed as admirable’ (1994: 115). 77 Laubier writes: ‘Women’s main concerns in the 1960s were the conditions of their everyday lives – marriage, motherhood, sexuality, contraception, and conditions of work. In all cases the predominant concern was with freedom of expression and independence – material independence within marriage, freedom to choose motherhood or to use contraception if desired, and equality of educational opportunity in order to obtain jobs of one’s choice and financial

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independence’ (1990: 48). Laubier notes: ‘As France’s affluence increased and consumerism grew, a new era of stability dawned. People began increasingly to turn in on themselves and to indulge in their private lives – “la vie quotidienne” became the chief source of inspiration for studies in philosophy and sociology. People began to analyse the conditions of their own lives at home and at work and to examine human and social relations in general’ (1990: 46). 78 Rohmer says: ‘after these conversations with her, I wrote lines for her that I knew she could read well’ (Chase and Feiden 1972: 20). Born in 1943, Zouzou’s real name is Danièle Ciarlet. She was a model, singer and actress, and, for a couple of years, the girlfriend of Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. She made four films with Philippe Garrel and, like Daniel Pommereulle, was associated with the Zanzibar group. Shafto quotes Zouzou (2007: 231) and reports that Rohmer offered her the role in L’Amour, l’après-midi after he was impressed by her performance in Garrel’s La Concentration (1968). Shafto adds that Rohmer met Zouzou at a New Year’s Eve party in 1971 (2007: 210), although they had known each other since the mid-1960s, when Rohmer had considered working with her. Shafto describes her as the ‘It Girl’ of the 1960s and 1970s (2007: 208–11). In a further twist, Bernard Verley plays Frédéric and the actor’s wife, Françoise Verley, plays the character’s wife Hélène. The abstract colour paintings on the office wall are by Bernard Verley, although Rohmer suggests that Ingres can be regarded as the patron saint of the film because of Zouzou naked on the bed near the end (1990b: 116). 79 Mazierska (2002: 236) notes that Rohmer’s films often show people in transit. Frédéric’s choice of reading for his daily commute amuses because of its contrast with his actual life. Tahiti and polygamy link Rousseau in La Collectionneuse, Rousseau and Gaugin in Le Genou de Claire and Bougainville in L’Amour l’après-midi. As Serceau notes, Frédéric finds refuge for his passionless marriage in ‘intellectual activities’ (1973: 15). 80 As Milne writes, ‘during the projected marital seven-year itch of L’Amour, l’après-midi, domestic interiors tranquil with familiar happiness give the lie to the illusion of adventure offered by bustling Paris streets alive with fantasy’ (1981: 193). 81 For further discussion of the two Charlies at the film’s beginning, see Rothman (1982: 186–7). 82 Legrand notes that the depiction of marriage recalls the marriage between Doris Day’s and James Stewart’s characters in The Man who Knew Too Much (1956), one of Hitchcock’s most important films about marriage and, as Legrand notes, one of Rohmer’s favourite Hitchcock films (1972: 121). Rohmer praises its ‘formal perfection’ (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979: 139). 83 Legrand also mentions Chloé’s two doors (1972: 122). 84 As Stewart notes, having penetrated the film screen, ‘all mirrors, ordinarily as opaque and impenetrable as a movie screen, are opened to him . . . already a mirror image, mirrors don’t exist for him’ (Stewart 1979: 358).

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85 Zouzou was interviewed by Edith Cottrell, the wife of Pierre Cottrell, who co-produced L’Amour l’après-midi. 86 Trémège writes: ‘Frédéric is a typical Frenchman, well-established, and convinced that wearing a roll-neck jumper instead of a traditional shirt and tie is sufficient expression of his freedom’ (1972: 47). Crisp also mentions the jumper (1988: 67). 87 Bonitzer notes that we know as little of Hélène’s relationship with her colleague as she knows of the relationship between Chloé and Frédéric (1999: 99). 88 Legrand (1972: 122) and Robic (2002: 90) note the film’s three visions of nude female bodies. 89 Bonitzer identifies a potent critique of middle-class marriages in Rohmer’s Six contes moraux, which, he argues, suggest that ‘adultery is necessary to bourgeois marriages, on condition that it is not consummated’ (Bonitzer 1999: 120). 90 Legrand writes: ‘the last shot, after the exit screen right of the legitimate couple towards the bedroom to sleep together, comprises a return of the camera towards the same empty office, the big bay window and the discreet charm of the greenery that it shows’ (1972: 22). Chloé’s flat, lacking furniture, contrasts with Frédéric’s well-appointed suburban apartment. 91 The variety of critical responses testifies to the ending’s ambiguity. Charney writes: ‘this poignant scene between husband and wife is a sentimental and existential affirmation of love, in which the words themselves are almost banal’ (1973: 108). Crisp notes L’Amour, l’après-midi’s two views of marriage: ‘security, and permanence, versus marriage as repetitive routine and boredom’ (1988: 68). Vassé notes the significance of Hélène’s silence (1994: 74). Fieschi remarks that to exorcize the temptation offered by Chloé, Frédéric must break his routine and make love with his wife in the afternoon (Fieschi 1979c: 25). 92 Frédéric’s office calendar appears in the majority of the film, dating the progression of his and Chloé’s relationship. It is absent from the office wall in the prologue, though, adding to the prologue’s status as an imagined presentation of Frédéric’s concerns. The first shot of ‘Part One’ shows the calendar. 93 Frédéric tells his wife that Chloé is ‘impulsive and unstable’, but she appears to be neither. Vidal describes Chloé as ‘cynical and vulnerable’ (1986: 50). Rohmer states: ‘Chloé has very precise ideas, notions that are opposed to those of Frédéric. She attracts him by her ideas and, as the film progresses, she destroys his own little moral system’ (Chase and Feiden 1972: 20). When Haskell (1972) asked Rohmer about Zouzou’s character, Rohmer replied ‘Chloé, c’est moi’. 94 Legrand describes the tone of L’Amour, l’après-midi as more ‘grating and satirical than the preceding films’ (1972: 122).

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Chapter 3  1 L’Amour, l’après-midi was released in September 1972 and La Femme de l’aviateur in March 1981. For nine years, Rohmer did not set a film in contemporary France. Cahiers du cinéma did not interview Rohmer between April 1970 and May 1981. In the post-1968 period Cahiers de cinéma showed little interest in their former editor’s work, only reviewing Die Marquise von O. . . and Perceval le Gallois, although Rohmer was not the only nouvelle vague director that Cahiers du cinéma ignored during this period; de Baecque points out that ‘between autumn 1973 and December 1976 (the date of Bonitzer’s review of Die Marquise von O. . .), there is not a line on the films of the former editors (with the exception of Godard)’ (de Baecque 2001: 339). Cahiers du cinéma did not review Le Genou de Claire. They listed it as a new release on the last page (65) of issue 228, March–April 1971. They put a still from Perceval le Gallois on the cover of issue 294, November 1978. In 1972, Rohmer admitted, ‘I have no plans. I need to rest now, to put my ideas in order. I have no wish to repeat myself, to use the same themes and the same actors again and again. For the moment, I have no ideas. I would like to change radically, follow a path quite different from the moral tales. But ideas do not come at will. Unlike Stravinsky, I believe in inspiration’ (Wyndham 1973). In 1977, he said: ‘Frankly, right now, I have no ideas or stories to tell about modern times and when I see others’ films I’m not satisfied. It always seems to be the same story. I think we’re in a terrible slump in terms of subject matter for films about everyday life’ (Rohmer 1977). In 1983, he reflected, ‘after the Six contes moraux my inspiration dried up a little . . . The reason that I stopped after the Contes moraux is that I had nowhere to film, nowhere that really inspired me’ (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7 and 8).  2 Allan (2001: 3) notes that Volker Schlöndorff directed a film version of Michael Kohlhaas (1969) and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg directed a film version of The Betrothal of Santo Domingo (1970). Allan writes of Schlöndorff and Syberberg’s films, ‘both exploit the revolutionary setting in the two novellas and attempt to establish a link with the student riots of the late 1960s. And what Thomas Elsaesser has referred to as “Kleist’s metaphysics of private revolt” is evident in both Helma Sanders-Brahms’ film Erdbeben in Chili (Earthquake in Chile, 1974) and Eric Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O. . .’ (2001: 3). Elsaesser writes: ‘In the general discovery of Germany’s literary response to the French Revolution in the wake of 1968, Kleist became the patron saint of the New German Cinema at the same time as his plays were revived on every municipally subsidised stage from Hamburg to Munich’ (1989: 87).  3 He says: ‘I thought it could be filmed, but as I could not read it, I had to take up learning German again’ (Pruks 1977: 125). Although he directed Die Marquise von O. . . in German, Rohmer also supervised a post-synchronized French version for its release in France. Marie-Christine Barrault did the voice for Clever, Suzanne Flon for Edda Seipel, Féodor Atkine for Bruno Ganz and Hubert Gignoux for Peter Lühr.

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 4 Die Marquise von O. . . has prompted several essays. As an adaptation of a famous German novella, the film has attracted literary scholars, and as a film that refers to famous paintings, the film has attracted those interested in links between art history and cinema: see, for instance, Borchardt (1984), Dalle Vacche (1993) and (1996), Gerlach (1980), Herbst (1988), Johnson (1977), Spiegel (1981), Rhiel (1991a, 1991b and 1992).  5 Rohmer adapted the story into a script himself, but he wanted someone else to read it. In the event, however, he disagreed with the woman who read his version, though the script was printed from her version because it was necessary to reassure the television company who were providing some of the funding. Eventually, though, ‘I went back to my first script, which is to say, to the book and so as to be really sure, I glued the pages so that opposite the false script were the pages from the book. The actors stood by me. If I hadn’t been supported by the actors, I couldn’t have done anything because as a foreigner I couldn’t say to the actors “speak like this”. There were things that were a bit rhetorical, a little grandiloquent . . . the scriptwriter cut these to make them more familiar, but it made them false’ (Prieur and Blum 1983: 61).  6 During the film’s preparation, Rohmer speaks of his intention to make Kleist’s story even more like Hitchcock than it already is (Gauteur 1975: 10). Die Marquise von O. . . is Hitchcockian in that it encourages us to identify with someone whom we would usually condemn. Watching Psycho (1960), we sympathize with a thief who steals 400 dollars; watching Rope (1948), we share the viewpoint of two murderers, laughing at their jokes and ignoring the body in the chest. It is also Hitchcockian in that re-watching Die Marquise von O. . . is like re-watching Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) or Vertigo (1958): once we know about Eve and Madeleine, our sympathies are drawn away from the male protagonists.  7 As the Count does so, he passes Leopardo who is standing in the hallway looking at the Marquise. His stare is long-lasting and Rohmer holds the camera on him for some time. Leopardo’s presence here, a deliberate piece of misdirection by Rohmer, extends the servant’s role, for Kleist does not mention Leopardo until the mother visits the Marquise in the countryside and lies about the groom confessing to rape (2004: 104). Bonitzer also notes that Rohmer makes more of Leopardo than Kleist does; he interprets this as Rohmer’s figurative emphasis on two contrasting men – the noble rescuing Count and the base violating Leopardo (1976: 28). Schilling also notes the shot of Leopardo (2007: 164), while Tester (2008: 42–3) offers another interpretation of Leopardo’s role.  8 Spiegel refers to a comment by Rohmer that he added the sleeping potion ‘to satisfy the credulity of a modern audience’ (1981: 322).  9 Rohmer says that ‘to refind the reality of the period, it was necessary to go via painting’ (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 35). Dalle Vacche (1996: 81–106) compares several paintings to Die Marquise von O. . ., including Caspar David Friedrich’s Garden Terrace (1811–17), Fragonard’s Storming the Citadel (1771), Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Paternal Cause (1777–8) and Georg Friedrich Kersting’s Young Woman Sewing by Lamplight (1828). See Herbst

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(1988) for a discussion of the film’s use of colours as visual leitmotifs. See Almendros (1985: 156) for further details on the lighting 10 Fuseli painted different versions of The Nightmare; Rohmer’s film refers to the first, 1781 version. For further details on Fuseli’s painting, its influences and early interpretations, see Frayling (2006). See Dalle Vacche (1993) for further discussion of Die Marquise von O. . . and Fuseli. Bonitzer links the painting of the devil to the incubus in Fuseli’s The Nightmare, sitting on the woman’s chest while she sleeps (1976: 28). He then notes that Rohmer’s shot of the sleeping Marquise evokes the demon/incubus from Fuseli’s painting. Dalle Vacche refers to Bonitzer’s interpretation, in which ‘the invisibility of Fuseli’s incubus in Rohmer’s film echoes the ellipsis of violence in Kleist’s text’ (1993: 7). Crisp also follows this line, proposing that when watching Rohmer’s film ‘we substitute the Count for the absent incubus, and fill in the narrative gap’ (Crisp 1988: 78). Schilling too speaks of the painting’s horse and incubus being ‘displaced metonymically’ onto the dreaming Marquise and the Count (2007: 165). 11 Rohmer says: ‘when I met my two actors, Bruno Ganz and Edith Clever, I showed them a postcard which represented The Bolt by Fragonard’ (1990b: 110). 12 A comparable instance, of which Rohmer would have been well aware, is the opening of Rear Window, which shows Jefferies asleep, his forehead covered in sweat, near a rising thermometer, the implication being that his unconscious thoughts are making him feverish. For a discussion of Rear Window’s opening and its links to the opening of Vertigo, see Barr (2002: 32–7). 13 Rhiel argues (1992: 86) that the film’s drugged silence is different to the absence of any description in the novel. She contends that this shifts the balance from resistance to victimhood: ‘Whereas the dash in the novella leaves the reader at first clueless as to its meaning, the cinematic conventions make it explicit that a forbidden sexual act ensues’ (1992: 86). However, Rohmer’s addition does not necessarily reduce the Marquise to a victim; if anything Rohmer’s additions stress her desire for the Count and further complicate Kleist’s already ambiguous story. On a first viewing, nothing indicates what takes place in the ellipsis after the fade-out on the Count’s face; we may suspect the Count, but confirmation awaits the end. Kleist’s novella attracted him because it is designed to be either read twice or thought of retrospectively. Only once we know the end can we fully comprehend the nuances of the story, such as the Marquise’s desire for the Count. Rhiel concludes that this scene is a good example of the ‘de-fantasticization’ of the story (1992: 86), but in his adaptation Rohmer emphasizes the links between fantasising and actuality. 14 As Bonitzer (1976: 29) observes, Rohmer appears in Die Marquise von O. . . as a Russian officer, standing behind the Count when the latter’s General orders the men who attacked the Marquise to be shot. Bonitzer sees in Rohmer’s posture (arms folded and a stern look) the look of a judge at our guilty hero, the Count; he takes this look to be representative of the film’s point-of-view structure, in that the film enables viewers to judge its characters;

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we find them ridiculous yet also pathetic and moving. Crisp also mentions this: ‘Rohmer himself appears early on in the role of a soldier, or rather of judge, casting a sharply sceptical eye on the Count’ (Crisp 1988: 77). 15 Rhiel quotes Rosemary Jackson from Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion: ‘fantastic literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems’ (Jackson 1981: 4; quoted in Rhiel 1992: 83). 16 Russo mentions this in her discussion of how The Nightmare is ‘representative of sublimated sex, and of the fantastic dreams produced by this sublimation’ (1986: 41–2). 17 See Frayling and Myrone (2006) for details of its influence. For Dalle Vacche, Rohmer’s use of The Nightmare in Die Marquise von O. . . ‘is meant to reproduce the period’s conception of itself, its inner image, and thus reflect the issues of self-discovery and self-acceptance confronted by the characters’ (Dalle Vacche 1993: 9). As Milne writes: ‘Not only did Kleist’s novella exactly echo the teasing spirit of the moral tales with its analysis of the social maelstrom stirred up by the discovery of an apparently immaculate conception, but Rohmer added his customary element of paradox through the use of décor: a series of classically serene, Empire-style interiors against which the romantic, or indeed Gothic passions of the principals rattled their brittle bones’ (Milne 1981: 193). 18 In novella and film, the so-called incest scene has attracted discussion. The mother finds her husband with her daughter sitting on his lap and being kissed on the lips ‘as if he were her lover’; he kisses her (close-mouthed) on the lips for several seconds. Film and story represent the mother’s joy at seeing her daughter and husband reconciled. In the film, the father stops when the mother comes in, but looks as if he is embarrassed at his earlier bad behaviour rather than his kissing. One way to gauge this is through the mother’s reaction; she says to him ‘What a face’. Then she kisses Giulietta on one cheek and the father kisses her on the other cheek. Although the long kiss on the lips looks incestuous, to the mother it does not appear to be inappropriate. Kleist describes it as follows: ‘Her mother felt quite transported with delight; standing unseen behind his chair, she hesitated to interrupt this blissful scene of reconciliation which had brought such joy back to her house’ (2004: 107). Kleist could be suggesting that the mother is blind to her husband’s desires. This would tie in with Kleist’s mode of challenging the moral code of the time. As Brown comments, ‘the father’s behaviour towards his daughter, with its strong overtones of incestuous passion, opens up darker areas of the human psyche which are normally taboo’ (1998: 208). She notes that this scene has been the focus of much recent Kleist criticism (1998: 219), citing Ellis (1979), Dyer (1977) and Swales (1979). Comparing novella and film, and referring to Ellis (1979: 33–4), Rhiel (1992: 87) suggests that the scene introduces father–daughter incest. However, while Brown admits that there are parallels between the Count’s rape of the Marquise and her father’s incestuous kissing of her; she also notes the mother’s condoning of

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this kissing and she doubts whether this episode should be seen as central to the story, and instead proposes that it is a moot point whether the breaking of taboos is meant to be shocking or comic (1998: 219). Spiegel gets it right when he describes Rohmer’s scene as an ‘amalgam of disturbing and joyous, incestuous, and ennobled emotion’ (1981: 327). 19 Dalle Vacche argues that ‘this is the painting which any standard survey of the history of art will cite to call attention to the founding dichotomy of the Napoleonic era – namely, an obscure feeling of unrest growing underneath the call to public morality’ (1993: 11). 20 Rhiel draws a parallel with the advertisement that opens the story and the battle which is the next incident. With both, the father’s power is disturbed: with the advertisement, the Marquise ‘has actually broken the closed circuit of the family’ through which patriarchy retains its inheritance; with the loss of the battle, the father’s power is defeated in war (1992: 85). 21 The ending contains the Marquise’s admission that he seemed to be an angel to her: ‘I would never have thought you were a devil if when I first saw you you had not seemed like an angel’. This is in the novel at the end, but at the beginning when he rescues her, Kleist also writes ‘To the Marquise he seemed an angel sent from heaven’ (2004: 69). In addition to the shot of Ganz backlit in white on the wall, resembling an angel as he rescues the Marquise, there is also the scene of their marriage in church, when the camera tilts down the painting from the angel to the devil, as if representing what the Marquise sees. The end credits (like the opening ones) are accompanied by the sound of a drum being beaten. The final part of the film’s comic detachment, the drums were played by Rohmer himself (Pruks 1977: 126). 22 Eco notes how literature and popular culture offer versions of medieval myths, including Star Wars (1977), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); ‘there is no special reason for amazement at the avalanche of pseudo-medieval pulp in paperbacks, midway between Nazi nostalgia and occultism’ (1987: 62). Eco identifies ‘ten little Middle Ages’, which David Williams adapts into five types of medieval movies (1990: 10). 23 There is a link between the revival of interest in the Middle Ages, Arthurian legends, religious myth and political nationalism in the nineteenth century in that the nineteenth-century interest in the Middle Ages connected to an affirmation of national cultures, be they British, French or German. As Mancoff writes, ‘a convergence of nostalgia, cultural pride, a desire for national identity, and the romantic imagination fuelled the scholarly investigations and the escapist inventions that characterise the early Gothic revival’ (1992: xii). She argues that in Britain the Arthurian Revival subsumed the broader medieval revival, while Germany and France ‘recalled their own individual claims to the legend’s origins, in scholarship and in the fine and performing arts’ (Mancoff 1992: xiii). 24 Rohmer abridged and translated Chrétien’s Old French text himself. L’Avantscène du cinéma published Rohmer’s script in issue 221, February 1979, 9–64. Beatie compares Rohmer’s film with Chrétien’s text, line by line, describing Rohmer’s translation from the Old French as ‘literal and smooth’ (1992: 253)

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and concluding his comparison by calling Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois ‘one of the most important Arthurian transformations of our century’ (1992: 263). Beatie writes: ‘Rohmer’s translation consists of 2182 lines of spoken text, most of which are octosyllabic rhymed couplets like Chrétien’s. The lines of Chrétien’s text that Rohmer translates are taken from between lines 69 and 6473 of the incomplete Li Contes des Graal; in other words, Rohmer ignores some 30 percent of the 9184 lines in Chrétien’s torso’ (Beatie 1992: 251–2). Thomas Hinton pointed out to me that most of the material which Rohmer excludes concerns Gawain; to conform with twentieth-century expectations, Rohmer changes Perceval and Gawain into a main character and a supporting character. 25 As with all such pigeonholing, the two categories simplify a varied and complex range of filmic examples. David Williams saves his discussion of Perceval le Gallois to the end of his ‘Medieval Movies’ essay: ‘whatever we think of the success of this ambitious undertaking, it is obvious that Rohmer is attempting something quite extraordinary, if not unique, among medieval movies, not least because of the emphasis he places on the medieval literary text’ (Williams 1990: 24). Linda Williams agrees: ‘the unfathomable error of most film versions of medieval texts has been to sacrifice the peculiar charm and style of the narration for the concrete particularity of its historically known world. Such films opt for authentic castles, real forests and bone-crunching battles in place of the spiritual ideals for which they stand’ (Williams 1983: 74). Kingdom of Heaven (2005, Ridley Scott), for example, depicts twelfth-century France with gloomy, drab and dirty locations, darkened high contrast photography, and a general feeling of muddiness. King Arthur (2004, Antoine Fuqua) also takes the ‘dirty’ approach, including ‘bone-crunching battles’. Excalibur (1981, John Boorman) contains bloody battles, plague, dirt, mud and marauding knights. The film stresses the Arthurian period as one of transition between a pagan time and a Christian time; as Merlin (Nicol Williamson) says, ‘the time of many gods is ending and the time of the one God is coming’. Lancelot du lac (1974, Robert Bresson) has a more compressed story than Rohmer’s medieval film, but it is as violent and dirty as some of the more popular examples. While preparing his film, Rohmer said: ‘Perceval le Gallois will be the exact opposite of Lancelot du lac’ (Gauteur 1977: 11). Zumthor finds nothing in common between Rohmer’s Perceval, Bresson’s Lancelot du lac and Frank Cassenti’s La Chanson de Roland (1978) (1980: 121). For a comparison between Perceval le Gallois and Lancelot du lac, see Rider et al (2002: 149–62). Unlike the dirty medieval films, A Knight’s Tale (2001, Brian Hegeland) is a recent example of a ‘clean’ medieval film, using pop music to accompany a jousting tournament. Though its cleanness differs from that of Rohmer’s film, the story of a peasant becoming a knight has its roots in the story of Perceval. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones) includes Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, Camelot, mud, dirt and the plague, but, as Thomas Hinton reminded me, it is more of a hybrid of Williams’s two approaches. 26 Bruckner points out that ‘Perceval is also the most frequently illustrated

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among Chrétien’s romances’ (2008: 91). She illustrates her essay with two examples of the miniatures that depict Perceval’s adventures. 27 Cinematographer Nestor Almendros says, ‘unlike the delicate-toned harmony of The Marquise of O, the colours of the gowns and objects were bright and sometimes aggressive, like the miniatures that inspired us’ (Almendros 1985: 221). Arielle Dombasle, who plays Blanchefleur, confirms this: ‘it required from me a year’s very specific work of observing miniatures in order to find gestures’ (Dombasle 1990: 138). 28 He confirms: ‘I was struck by the cinematic side of Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, in the translation by Gustave Cohen, who had done, in a word-for-word verse translation, a much more beautiful version than the prose translations’ (Blumenfeld 2007). Rohmer made two versions of Perceval le Gallois: the first was a 23-minute black and white film with the voices of Antoine Vitez and Christine Théry, shown on French educational television on 9 October 1964. The second version was partly inspired by Vitez: ‘I saw a lot of plays [directed] by Antoine Vitez in the 1970s and if I had not seen these plays I would not have made Perceval; I would not have had the confidence to initiate something so far from reality’ (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 32). Rohmer says that Perceval le Gallois was influenced generally by theatre direction, like that of Vitez, in the 1970s (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7). Suggestive of Rohmer’s approach in Perceval is Gershmann’s (1980: 76) description of Vitez’s 1975 production of Catherine, adapted from Louis Aragon’s novel Les Cloches de Bâle (1935): ‘Vitez developed a new genre in French theatre, the récit-théâtre, in which a novel is staged without being adapted into a play. All novelistic techniques (the French passé simple, 3rd person narrative, description, etc) are retained, but the result is theatre, not a staged reading. The actor is at times a character, at times a narrator, and at times himself, reading passages from a favourite book’. 29 According to Robert Louis Benson, Cohen (1879–1958) ‘rehabilitated him [Chrétien] as a conscious and intelligent romancier – the creator of the French, and therefore the European, roman’ (Benson 1982: 606). Before Cohen’s book, entitled Un grand romancier d’amour et d’aventure au XIIe siècle: Chrétien de Troyes et son oeuvre (Paris, 1931; revised edition 1948), Chrétien’s reputation was, Benson writes, ‘rather low’. Solterer argues that Cohen’s interest in medieval theatre was linked to his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism (1996: 376) and Cohen’s medieval revivalism linked to French right-wing politics in the 1930s: ‘whether in the specifically religious terms of the liturgy or the aesthetic terms of the mystery play, partisans of the right privileged the example of the Middle Ages’ (1996: 380). Solterer indicates the link between the Théophilien productions and one of their advocates, Robert Brasillach, who ‘promoted energetically the idea that Théophilien theatre could put Parisian audiences in direct contact with their medieval past’ (Solterer 1996: 381). For more details of Brasillach’s association with Cohen, see Kaplan (2001: 198–9). 30 Solterer says of Zumthor: ‘Himself a Théophilien between 1934–36, Zumthor turned to consider the imprint of this experience on his own writing. In a

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recent interview with me, he speculated: “the memories going back to my Théophilien period have certainly played a role in leading me to the idea that all medieval texts should be understood through performance; not only the so-called dramatic works, but in a general way, all poetic texts of the Middle Ages. I can’t say that I’ve thought of that, but, yes, I am convinced that it has played a role”’ (Solterer 1996: 383). 31 Rohmer says: ‘we rehearsed for a whole year, don’t forget. Luchini knew not only his lines by heart but all the other roles’ (Adair 1978: 234). See also Anon. (1978: 22). 32 Beatie also notes this (1992: 254), as does Callahan (1999: 47). Grimbert writes: ‘The effect is comparable to that achieved by Chrétien whose narrator delights in inserting ironic asides into scenes where the potential for emotional investment is greatest’ (2000: 36–7). Fischer writes: ‘What Rohmer emphasises – with minstrels who participate in the action, and characters who describe their own behaviour – is the act of oral narration’ (1980: 22). 33 Rohmer says that he was fascinated by early music: ‘the décor found its justification in the music’ (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7). He comments on how he was helped by the advancements made in early music recordings in the 1960s and 1970s (Delavaud and Montaville 1981: 87–8). As Beatie notes, the film resembles opera rather than other Arthurian films (1992: 253). Schilling also praises the integration of music (2007: 172). 34 In the film, when Perceval leaves King Arthur to look for the grail, one of the singers and the king say ‘follow him’, but two courtiers say, ‘Let him roam. We’ll return to him later. First let me tell you a story, about the knight who was the finest of all, who shone like the sun: Sir Gawain’. A close-up of Gawain appears as they say his name. Then the musicians sing of Gawain, before Guinganbresil challenges him. The film follows Gawain as he lodges in the house of Garin, meets Tybald and his youngest daughter, stays in the castle in Escavalon. The story concerning Gawain ends when Gawain uses the chessboard as a shield to defend himself against the crowd. Chrétien writes: ‘he felt he could defend the doorway and entry to the tower, for he had Excalibur strapped to his side, the best sword ever made, which cut iron as if it were wood’ (Chrétien 2004: 453). In the romance, Gawain is subsequently sent by Guinganbresil and his king to search for the bleeding lance. 35 Kibler writes: ‘The bleeding lance is never directly connected with the grail in Chrétien’s fragment, but very soon among Chrétien’s early imitators and continuators it becomes associated with the legendary lance of Longinus, the name given to the Roman centurion who pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion; thus the Lance figures prominently in post-Chrétien associations of the Grail with the Last Supper and with the Mass. In Chrétien’s text, as it stands in fragmentary form, the bleeding lance has far more secular – and the grail a somewhat more secular function’ (Kibler 2004: 518, n.14). 36 Angeli describes how Rohmer organized screenings of Perceval le Gallois in schools, continuing the impetus behind his work in schools television and his own first job as a secondary school teacher of literature (Angeli 1995: 34). 37 Rohmer says: ‘the end will be very Christian, closing with the Passion played

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with full force. Perceval, in the beginning, believes that God is a warrior, and in the end he realizes that God is a victim, a man humiliated, beaten’ (TesichSavage 1978: 56). 38 For an account of the development of the story of Holy Grail, both before and after Chrétien, see Loomis (1963), who writes, ‘in the First Continuation of Chrétien’s Conte del Graal the vessel is merely a magic talisman of plenty, whereas only in an interpolated passage and in later romances does it become a relic of the Last Supper and the Passion’ (Loomis 1963: 24–35). Kibler argues that The Story of the Grail is the most puzzling of Chrétien’s five tales: ‘controversy continues today over whether or not Chrétien intended this romance to be read allegorically. Even those who agree that his intent was indeed allegorical argue over the proper nature and significance of the allegory’ (2004: 9). Chrétien, Kibler writes, ‘combines mysterious and magical elements from his sources with keenly observed contemporary social behaviour to create an atmosphere of mystery and wonder that is nonetheless securely anchored in a recognizable twelfth-century “present”’ (Kibler 2004: 11). 39 More than the ending is mysterious. Rohmer uses camera tricks that recall silent cinema to create special effects. These include Perceval’s sight of the grail, the appearance and disappearance of the Fisher King’s castle and the sudden entrance of the Ugly Damsel (Fortune) who tells him the proverb: ‘Fortune is bald behind and hairy in front’. The order of Fortune’s appearance is changed. In the film, she appears after Perceval leaves the Fisher King’s castle. In the book, she appears when Perceval is with King Arthur (Chrétien 2005: 438). As almost all commentators point out, including Rohmer, the film conflates Perceval’s cousin, who tells him his name after he leaves the Grail castle, with the supernatural Ugly Damsel who appears at King Arthur’s court. See for instance Wise (1979–80). 40 Grimbert argues that, despite Rohmer’s ending of Perceval riding off into the forest again, a concession to Chrétien’s ambivalence, ‘it is Rohmer’s elaborate rendering of Perceval’s “conversion” that remains in the spectator’s mind, leaving one with the distinct impression that Chrétien’s poem is as implicitly Christian as the prose writers who reworked his romances in the following centuries would have us believe’ (2000: 40–1). Milne suggests that the use of a single semi-circular set ‘evokes the endless circularity of the quest for the Grail, whose mysteries, though known to all, remain ever obscured’ (1981: 194). 41 For an assessment of Perceval le Gallois within ‘Arthurian cinema’, see Harty (2002: 7–33), who calls Perceval le Gallois ‘the most authentically medieval example of cinema Arthuriana’ (2002: 20). Williams (1983) compares Rohmer’s film and Chrétien’s text, foregrounding the different forms of storytelling used. Wise (1979–80: 48) praises the film. French medieval scholar Norris Lacy calls it a ‘fascinating experiment’ (Lacy 1989: 75; quoted in Beatie 1992: 250). Callahan compares the film favourably with Chrétien’s original (1999). Grimbert (2000) discusses distancing techniques, drawing on Peter Haidu’s study of irony and comedy in Chrétien. She suggests that

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‘it is hard to imagine a filmmaker better suited than Rohmer to adapt this romance of Chrétien’s which contains so much irony and humour’ (2000: 33). It was not well received by everyone, though. Arthurian specialist Donald L. Hoffman (2000) compares Rohmer’s film with Parsifal (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1982) and The Fisher King (1991, Terry Gilliam) and suggests that Rohmer’s ‘pseudo-medieval visuals’ are ‘problematic’, while the characters’ ‘pseudo-medieval screech will grate on us for the next two hours’ (2000: 45). Legrand writes, ‘Perceval (despite the shot of the wounded bird in the snow, which flashes by) is not a film, but an interminable radio broadcast, illustrated by inelegant vignettes’ (1981: 71). Cormier is disparaging of Perceval le Gallois, criticising the performances (‘a Perceval who sometimes moves like a Christ-figure on acid’) and the décor (‘studied painted backdrops mock the vigour and affective power of the Old French language’; ‘matching lamé wallpaper and bedspreads in the film recall neither mysteries nor manuscript illuminations, only Bloomingdale’s interior decorators’) (Cormier 1981: 392–3). Cormier thinks the film’s structure is ‘muddled’, the sword fights ‘careless, lackadaisical and silly’ and the film’s texture ‘frayed and confused’ (1981: 394). Lastly, Cormier describes Rohmer’s ending as ‘tedious’ and ‘devoid of logic’ (1981: 395). Beatie dismisses Cormier’s article as ‘not meaningful criticism’ (1992: 250). Crisp treats the film briefly, commenting, wrongly, that ‘the whole film is spoken in the third person’ (Crisp 1988: 82). As Beatie notes, Crisp ignores Rohmer’s work on the script and concentrates on production problems (1992: 249). 42 For further discussion of the orality of Chrétien’s work, see Douglas Kelly, ‘Narrative Poetics: Rhetoric, Orality and Performance’ in Lacy and Grimbert (2005: 52–63). Gaunt and Kay state: ‘Most Old and Middle French works, for example, are scripted for oral delivery, featuring a first-person voice who addresses an audience of listeners in the second person’ (2008: 6). 43 Wise summarizes that it is ‘truthfulness in spirit, not in form’ (1979–80: 51). Callahan writes: ‘by doubling these roles, Rohmer makes explicit one aspect of the romance’s meaning, the pedagogical message. The presence of the transformed figures of his mother and Blanchefleur demonstrate that two aspects of Perceval’s education, that of dutiful son and that of knightly lover, have been completed, and that in this final scene, the knight is in the process of realising the third, most important aspect of his quest, the knowledge of the Christian God’ (1999: 51). Simonds writes: ‘Rohmer achieves a haunting presentation in Perceval of the psychological metamorphosis of an innocent but violent young savage to a completely humane and mature adult. Perceval’s gradual discovery of an inner conscience becomes our own discovery of what it means to be human’ (1984: 9). For Linda Williams, ‘What Rohmer miraculously manages to convey in this scene is the overwhelming power of a faith that can transcend the boundaries of individual identity: we see Perceval both as himself and as Christ, and we see the chapel – the space for the performance of the mass – both as chapel and scene of the passion’ (1983: 77). 44 One could also speak of this as the film’s acknowledgement of its combination of artifice and authenticity. There is artifice in the recycling of sets, the

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animated sequence, Perceval’s circular journeys in the studio, from one castle to another, which Linda Williams calls analogous to the symbolic space of medieval paintings and Chrétien’s romance: ‘the narrative contains no extraneous detail; when the knight sets forth again, he will ride through the same formulaic “wild forest”, arriving at yet another “well-placed” or “noble” castle’ (1983: 79). The authentic elements include the horses, the chainmail, the bird song on the soundtrack, the fruit on Perceval’s table, and the voices. The actors wear heavy chainmail and Rohmer wanted the weight of the costumes to be apparent: ‘I’ve tried to be faithful to the detail right down to the level of costume. The chainmail jerkins weigh eighteen kilos, the swords are heavy and the men crash into one another with the same sort of violence you would have seen in the medieval period’ (Anon. 1978: 22). In describing his ideas, Rohmer cites André Bazin’s comment about Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), ‘one saw real earth in a décor totally abstract’ (Rohmer 1979a: 17). Bazin writes: ‘Dreyer’s brilliant sense of cinema is evidenced in the exterior scene which every other director would assuredly have shot in the studio. The décor as built evoked a Middle Ages of the theatre and of miniatures. In one sense, nothing is less realistic than this tribunal in the cemetery or this drawbridge, but the whole is lit by the light of the sun and the gravedigger throws a spadeful of real earth into the hole. It is these “secondary details”, apparently aesthetically at odds with the rest of the work, which give it its truly cinematic quality’ (Bazin 1967: 110). 45 Desbarats also argues that Pauline à la plage would not have been the same film if Rohmer had not made Perceval le Gallois (1990: 18). 46 Marie-Christine Barrault, who plays Gueneviere, had been in Ma Nuit chez Maud. In 1970, she played Gueneviere in a French television version of Lancelot du lac, directed by Claude Santelli, in which Gérard Falconetti, Claire’s boyfriend, played Lancelot; in Perceval le Gallois, Falconetti plays the Seneschal Kay. Daniel Tarrare, one of the chorus members in Perceval le Gallois, plays Polyxenes in Conte d’hiver and Grace’s footman in L’Anglaise et le duc. 47 Klaus Hellwig arranged for Rohmer to direct Kleist’s Catherine de Heilbronn on stage. Rohmer translated Catherine de Heilbronn from German (Curchod 1992: 27). The play was staged at the Maison de la Culture de Nanterre in November 1979. Rohmer recalls: ‘apart from Mathieu Galley [literary critic for L’Express and Combat], everyone called it a disaster, amateurish’ (Ramasse and Danvers 1983: 7).

Chapter 4  1 Brody (2008: 444) attributes some of Rohmer’s prolific output in the 1980s to the change in government policy towards film and the arts inaugurated by Mitterand and Jack Lang. Bonitzer begins his review of La Femme de l’aviateur by describing it as ‘one of the best films by Rohmer and a

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magisterial lesson in cinema’ and praising its subtle transposition of a theatrical form to the streets of Paris (1981: 5).  2 Georges Prat, Rohmer’s sound designer on several Comédies et proverbes, tells Hertay (1998: 106) that they filmed La Femme de l’aviateur in July and August 1980. It was released in March 1981. The series title refers to work by Alfred de Musset and Comtesse de Ségur, while the sub-title of La Femme de l’aviateur, ‘One can’t think of nothing’, adapts Musset’s One Can’t Think of Everything. However, Rohmer says: ‘Just as the Moral Tales have nothing to do with Marmontel, neither will my Comedies and Proverbs have anything to do with the people who managed to write Proverbs and Comedies. Moral Tales is simply a means of stressing the tale side, the narrative side, the story, which I didn’t initiate in cinema – since other people had already done that – but that I used in a slightly more systematic fashion. As far as my Comedies and Proverbs is concerned, that has another spirit, the spirit of social games, something too of the actors’ work’ (Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 219). Crisp notes of the Comédies et proverbes that ‘the action is “staged” rather than “narrated”’ (Crisp 1988: 88), while Legrand describes La Femme de l’aviateur as having ‘more dramaturgy than narration’ (1981: 71).  3 Hertay describes the Comédies et proverbes as a ‘veritable panorama of French society in the 1980s’ (1998: 20). Between the Six contes moraux and the Comédies et proverbes, abortions and the contraceptive pill became available to French women; the 1975 Marriage Law introduced divorce by mutual consent and eroded the criminal offence of adultery. As Laubier writes, ‘fidelity is no longer an obligation imposed by the institution of marriage, but a matter between individuals, based on mutual respect and equality’ (1990: 147). Laubier states: ‘whereas in the period 1960–69 only eight per cent of couples cohabited before marriage, by 1980–85 the percentage had risen to 57 per cent’ (1990: 147). Also see Duchen (1986: 127–8). Handyside (2010) also notes that the Comédies et proverbes focus more on women than do the Six contes moraux.  4 ‘I knew the two young women before I wrote the dialogue, but I met Philippe Marlaud once the text was finished’ (Carcassonne and Fieschi 1981: 30). Asked about whether he thinks of his actors when writing scripts, Rohmer says, ‘in my recent films I thought more about the actresses than the actors. I wrote some masculine parts without knowing whom they were for’ (Mauro 1985: 90). The story’s original title was Un Jour exceptionnel (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 36). He says, ‘it was while making Perceval that the idea came to me for another series, to help me find new ideas. These very vague ideas of the Comédies et proverbes made me look at my notes and come across some old outlines, the one for La Femme de l’aviateur and the one for Pauline à la plage, which helped me start them up again, as well as helping me find new stories, like Le Beau marriage and the two films that I am going to make now and which weren’t from old outlines’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 20). He adds: ‘I carried my subjects with me for a long time. I’ve noticed that this has been the same for lots of authors; the fecund period, where one has lots of ideas about lots of subjects, is a really brief period and in general a period of youth.

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Lots of ideas came to me between the ages of twenty and twenty-five and I only developed them successfully much later’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 18).  5 Bonitzer writes that the general motto for the first three Comédies et proverbes could be ‘one image can hide another image’ (1983: 16). See Pye (1994) for a discussion of the suppression of information in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956) and Smith (2000) for a discussion of similar devices in Hitchcock’s films.  6 Legrand (1981: 72) also refers to Aurora’s comment. Bonitzer and Daney suggest to Rohmer that in his films ‘There is the desire to bring a great deal of [the] power of suggestion to something which is by nature invisible’. Rohmer responds, ‘Yes. Something invisible which has been thought, yes. Hence the subtitle [of La Femme de l’aviateur]. It’s true: one can never think of nothing; there is always thought. Thought is always present in my films’. One of his interviewers agrees: ‘Your characters always have little ideas in their heads’ (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 37).  7 Despite Rohmer’s interest in characters dreaming and day-dreaming, he states: ‘The unconscious has never interested me. I know that man is not entirely a free agent, but it’s the free part of him that concerns me. My people are fully conscious, and fully responsible for themselves’ (Church 1972: 40).  8 Hertay also quotes these comments (1998: 26). Sarris praises this intertwining of world and imagination: ‘Rohmer’s genius lies, however, as much in the background of his films as in the foreground. In many ways he is as serious and scrupulous with the documentation of his locale as he is playful and fanciful with his anecdotal material. Paris itself is one of his protagonists as it metamorphoses from a drab purgatory of grayish pavement to a dreamy paradise of leafy lassitude . . . The Aviator’s Wife is a thoroughly delightful experience only for the most deeply discerning. It is also a theory of cinema as a precarious balancing act between fantasy and reality, and above all, between dreaming and awakening’ (1981). French recognizes Rohmer’s success at showing characters lost to their imaginations: ‘The characters of The Aviator’s Wife are younger, less sophisticated, than those of Rohmer’s moral tales; they’re not so accomplished in the arts of self-deception and their pains are nearer the surface. But the gap between the world they create in their minds and the reality of other people’s lives and emotions is quite as large’ (1981). Milne writes: ‘Probing areas that the characters themselves prefer to leave unknown and unexplored, La Femme de l’aviateur is endlessly perceptive beneath its casual surface’ (1981: 195). Crisp notes: ‘One central thematic of the comedies seems then to be the conflict between reality and the idea which the characters have of it. Living intensely in their imagination, they misinterpret or misapprehend the world around them’ (1988: 89).  9 Barr (2002: 35–7) points out that there is pressure for Jefferies to get married, and Rear Window shows different stages of married life in the opening sequence. Conrad (2000) suggests that Jefferies ‘possibly hallucinates the plot’, with the high temperature on the thermometer registering ‘the inferno inside Stewart’s head’ (2000: 255). Austin (1996: 101) suggests that in La Femme de l’aviateur Rohmer alludes to the sequences of Vertigo in which Scottie

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follows Madeleine. La Femme de l’aviateur also resembles Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1972), when it switches between the two young women in Paris and the other house, which they visit in trances, brought on by eating magic sweets. Fieschi (1981: 45) also notes this. 10 Legrand (1981: 71) notes Rohmer’s ‘direct intervention’, observing how amusing it is that François’s pen doesn’t work and Christian’s pen does. 11 Bonitzer (1981: 8) describes how the first scene, in which François and his colleague talk about a third person, Anne, takes on a new dimension when we acknowledge a fourth person, Lucie. 12 Much of the park sequence takes place around the small lake; Crisp suggests that ‘[w]ater has acquired an almost ritual significance in Rohmer’s films for its purification potential’ (1988: 91). Mazierska notes that ‘The park is represented as a place where the division between nature and culture is obliterated’ (2002: 234). 13 Rohmer says of their time filming in the park, ‘we were like documentary filmmakers. When someone asked us what we were filming, we responded “a short film”’ (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 33). Sound designer George Prat recalls that, during the shooting of La Femme de l’aviateur, there were only seven technicians: ‘the walkers in the park of Buttes-Chaumont were used to our presence; they were convinced we were filming a short film’ (Hertay 1998: 108). They took three weeks to film the sequence in the park, using hidden radio microphones, the importance of which to direct sound Rohmer stresses (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 33). 14 Rohmer wrote a small musical theme, which Valero turned into a waltz (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 26). Valero’s website (http://jeanlouisvalero. wordpress.com) states that the words and music were written by Rohmer and the song was arranged by Mary Stephen and Valero. Arielle Dombasle, accompanied by Valero on organ, sang it. 15 Throughout Rear Window, the composer who lives opposite Jefferies’s apartment is writing the song, ‘Lisa’, which is the name of Grace Kelly’s character. When she comments on the composer’s first efforts – ‘it’s as if it were being written especially for us’ – Hitchcock the director cuts to Hitchcock the actor in the songwriter’s apartment, adjusting the clock and giving advice to the songwriter. When Miss Lonelyhearts later abandons her attempt at suicide, she does so because she hears ‘Lisa’. The film ends with ‘Lisa’ sung on the soundtrack. The song and Hitchcock’s cameo appearance are part of what Leitch (1991) describes as our double awareness of the film as fictional world and constructed artifice with a controlled perspective. To picture the organising consciousness behind this strategy, we have to acknowledge Hitchcock’s role. Smith also notes that Rear Window links the romantic song with the murder plot (2000: 110). Fawell notes that every sound in Rear Window, including all the music in the film, comes from the fictional world, thus allowing ‘his characters to comment ironically and self-reflexively on the music as the film goes along’ (2004: 126). 16 Rohmer quoted in the Le Beau mariage press book, produced by Gala films,

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who distributed Le Beau mariage in the UK. The press book is on microfiche in the BFI library. 17 See Hertay (1998: 41). Between Le Genou de Claire and Le Beau mariage, Romand had married, had a child and lived in India with her husband for five years, returning to France in 1980 after her husband died. She says: ‘it was really hard after the death of my husband to project this image of myself; to be someone who wanted to get married in this way was really hard’ (Carbonnier 1984: 11). She also says that Rohmer accompanied her to church and gave her away at her first marriage (Béghin 2010: 24). Rohmer drew upon Romand’s ideas, but when he finished the script, the actors had to learn it. He then held long rehearsals. Romand recalls the constraints placed upon her: ‘For Le Beau mariage, I thought that I would have had some freedom, but no! Places were marked on the ground within a millimetre’ (Higuinen and Lalanne 1998: 41). Binet-Bouteloup says: ‘The camera had been put in position; there were marks on the ground to indicate the movements of the camera, the entrances and exits of the actors in the frame. Everything was scrupulously noted’ (Binet-Bouteloup 1982: 37). Prat explains that they rehearsed for two days in Edmond’s chambers. Daylight from two windows lit the scene. Rohmer refused to put any lights on scaffolding outside the windows. Instead, the director of photography, Bernard Lutic, studied the moment most favourable during the day for lighting the scene in a natural way. Rohmer had planned to rehearse one day and shoot the next; in the event, though, on the second day, the sun was shining too much to fit into Rohmer’s autumnal colour scheme. They filmed on the third day. As Prat points out, a normal shooting schedule might be three days for filming an important long scene, but Rohmer’s method meant that during the first two days they did not shoot at all (Hertay 1998: 111–13). Prat tells Hertay that Rohmer only filmed the shots he wanted to use (Hertay 1998: 113). 18 Mazierska describes Clarisse as ‘modest, easygoing, tolerant and unselfish, Sabine – ambitious, impatient, dogmatic and egotistic’ (Mazierska 2002: 239). Mazierska’s interpretation of Le Beau mariage differs from mine because she places less emphasis on the social dimensions of the film. Rohmer says of the writing of Le Beau mariage: ‘I wrote Le Beau mariage in the form of a firstperson story; the narrator was Clarisse, the heroine’s friend’ (Mauro 1985: 92). 19 There is, as John Gibbs pointed out to me, a contrast between this wall hanging and Sabine’s poster. The pattern also includes the poster on the wall of her Paris apartment, which advertises an exhibition of work by her lover, Simon Leghen. 20 Magny (1995: 172) also observes that Sabine only appreciates the view from Clarisse’s parent’s house. Heinemann (2007: 80) notes this shot’s ‘metonymic’ function, representative of Edmond and Clarisse’s wealth and social position. 21 Mann also notes that, although Le Beau mariage and Pauline à la plage end as they began, both women have changed: Pauline has learnt about male deceitfulness and ‘Sabine is about to begin a new relationship with someone

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she has met on her commuter train’ (Mann 1999: 104). He is correct about Pauline, but it is not confirmed what will happen to Sabine. 22 Rohmer’s films have sometimes been misinterpreted as being devoid of any social analysis; for example, Cornand writes of La Femme de l’aviateur’s characters: ‘Nothing in their existence is conditioned by their belonging to this class or that in society. They all belong to the petit bourgeois which Rohmer always puts on screen . . . as usual with Rohmer there is nothing social or political on the part of the director who seems fixed in his conservatism’ (1981: 21). However, Williams argues that ‘Rohmer’s characters reveal not so much the intellectual possibilities of the questions, but their own prejudices, limitations, and hidden agendas. These people typically use conversation to play an ongoing social game, the stakes of which are not always completely clear. Sex is quite often a goal of the game, but so is finding one’s preferred position of dominance or submissions. The assertion of one’s social position, and the discovery of the interlocutor’s as well – for few directors are as acutely aware of class issues as is Rohmer – are also constant concerns’ (1992: 377). 23 Rohmer says the story of Pauline à la plage resembles Racine’s Andromaque (1667), ‘but it goes on in a certain setting which is very much of today’ (Romney 1990: 21). He also says (1994) that the first title he had for the story was A Dainty Rogue in Porcelain, a quotation from George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879), which he says has been an influence on his work. The ‘dainty rogue in porcelain’ is Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson’s description of Clara Middleton, which annoys Sir Willoughby. Pauline à la plage was released in France in March 1983, having been filmed during the summer of 1982 when Langlet was 15. Langlet learnt the script by heart before they started filming (Hertay 1998: 119). She and Greggory recall extensive rehearsals (Hertay 1998: 121, 130). During rehearsals, in the winter of 1981–2, Rohmer made a Super-8 film of some scenes with Langlet, Greggory and Dombasle (Bergala 1983: 27), parts of which can be seen in Preuves à l’appui, Cinéma, de notre temps (1994). Almendros says: ‘The crew and the actors became almost the same thing anyway because the actors gave us a hand with carrying things’ (Bergala 1983: 25). Langlet recalls that cast and crew lived in the same house during filming and that her room in the film was her room during production (Hertay 1998: 124). 24 Rohmer says: ‘My masculine characters all share the same model, inspired by the scriptwriter Paul Gégauff, who created his own myth. This character “the hoaxer” made a mark on the cinema of my generation. One can find him as much in my work as in work by Godard, Chabrol and, in a certain way, Rivette’ (Parra 1990: 52). Desbarats (1990: 48) notes that Gégauff was the model for Pierre in Le Signe du lion, Guillaume in La Carrière de Suzanne, Adrien in La Collectionneuse, Jérôme in Le Genou de Claire and Henri in Pauline à la plage. 25 When Rohmer wrote the outline in the 1950s, he envisaged for Marion someone whom he and his colleagues liked – Brigitte Bardot (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 18). Legrand says that Dombasle resembles Bardot, ‘or rather a Bardot imitator’ (1983: 54). However, besides their blonde hair, Dombasle and Bardot have little in common.

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26 Rohmer (1994) discusses his use of colours, especially the red and white of Henri’s daughter’s room, in Pauline à la plage. He describes his collaboration with Almendros: ‘Nestor Almendros has a habit of making the image very seventeenth-century Spanish, full of shadows, with lots of obscure lights and with really violent oppositions between the shadows and the light. I told him that I wanted an image that would resemble the Normandy coast, which is clearer, as, for example, in Eugène Boudin [a Normandy painter of marine landscapes, 1824–98]. I looked for a model and I spoke of Matisse and it happened that in passing a shop, and this is the role of chance, I saw on display La Blouse Romaine. I bought it and put it on the wall. I said to Almendros that I liked these colours of blue, white and red’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 24). See also Almendros in Bergala (1983: 25). Handyside also refers to Rohmer’s discussion of Boudin and Pauline à la plage (2009: 152–3). She refers to other painters of beaches – Degas, Manet, Monet and Morisot: ‘As Rohmer documents contemporary French beach-life using natural light effects and authentic sounds, and charts the social relations of the beach, he inserts himself into a French aesthetic tradition that stresses the beachscape as modern subject matter par excellence’ (2009: 153). Rohmer explained what kind of photography he wanted by showing Almendros his own holiday slides (Legrand 1986a: 47, n.3). Noël (1992: 157) also notes Rohmer’s attention to colour in Pauline à la plage. Almendros says: ‘The actors suggested things that they had. Rohmer and I chose things. For example, the blue t-shirt that the young man [Sylvain] has at the end, when he’s arguing with Atkine, that was Rohmer’s t-shirt. Before, the boy had had a t-shirt with bright colours, and I preferred this pale blue because it suggested something a little angelic about him, in contrast with the other monster’ (Bergala 1983: 25). When asked if he took into account psychological factors when using the colours, such as the association between red and Henri, Rohmer replies that he did: ‘Henri is more carnal and Pierre more ethereal’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 24). Sarris describes the ‘ethereal’ Pierre as: ‘Perceval reborn in a grotesquely sybaritic epoch’ (1983: 43). 27 The location was partly chosen because Marie Binet-Bouteloup told Rohmer that he could use her villa at Granville (Hertay 1998: 50). 28 Almendros explains Rohmer’s plans: ‘In filming chronologically, we saw this garden fade little by little, and that pleased Rohmer a lot’ (Bergala 1983: 27). 29 Rohmer re-shot the opening scenes of Pauline à la plage so that they would be set during sunny weather with the cloudy weather reserved for the middle of the film (Desbarats 1990: 21). 30 The film is set during one week in early September. Unlike Le Genou de Claire, Le Rayon vert and Conte d’été, Pauline à la plage does not indicate its dates on written intertitles; however, Louisette, the sweet-seller, refers to September when she talks to Henri and on the last evening Pierre says that he is going back to Paris the next day. 31 Herpe writes of À nos amours: ‘Even today (and still very close to Rohmer, though from a less ironic perspective of course), I rediscover there the only accurate depiction of this France that is coming into being, caught in a vice

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between the moral paralysis of the post-war years (possessive parents, sexual taboos, marriage as the only means of escaping the suffocation of the family) and the new conservatism of the consumer society (bodies, clothes, sensations that bring an illusory liberation)’ (Herpe 2003). Buss notes that while 20 years earlier the Office Catholique Français du Cinéma would have condemned Pauline à la plage as immoral, in 1983 the office recommended it as suitable for adolescents (1988: 122). Laubier writes: ‘Between 1973 and 1983 there was an enormous increase in the divorce rate [in France]. In fact, this trend seems to have started before the introduction of the law of July 1975 which fundamentally altered previous French divorce law. First, it introduced divorce by mutual consent, where divorce can either be requested by both parties or requested by one party and accepted by the other, and, second, it abolished adultery as a penal offence and “cause péremptoire” of divorce’ (1990: 148). 32 Reynaud (2000: 263), like Crisp, emphasizes Rohmer’s supposed interest in filming stories that reward women who have faith; this leads her to say of Henri in Pauline à la plage that he never expresses what he wants. In fact, he expresses several times what he wants. 33 While filming this scene, Dombasle signalled to Rohmer to stop filming – that was the intended meaning of her placing the back of her hand over her mouth. They finished the take but Dombasle insisted on them doing another one. In the final edit, though, Rohmer used the first take (Desbarats 1990: 36). Langlet remembers: ‘We had rehearsed a lot – it was the evening, we were all a little tired. Arielle started to speak and stumbled; she made a gesture to excuse herself and stop the take. But in the final edit, the gesture was kept and it worked within the context’ (Cléder 2007: 63). Bonitzer and Chion put to Rohmer that Marion’s statement ‘I want to burn with love’ is anachronistic, but Rohmer says that he wanted that effect, even though Dombasle resisted it: ‘The characters have a mannered side, which seemed to me to belong to them. What a modern character would have said, and which I didn’t want to use because it’s an anglicism, is the word ‘flasher’ [to fall in love with/to go weak at the knees for] for example. It pleased me to have them say ‘light a fire, burn’, in an amorous sense; it was possible in a slightly precious milieu. I find that ‘brûler’ [to burn] is very beautiful if it makes one smile. It’s like an affectation, on the border between ridiculousness and refinement’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 20–1). Nevertheless, Dombasle did not want to repeat ‘I want to burn with love’, which she felt mocked her. Rohmer convinced the actress by explaining that the force of her personality demanded that she shift into a comic mode of performance, although not one that is insincere or distancing. 34 As Desbarats writes: ‘The minutiae is put in service of a meticulous architectural organisation where the ornamental detail is intimately tied up to the whole’ (1990: 23). See Dubroux (1983: 13), Crisp (1988: 92), Bonitzer (1999: 24) and Desbarats (1990: 62), who suggests La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1938) as a precedent, where ‘the characters are the little playthings of destiny’ (Desbarats 1990: 138). See Sesonske (1980: 388–93) for discussion of how Musset, Marivaux and Beaumarchais were influences on Renoir’s film.

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35 As Dombasle comments, ‘the adults are more childish than the teenagers. Marion dreams more than her young cousin, who shows much more clearsightedness’ (Dombasle 1990: 137). Hertay suggests that Pauline functions as Cécile de Volange to Henri’s Valmont, a young heroine ‘perverted and corrupted by the hypocrisy of the adults’ (1998: 58). One earlier title for the project was Loup y es-tu? The word ‘loup’, French for ‘wolf’, recurs twice in the dialogue. When Pierre disapproves of Pauline staying at Henri’s house, Henri tells Pierre, ‘I’m not the big bad wolf; I won’t eat her’, though he tries to seduce her the next morning. The allusion to fairy tales accompanies a French colloquialism – ‘connaître le loup’ is slang for ‘to lose one’s virginity’. Henri uses this phrase to Marion when he says of Pauline that ‘it is time she got to know the wolf’. Rohmer told Desbarats that he changed the title because it was too hard to pronounce, but she suspects that Rohmer changed the title because it would have made the sexual theme too obvious (1990: 28). 36 Buss places Pauline à la plage in his ‘middle class’ category, saying ‘the class to which the central characters belong is, once more, treated as “natural”’ (1988: 122). 37 Many shots in the film are long takes, which Rohmer designed before shooting. Yet they shot in public places with a small crew. See Desbarats (1990: 21). There is one tracking shot in the film. When Louisette reveals the truth to Pierre, the long tracking backwards shot along the promenade combines with deep space, parallel lines and a vanishing point. Almendros describes how the travelling shot was filmed by placing the camera in the cleaning lady’s Citroen 2CV. Everyone on the crew pushed it; Féodor Atkine steered: ‘We rehearsed a great deal; Rohmer was really worried because he had shot very few travelling shots before and he had never done one as long as this; it was a risk in a film where there were no other travelling shots. Me, I find it quite successful; it works very well. Rohmer was delighted when he saw it in the rushes’ (Bergala 1983: 27). 38 As Desbarats notes: ‘The garden of hydrangeas at the start forms a real Italian theatre’ (1990: 36). 39 Desbarats (1990: 27) also notes that Pauline often listens to the adults around her and Handyside also mentions that, when Pierre introduces Henri to Marion, Rohmer ‘keeps his camera at a distance, allowing a multiplicity of gazes to occur within the frame – Pauline’s quietly observant one and Pierre’s disgruntled one, as well as Marion’s desiring one of Henri – signalling that Marion’s gaze is not in control of the situation’ (2009: 155). 40 Desbarats also notes that the window is a motif in Pauline à la plage, linking it to Matisse’s work (1990: 44). Several predecessors to Rohmer have used this type of framing. One of the most famous is John Ford, who uses windows and reflections in My Darling Clementine (1946) to compare visions of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), and doorways and thresholds to compare Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Chief Scar (Henry Brandon) in The Searchers (1956). See Wilson (1988), Pye (1996) and Gibbs (2002) for discussion of the doorway motif in The Searchers and Thomas (2001) for discussion of My Darling Clementine’s mirrors and windows.

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Wilson (1999: 53) notes that Pauline à la plage, with its visions of naked women, renders Rohmer’s interest in showing women’s bodies explicit. She compares his work with the artist Balthus, whose paintings often show young women naked. However, Rohmer’s use of nudity in Pauline is more precise than this and his films do not resemble Balthus’s paintings, though there is a Balthus poster in the room of the journalist Blandine in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque. 41 Bégaudeau also draws attention to the first arrival, noting that the film shows Sylvain descending the stairs to the beach and ‘dominating the beach, going to conquer it’ (2004a: 35); above his head in the distance, Pauline stands, looking out to sea; yet she is so tiny, compared to the enormous shadowy figure of the descending boy, that on a first viewing it is unlikely anyone would notice her. However, it is clear that Sylvain has seen Pauline and is running towards her, removing his red t-shirt as he does so, indicating, as Bégaudeau remarks, his intentions. 42 Valero wrote the song to which Pauline and Sylvain, then Henri and Marion, dance. Valero recounts the genesis of the piece: ‘Rohmer asked me to compose a summer smash hit on the lyrics he wrote. So I made something in my little studio, with a simple piano and my own throat, singing with myself, baritone and high-pitched voice, thanks to a multi-track recorder. . . . Eric was very happy with that rough copy and asked me to send it to the set at Jullouville (near le Mont Saint Michel). Two days later I went to a big studio and made a perfect version (in my opinion), with a big orchestra. But my opinion was not the great man’s opinion. They called me: “Hello Jean-Louis, Eric has received your music. But just after he lost his voice. Currently, he stays immobile, we are afraid he is going to fall down in a faint ... Shooting is stopped!” One hour later Eric phoned me: “Jean-Louis your music is too ... too ... too perfect ... can you send me the first version?” So I took the first version (replacing my falsetto with Arielle Dombasle’s voice) and it is what we are enduring nowadays. Of course what Henri holds in his hand is a false album cover’. Email to the author, 1 June 2007. Rohmer says: ‘It’s music in the film, not film music. I always prefer that it is my music, even if it is not very good, rather than a better music, because, for me, music is something too important to entrust to someone else’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 26). 43 Ennis writes that Marion is ‘not affected when he leaves her’ (1993: 122); I argue that she is affected by Henri’s rejection of her, but that she tries hard not to be. Her pride is wounded if nothing else. 44 Luchini says ‘certain things I said about women were used by him because he found them funny, but he re-wrote them completely, putting them in a grammar close to my own and which I could easily express’ (Arnaud and Najman 1984: 63). Rohmer says: ‘One can imagine that Fabrice Luchini improvises. Not at all: he never improvises for me, except in Le Genou de Claire. But he is someone who gives that impression: he has the kind of personality that whatever dialogue he says, one has the impression that it comes from him’ (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 10). Trémois (1984a: 13) notes that, while Octave and Louise use plenty of contemporary slang

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words, their discussions still resemble eighteenth-century dialogue. Ogier says: ‘Knowing my taste for interior design, Eric Rohmer suggested I put into action one aspect of the character I play in the movie, by actually designing the sets, just as Louise designs the various settings in which she lives’ (Ogier, in the Artificial Eye press book, held on microfiche in the BFI library). 45 Trémois (1984a: 13) notes the way that Louise wears different coloured scarves as the film goes on. She starts off with a red scarf, then a pink one and a blue one. Rohmer says: ‘In Les Nuits de la pleine lune, I worked with Renato Berta on grey and black principles which give full resonance to the brighter hues that belong to the characters of that movie’ (Ranvaud 1985: 12). 46 Karyo suggested to Rohmer that during Rémi’s argument with Louise the actor would hit his head against the wall. Rohmer refused (Bergala and Philippon 1984: 11). 47 An example of this mistaken interpretation is Crisp’s statement: ‘Rohmer’s output, like Bresson’s, can best be understood as evidence of progressive marginalization. His thematic, likewise – in which “liberty” is questioned, and liberalization seen as license, in which “self” is questioned, and self-expression seen as egotism – corresponds to a conservative reaction against those marginalizing forces’ (1988: 114). 48 Milne also notes how the first party is important structurally because it introduces Bastien and Marianne long before they become important to the plot, and important to Louise and Rémi (1984/85: 65). 49 The song is by Elli et Jacno, who were a successful French pop group in the early 1980s. They released a soundtrack album for the film. 50 Mazierska observes that, although Octave mocks Rémi’s immobility, Octave ‘is very decentred in his emotional life (he claims that he loves his wife, but also tries to seduce Louise)’ (Mazierska 2002: 237). Mazierska points to the contrast between Louise’s constant movement and Rémi’s static behaviour. She also notes the fragile ethereal nature of Ogier, opposed to the stout body of Karyo. 51 Trémois (1984a: 12) also points to the contrast that Rohmer makes between the new town of Marne-la-Vallée and the heart of Paris. I argue that the film withholds judgement of the city centre and the suburbs; Mazierska, on the other hand, herself disagreeing with Crisp’s (1988: 102) interpretation, concludes that in Les Nuits de la pleine lune ‘the superiority of the margins over the centre is more postulated than realized in practice’ (2002: 242). 52 Reynaud sees the film as less historical than I do and more as a demonstration of a universal psychoanalytic structure, describing ‘Louise’s displacement [as] not anecdotal, but structural. It is as a woman, in her relationship with men, that she is essentially displaced’ (2000: 257). Tester (2008: 131), like this author, disagrees with Reynaud’s interpretation. 53 Cone notes that Colette’s early novels share a common theme of a young woman refusing to be an object of circulation from father to husband: ‘Enticed by the activity of the streets below, Colettian heroines come down

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from their overly protected bourgeois apartments and circulate alone in the streets of Paris, by foot, on omnibuses or on the brand new métro still under construction’ (Cone 1996: 426). 54 Bergala (1986: 22) sees an ‘indirect germ’ for Le Rayon vert in this scene. Reynaud interprets this scene differently from me. She argues that what Louise tells Octave about spending a pleasant evening alone is contradicted by what we have seen, yet the film does not specify, as Reynaud insists, ‘the growing anxiety and distress of a woman trapped alone in her own space’ (2000: 260). Reynaud does not demonstrate her claim with an interpretation of details from the film that might exemplify her assertion. Instead, she compares this scene with ones she finds similar in La Maman et la putain and Jeanne Dielmann. Cone, agreeing with Reynaud, also writes: ‘her solitude turns quickly into loneliness, as she attempts to spend the evening by herself in her studio with her books and her boom box’ (Cone 1996: 428). As with Reynaud’s assertion about Louise’s anxiety and distress, Cone’s claim is unsupported. 55 Prat (Hertay 1998: 114) says that the scene was filmed in Auber, a large station in central Paris near Opéra and Place des Victoires, where Louise works. Auber is on the A4 RER (the suburban railway), a direct line from Lognes station in Marne-la-Vallée, from where Louise takes the train. 56 For further discussion of You Only Live Once, see Wilson (1988: 16–38). Trémois also notes that the film withholds the reverse-shot that could reveal whom Octave sees at the bar: we wait to discover whom he has seen. Trémois calls Les Nuits de la pleine lune ‘a thriller of the heart’, like all of Rohmer’s films (1984a: 13). Philippon (1984: 38) remarks that all of the Comédies et proverbes so far, except Le Beau mariage, have a moment where the film seems to stop for an instant on an image which is likely to be misinterpreted. Everyone who sees Les Nuits de la pleine lune, argues Philippon, will remember ‘the superb shot without a reverse-shot of Octave (Fabrice Luchini) in the middle of seeing someone whom we do not see’ (Philippon 1984: 38). 57 Mann (1999) and Bonitzer (1999) offer different emphases in their interpretations of Louise. Mann notes that Louise, like the men in Rohmer’s earlier series, attempts to lead two lives, though ‘she is punished more than her male counterparts in the Contes moraux’ (1999: 105). Bonitzer writes of how Louise, typically for a Rohmer protagonist, has a nostalgic fantasy for ‘the other thing’ (1999: 124). 58 As Adair writes: ‘Louise, however trying we may find her insensitivity to Rémi’s feelings, never ceases to engage our sympathies. This is due in part to a performance by Ogier that is, in a way, more moving than it ought to be’ (Adair 1984: 388). 59 Amiel describes the opening and closing pans as a form of parenthesis, and he too notes that Louise’s call to Octave sustains an idea of the story beyond its end (1984: 61). Huvet also discusses the similarity of the opening and closing shots (1985: 66). 60 ‘I saw and liked his films before those by Renoir, and even if I feel closer today to Renoir, I still have a little loyalty to Carné, and I always admired the

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way that he finished his story where it started. It’s true as much of Hôtel du Nord, as it is of Jour se lève or Les Enfants des Paradis. It’s a trick without a doubt, but it amused me to use it’ (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 9). Hertay (1998: 66) also cites this statement. 61 See Rohmer in Bonitzer and Chion (1983: 18).

Chapter 5  1 Hertay (1998: 77) also cites part of this quotation. Handyside (2009: 158) also mentions the production methods of Le Rayon vert and Rohmer’s aim to adopt Jean Rouch’s methods. Hertay repeats what Rohmer says about his films becoming increasingly scripted during the 1970s and his working more with experienced actors in place of non-professionals, as he had done with Bauchau, Politoff and Pommereulle on La Collectionneuse. Rohmer gives to Geoff Andrew another reason for making an improvised film: ‘I’ve been told so often that my dialogue is too literary. I don’t agree, and I did this film to prove to myself that the conversations would be just the same as if I’d written them. And I was right, there’s no difference’ (Andrew 1987: 26). Jean-Claude Bonnet agrees: ‘Delphine talks like everyone else in 1986’ (1986: 67). For a while Rohmer could not decide whether to include Le Rayon vert within the Comédies et proverbes series (Ostria 1986: 33). Maintigneux also describes Rohmer’s hesitation (Durel 1986: 39). The film was released in France in September 1986 and filmed during the summer of 1984 (Durel 1986: 39). Wilson writes that Rohmer has used improvisation ‘particularly effectively’ (1999: 31). This is true, but only Le Rayon vert is improvised: 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle has one scene that is improvised and L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque had a full treatment with most of its dialogue written.  2 Cahiers du cinema published some of Rohmer’s photos to accompany an interview with him (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 71).  3 Rohmer had planned that his film would have some parallels with Jules Verne’s novel The Green Ray, but he had not worked out the details of Delphine’s story (Ostria 1986: 34). Amanda Langlet speculates on the origins of Rohmer’s idea for Le Rayon vert: ‘At the end of Pauline, we had a meal at the Grand Hotel in Granville. It was the evening and we could see the sea. Someone said: “The green ray, are we going to see the green ray?” We stayed still for several minutes, really a long time, to see it. At the moment of the green ray, half of us had seen it and the other hadn’t seen it. Rohmer maintained that he had seen it and I maintained that it was just a sun’s ray. It made me laugh when, afterwards, I saw that he was making Le Rayon vert’ (Hertay 1998: 125). Several critics note that the Rimbaud quotation epitomizes Delphine’s story: Carbonnier (1986: 2), Masson (1986: 43) and Milne (1987: 85) quote the preceding lines of ‘Fêtes de la patience’. Milne concludes that, ‘Through an excess of delicacy, Delphine has indeed lost her way in life’ (1987: 85).

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 4 The photographer and sound recordist were the youngest: Maintigneux was 33, Nougaret 25; both had sole responsibility for photography and sound for the first time (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 21). Rohmer told Nougaret to abandon any attempt to attain perfection; as she was holding the boom with the Nagra recorder over her shoulder, to modulate the sound Nougaret had to move the microphone. Rivière says: ‘Eric Rohmer hadn’t actually written anything when he contacted me for this film. He told me the story of a girl who would be alone during the holidays. He explained some scenes, in Paris, in Biarritz and in the country. Then we quickly started to work on certain scenes, immersing ourselves in improvisation: the scene with the friends who “counsel” Delphine at the start; the one with Vincent at the end’ (Carbonnier and Revault d’Allonnes 1986: 16). Challenged about a continuity error in Le Rayon vert, when the film shows a glass of beer finished by Vincent Gauthier then, in the next shot, reveals the glass half full again, Rohmer says that faults in the continuity happened in Le Rayon vert because he took the risk of not employing anyone to supervise continuity. The risk was worth taking because the opportunity to work with a crew of three outweighed the chance of someone noticing a continuity error (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 22).  5 While Delphine gesticulates, Manuela sits like a fortune teller, stroking a black cat; she also professes that she can read cards to predict the future, all appropriate because Heredia was also the editor of Le Rayon vert. La Femme de l’aviateur credits Lisa Heredia in the cast list, while Le Beau mariage and Les Nuits de la pleine lune credit Lisa Heredia as assistant editor; Le Rayon vert lists her in the cast as Lisa Heredia; however, Le Rayon vert, 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, L’Ami de mon amie and Conte de printemps all credit her as Maria-Luisa Garcia, editor of each of these films. Bonitzer suggests that Le Rayon vert’s use of the cards, the horoscope and Verne’s green ray legend all allude to pagan beliefs; he also notes Manuela’s slapping the classical-looking statue’s calves while saying that this is what Delphine needs (Bonitzer 1986: 31).  6 Hertay (1998) also connects Le Rayon vert to Rouch, pointing out that Rohmer was one of the first and strongest defenders of Rouch’s work. Marie suggests that Rouch’s La Punition ‘provided a veritable aesthetic matrix for films by Rivette and Rohmer in the 1970s and 80s’ (2003: 79). Rohmer praised Rouch’s Le Pyramide humaine (1959) in his ‘The Taste of Beauty’, published in July 1961 in Cahiers du cinéma and reprinted in the book of that name. The planned title for Rouch’s Chronique d’un été was Comment vis-tu? One strand of Rouch’s chronicle of contemporary French society focuses on Landry, the visitor from the Ivory Coast. Landry’s comments about the spiritual impoverishment of Western European society, despite the wide availability of consumer goods, expressed during the scene with the Renault worker, Angelo, relate to Delphine’s longings for something she believes can be only found in nature. Rothman suggests that Rouch believes that Chronique d’un éte reveals a way of life that is ‘haunted by alienation and fear of death’ (1997: 101). Rohmer used Rouch’s technique for filming: as Rothman describes it, ‘The camera is capable of provoking people to reveal

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aspects of themselves that are fictional, to reveal themselves as the creatures of imagination, fantasy and myth they are: This is the touchstone of the practice Rouch calls “cinéma-vérité”’ (1997: 70). For a discussion of the link between Rouch and Bazin, see Dilorio (2007).  7 In Reading Rohmer (2007), I present longer analyses of the scene in which Delphine and Béatrice argue and the scene in which Delphine defends her vegetarianism, focusing in particular on performances.  8 Maintigneux confirms that the performers improvised this scene: ‘Nobody knew what was going to happen. I had a pile of magazines at my feet and I loaded the camera as I went along. It so happened that these people didn’t know that Marie is a vegetarian, and one of them, suddenly, brought out some pork chops’ (Durel 1986: 39).  9 Rohmer says that the horoscopes, playing cards and the use of green were all planned (Carbonnier and Revault d’Allonnes 1986: 16); Rivière told him the story about finding the cards, which he incorporated. 10 Milne (1987: 85) also notes this. 11 Rohmer planned these ‘moments of solitude in nature’ (Rohmer 1986). 12 Fawell argues that Delphine ‘is as ill-equipped as the next person to be alone with nature, and her summer vacation proves it’ (1993: 781). 13 Maintigneux observes that Rohmer planned to film in Biarritz: ‘Rohmer adores this town’ (Saada 1986: 25). On the busy beach in Biarritz, Maintigneux shot much of the footage alone with Rivière (Carbonnier and Revault d’Allonnes 1986: 16). 14 Fawell (1993: 782) also notes the significance of this. 15 Masson (1986: 44) also notes her search takes her to the limits of France. 16 Several critics have noted the influence of Stromboli on Le Rayon vert: Bergala (1986), Bonnet (1986) and Philippon (1987). Bergala describes Le Rayon vert as ‘almost a remake of Stromboli where he completely renounces the Hitchcockian aspect to re-discover entirely the Rossellini side’ (Cléder 2007: 22). 17 Rohmer comments ‘For Le Rayon vert, the colours were going to be orange and green – I had a little notebook for useful ideas, which was green with an orange band – but in the film the colours that one sees most often, are of course green – of the countryside, the blue-green of the sea – and red’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 23). Legrand (1986a: 47) also notes the prominence of red in the Cherbourg sequence. Masson suggests that the sequence of Delphine wandering evokes Kim Novak’s wandering in Vertigo (1986: 44). 18 Rohmer found this shop as Delphine finds it, ‘by chance’ (Ostria 1986: 35). 19 Rohmer (1986) explains the gestation of the music in Le Rayon vert: ‘The closing theme is a fugue based on the opening theme. I can say, in all modesty, that I came up with the theme. I am not a musician, and the composition is purely intellectual . . . I started with Bach’s name, replacing the letters with the corresponding notes of the scale. And H is B. We tried it

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out. Eventually, we got rid of the B. So it begins with C, next H, which is a B, and B again, which is a B flat. Then we move away from it. I put it to my musician, Jean-Louis Valero. He was inspired by it and he wrote the closing theme, the fugue, which you hear when the two characters are watching the sunset’. Valero says: ‘He showed me a little score: five strokes of the pencil sprinkled with ten notes industrially drawn, the whole on a white scrap of paper carefully glued on a green sheet. . . . His forefinger aiming at the first note, he started singing ... Anyone who never heard ten wrong notes in one go can’t imagine the amount of wrong notes that that makes’. 20 Initially, they talk about the book Delphine is reading, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, another chance find: ‘It wasn’t a choice; it was a coincidence, a miracle. In this film, there are only coincidences. This was pure chance. It happened that she was was reading the book, I don’t know why. If she had been reading a book which I didn’t like, perhaps I would have said “let’s find another”. But when I saw her reading The Idiot, I said “Ah, it’s fantastic that Delphine would be reading The Idiot” (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 19). Elsewhere, Rohmer says that he thought there was a connection between Delphine and Prince Mychkine (Rohmer 1990b: 111). Dostoevsky was one of Rohmer’s favourite authors; calling Dostoevsky one of his ‘masters’, he said that he liked the Russian author’s work and always wanted to adapt him for the cinema (Carcassone and Fieschi 1981: 18). 21 Tortajada (2004) compares Le Rayon vert and Conte d’automne and Rivière’s Delphine and her Isabelle in Conte d’automne. Whereas Delphine holds out for an ideal love, Isabelle is more pragmatic: ‘the couple contemplate the horizon as if finding there, rather than in each other’s eyes, the revelation of true love. In doing so, he paradoxically introduces the mediation of the green ray, as a third party, to guarantee the experience of transparency . . . In Conte d’automne, Magali assumes the role of the one who believes in the ideal and transparency, but this film, as we will see, has its own way replacing transparency with ambiguity’ (Tortajada 2004: 223). 22 With all three, the search for a green ray leads westward: Verne’s story ends with the heroine rescued from Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa; Delphine’s search ends in St Jean de Luz; and Rohmer’s filming ended in the Canary Islands, where he sent someone to film a green ray, having failed to film one in France. As Bonitzer writes, the green ray was ‘made in the laboratory’ (1986: 31). Rohmer explains that Demard filmed a sunset from the Canary Islands in a very clear sky, but it was necessary to add the green colour to the last piece of sun (Blouin, Bouquet and Tesson 2001: 56). In his book, Bonitzer (1999: 88) also notes that Rohmer waited a year to film it, having sent photographers to different places. Rohmer says: ‘I waited a whole year to photograph it [in France], and we never did get it, so I had to send a technician off to the Canaries to shoot it there! But also, of course, the ray is a bit like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, a motor for the story’ (Andrew 1987: 26). 23 I am not the only person to see Le Rayon vert as a crucial film for Rohmer. Production manager on Le Rayon vert, Françoise Etchegaray, remarks: ‘Le Rayon vert is still for me a completely astonishing phenomenon’ (Cléder

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2007: 69). White writes: ‘This post-Pauline phase has been Rohmer’s greatest. The aesthetic breakthrough he couldn’t quite attain in the Seventies despite the huge public response to the Moral Tales happened with Le Rayon vert, which dared to turn Pauline’s crowd-pleasing splendours inside out and offer a deep, lingering look at the depression preceding enlightenment’ (White 1996: 16). Kaufman’s reaction to Le Rayon vert is typical: ‘It’s a surprisingly magic moment, ephemeral and very moving’ (Andrew et al. 2000). Rafferty describes Le Rayon vert’s ending as ‘one of the purest moments of happiness in recent movies’ (Rafferty 1988: 78). Some people find it hard to identify with Delphine. Reynaud, for instance, describes Delphine as ‘obnoxious’ and refers to her ‘ridiculous stubbornness’ (2000: 259). Stubborn Delphine may be, but the film shows why she is stubborn and it never depicts her as obnoxious or ridiculous. 24 Vasse (2007: 105–11) suggests that the short film form is essential to Rohmer’s approach because it gives him freedom to experiment. 25 With Le Rayon vert and 4 Aventures, Rohmer felt that ‘Marie Rivière and Joëlle Miquel were really the inspirations for the two films’ (Philippon and Toubiana 1987: 12). 26 Rohmer, interviewed in the Artificial Eye press book for 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, held in the BFI library. Philippon (1987: 6) notes the use of money as ‘one of the best metaphorical vehicles in cinema for human relationships’ and he gives as an example the film’s comparison of two forms of social space where one traffics, the supermarket and the station. 27 Rohmer comments: ‘When I made it, I thought “it can be café theatre”. And what removes this café theatre-like quality is precisely the fact, I honestly believe, that it was filmed on the street, in reality. . . . It [the last episode] is a lot more theatrical: it takes place in a closed space and it relies only on speech; there is very little cinematic direction; people hold themselves absolutely immobile in their positions’ (Legrand, Niogret and Ramasse 1986: 21). 28 Austin (1996: 67–8) also notes this. 29 An amusing photograph, taken by Rohmer, shows Emmanuelle Chaulet, standing in the middle of the building site that will become the Cergy-St Christophe apartment block where her character lives. She appears to be holding a script in her hand; according to the caption, she is rehearsing (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 72). Rohmer had been familiar with the development of Cergy-Pontoise since 1975, when he made a television series on new towns with four 50-minute episodes, the first of which was about Cergy-Pontoise. 30 He says: ‘I am not for new towns and against old towns, nor vica versa; I’m for everything that I show . . . What I like about new towns is that they have not been built with a 1930s feel. They are not modern, but postmodern, with all that that comprises in terms of pastiche. What I filmed in Marne-laVallée and in Cergy-Pontoise – the spaces, the layout of houses – is not very different to traditional architecture. There are streets, squares, various facades and different levels. At Cergy-St Christophe, the Belvédère was constructed

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by Bofill, and Karavan sculpted the space around the tower. There are two observatories, a clock, in brief, a certain variety, unlike the horrors of Le Corbusier, which make you shudder’ (Trémois 1994: 23–4). 31 Crisp describes water in Rohmer’s films as having a ‘purification potential’ (1988: 91). 32 A more extreme version of this view is expressed by Dieckmann, who, calling L’Ami de mon amie ‘the latest in Eric Rohmer’s tedious Comédies et proverbes series’, writes: ‘As with so many Rohmer films, here we have a group of good-looking French bourgeois prattling endlessly about relationships, careers and the meaning of life in meticulously colour-coordinated outfits’ (1987: 63). 33 John Berger (1985), ‘The Eyes of Claude Monet’, in Lloyd Spencer (ed.) The Sense of Sight. New York: Pantheon, 190; quoted in Perez (1998: 205). 34 In his 1964 documentary on the industrial era, Les Metamorphoses du paysage, Rohmer includes a shot of a passing barge when discussing the ‘poetry’ of past industrial machines and buildings. The voice-over says: ‘This barge is surely poetic. It has its coat of arms, its golden legend and from it could emerge, like wandering sailing boats, a ghostly world’. The film is included on the French DVD of L’Ami de mon amie, distributed by Les Films du Losange, and on the English DVD distributed by Arrow Films. 35 Ennis argues that Adrienne acts ‘outside the game, like Delphine in Le Rayon vert. This amounts to an indictment of the other characters who seem unaware of the shallowness of their games’ (1993: 124). However, I would argue that the film suggests the opposite: Adrienne is the least sincere or likeable of the five characters. Each time we see her she is rude about someone. Her last appearance is when she dines with Blanche in Paris. There, the art student tells the town hall office worker that she wants to find someone with a ‘real artist’s soul’. She criticizes Alexandre, saying he is ‘just a brilliant bureaucrat’ and she declares her lack of interest in him, but she herself is a bore, something Rohmer emphasizes by fading out her voice and dissolving to Blanche returning home. Rohmer shows Adrienne to be the character most deceived by her own fantasies about finding a lover with an ‘artist’s soul’. 36 Rohmer explains his choice of colours: ‘For L’Ami de mon amie, which was filmed in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, I was thinking about a deep pink. But I changed my mind and I decided, curiously, completely naturally, without thinking about it, to use the colours which are the colours of CergyPontoise’s emblem. This emblem represents the loop in the river Oise, a watery blue ribbon, encircling the green forest. It is a film in which there is above all green and blue. Therefore, I was a little manipulated, in some occult fashion, by the power of this city’ (Rohmer 1990b: 118). 37 Rohmer has said that the colourful abstract paintings of Nicolas de Staël were an influence on L’Ami de mon amie (Rohmer 2006). 38 Talking of her infatuation with Alexandre, Blanche tells Fabien that she was in love with an image: ‘I realised that what I loved wasn’t a person but an image, an image of a man chasing me, a childish dream I’m too old for’.

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39 As Desbarats writes, ‘one can sometimes ask if the Comédies et proverbes are not documentaries about the actors’ (1990: 37). 40 Béatrice Romand was born in 1952, the oldest of the leads in the Comédies et proverbes. Marie Rivière was born in 1958. Arielle Dombasle was born in 1953. Emmanuelle Chaulet was born in 1961. I can find no information about Anne-Laure Meury; I would guess that she was born in 1960 or 1961. Sophie Renoir was born in 1965. Amanda Langlet was born in 1967, the youngest of the actresses in Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes. 41 A different approach to the Comédies et proverbes can be found in Vidal (1986). Vidal discusses the Comédies et proverbes and the ‘schema’ of the Six contes moraux, and she argues that the 1980s series reverses the structure of the 1960s series: whereas a man has to choose between two women in the Six contes moraux, in the Comédies et proverbes a woman has to choose between two men (1986: 48). She then discusses the women in Rohmer’s films, categorising them as universal types: passive seducers, active seducers or chosen ones (1986: 48–51).

Chapter 6  1 The play had two characters, Paul played by Pascal Greggory, Adèle by Jessica Forde. According to Greggory, the play ‘is very much like the world of his films’ (Hertay 1998: 129). In 1983, having directed his first play, Kleist’s Catherine de Heilbronn, Rohmer talked about doing another: ‘my dream would be to write a play, but I haven’t arrived there at all. Despite my willingness to do some theatre, I make cinema. I seem to be incapable; I can’t see how I would write a single line for the theatre’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 24).  2 Ennis (1993) suggests that Rohmer’s interest in the history of parlour games coincides with his interest in the way that social performers resemble players in an elaborate game.  3 Rohmer says, ‘I worried about only showing one generation in the Comédies et proverbes, with no parents or grandchildren or very few. In the Contes des quatre saisons, I have, from this point of view, enriched the painting: there are two generations in Conte de printemps, three in [Conte d’hiver]’ (Curchod 1992: 25). Warehime (2001: 120) also notes the linking in Rohmer’s seasonal tales between the cycle of seasons and the human life cycle. In two interviews, Rohmer explains the influence of the BBC’s The Winter’s Tale: Church (1992: 40) and Curchod (1992: 24). The BBC version was produced by Jonathan Miller and directed by Jane Howell, broadcast on BBC TV in February 1981. It was part of the BBC Television Shakespeare Project, produced between1978 and 1985.  4 Examples of other writers who refer to the everyday in Rohmer’s work include Farber, who in 1971 notices the ‘consistently undramatic material’ in Ma Nuit chez Maud (Farber 1998: 241). In particular, Farber identifies the importance of the actors in Rohmer’s films: ‘It’s a fascinating idea for

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a movie – a young man’s undramatic settling into a new town and job, structured around a long philosophical discussion in the rooms of a sexy, taunting divorcée – and, though it is immaculately written, it depends on taut smudges of elegant acting to keep it afloat (Farber 1998: 242). Monaco describes Rohmer’s Six contes moraux as ‘mosaics’ of mundane details, arguing that the director ‘manages to invest la vie quotidienne with some meaningful rhythm’ (Monaco 1976: 301). Crisp, commenting on Rohmer’s non-assertive style, notes that ‘the relative absence of the techniques that structure viewer responses has another effect: the narrative line of Rohmer’s films is singularly undramatic’ (Crisp 1988: 108). Buache says that Rohmer is like an entomologist in Le Genou de Claire in that the different phases of the sentimental story pass day by day ‘without dramatisation’ (1990: 102). Tracz (2003) argues, ‘What may seem like banality becomes, when looked at with Rohmer’s compassionate yet distanced eye, a revelation, through the quotidian, of the profound’. Heinemann (2000: 54) points to Rohmer’s combination of a ‘self-effacing style and quotidian settings’ with ‘highly orchestrated plots and formal peculiarities’. The French intellectual tradition of writing about the everyday, which includes Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, is summarized by Schilling (2003). Klevan distinguishes his work on the everyday from this tradition (2000: 6, n.11). See Leigh (2009) for a discussion of the links between Klevan’s work and that of Stanley Cavell, and Crouse (2002) for a further account of Klevan’s work.  5 Part of Rohmer’s freedom came from his combination of low-budget productions and his doing most of the research himself: ‘It is a policy that goes with the way that I conceive the role of chance. I am very demanding, but being demanding doesn’t lead me to appointing a set decorator, but rather to occupy myself with all the little processes, to use anything that’s already there. The sets are found in this fortuitous way. . . . Also, my film costs nothing before filming; I do everything myself and I don’t have expenses; if there are any, then I take care of them and reimburse myself later’ (Bonitzer and Chion 1983: 28).  6 In the documentary Cinéma, de notre temps (1994) Rohmer tells Jean Douchet this. See also Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana (1996: 48).  7 Darel confirms: ‘I learnt the text like a play for the theatre’ (Saada 1990: 15). However, Rohmer also met some teachers and some phrases in the film come from his conversation with them (De Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 25).  8 Quester met Rohmer when the director wanted him to work on Catherine de Heilbronn in 1979 (Bergson 1990: 63).  9 Rohmer says, ‘If I had to identify myself with one of the characters, it would be Jeanne’ (de Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 29). 10 Milne points to the way that Rohmer uses settings to demarcate character and plot: ‘Within the space of the first reel, for example, a casual inspection of four different apartments lays out the entire scenario. First, the flat belonging to Jeanne’s boyfriend, all peeling paint, cheery disorder and random sleaze; as soon as you see Jeanne’s apartment, its spotless, orderly twin, you know that

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lurking somewhere in her mind is the doubt, can I really be in love with his man?’ (Milne 1990: 151). Klevan (2000: 174–5) also cites this passage from Milne’s review. 11 Klevan writes of the air of mystery that Conte de printemps creates during its opening sequence: ‘(Why is she bothering? Why does she not stay in the first flat?) By solving this mystery, however, the viewer will understand their necessity, realising that the opening sequence gives us the first clues to her all-consuming orderliness’ (Klevan 2000: 174). 12 For Rohmer, ‘The décor is often the first thing decided. I could even say that one recognises a film by its colour; each film has a particular colour. Here the distinction is very clear; there will not only be a distinction in the settings but also the distinction of the seasons. Here, for spring, the colours are green and white’ (Legrand and Thomas 1990: 5). Mann (1999: 107) says that this is the only film of Rohmer’s set in spring. He argues that winter and summer are the most important seasons in Rohmer’s films because of ‘the icy virtue/warm decadence polarity’ (Mann 1999: 106). However, as Rohmer pointed out in interviews at the time of Conte de printemp’s release, L’Amour l’après-midi is set in the spring. Mann does not discuss how Conte de printemps uses spring; in particular, he does not discuss the youth of the women. Instead, he stresses Rohmer’s interest in a polarity between virtue and decadence, though there are several examples where this does not apply: L’Ami de mon amie, Le Rayon vert and Conte d’été. 13 Klevan compares Natacha and Jeanne’s meeting at the party with the first meeting between Bruno (Robert Walker) and Guy (Farley Granger) in Strangers on a Train (1951) (2000: 170–87). 14 When they arrive home at Natacha and Igor’s apartment, the first thing Jeanne does is ask about the pillars in the dining room. A remarkable piece of scenery, the pillars are described by Nigel Andrews as ‘bizarre, unyielding and pointless. They cannot be removed because they are sunk deep into the floor. They remind us of human relationships themselves, and the immovable, illogical parameters we set around them’ (1990: 21). 15 Bonitzer also observes that Jeanne is in the position of the heroes of the Contes moraux: she is in a relationship but she takes an opportunity with Igor to test her commitment to this relationship (1999: 41). 16 Klevan notes Rohmer’s characteristic way of framing characters’ bodies, which keeps hands and torsos as well as heads in frame. He also notes Conte de printemps’ use of two-shots, as, for example, the framing of Igor and Jeanne when they prepare food in the kitchen: ‘their own admitted clumsiness results as much from them sitting too closely together as from inherent traits’ (2000: 191). 17 This interpretation is strengthened by Jeanne’s comment to Natacha at the party: ‘If anyone had secretly witnessed today all I’ve said and done he’d have had no idea of the situation’s meaning, assuming it has one’. Jeanne’s comment informs us that Jeanne is aware of the question about her motivation that her behaviour prompts. Klevan comments on this dimension of her comments (2000: 173–4). I would add, though, that the comment is

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also directed by Rohmer the storyteller to us, his audience (above the head of the character, so to speak). Her comments describe the film’s following of her and the film’s deliberate introduction of mysteries about her behaviour. This kind of comment is frequent in Hitchcock’s films. 18 Duchen writes: ‘The French school student has a compulsory class in philosophy and can be examined in philosophy when she leaves school .The French lycée pupil therefore has a familiarity with certain philosophical ideas and thinkers that the British or American child lacks; the French child is also subjected to oral examinations and gains practice in argument and rhetoric; and the institutionalising of philosophy affects the degree of importance allocated to abstract inquiry, and the relative importance of intellectual life in France compared to British anti-intellectualism’ (1986: 68). At one point, the film reveals that Jeanne has a photograph of Wittgenstein on her bookshelf. Rohmer remarks: ‘It’s a con. Here’s what I thought: people who knew him would recognise him, but others might possibly think that it was Mathieu, Jeanne’s boyfriend. . . . Whether it’s Wittgenstein, as her ideal man, or her boyfriend, it’s a portrait of a handsome man, whose spirit and physical beauty appeal to her’ (de Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 29). 19 Several people comment on this feature of Conte de printemps. Robinson writes: ‘To regard the Rohmer comedy of manners as purely verbal is deceptive, though. No less than their words, their environments express the characters and their situation’ (1990: 21). Johnston points out that the characters ‘remain reluctant to make choices and commitments even into early middle age’ (1990: 17). Walker describes ‘the fine network of temptation, guilt, animosity and hesitation that connect all four people’ (1990: 32). 20 Klevan also remarks that Igor’s ‘ungainly carving of the meat is conducted by the side of Eve’s posturing’ (Klevan 2000: 197). 21 Klevan (2000: 200) notes that the finding of the necklace confirms Eve’s innocence of the suspicion of theft. It also confirms Natacha’s innocence of hiding the necklace to frame Eve. 22 Klevan also quotes part of this passage (Bonitzer 1999: 85, quoted in Klevan 2000: 173 and 202 n.2). 23 Ennis (1996) compares Ma Nuit chez Maud and Conte d’hiver’s references to Pascal. 24 Rohmer refers to the title of a book of memoirs by the poet Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947), Le Piéton de Paris (1939). In L’Avant-scène du cinéma, at the time of Conte d’hiver’s release, the head of the Comédie-Française, Jacques Lassalle, had compared Rohmer with Marivaux and Corneille (1992). Rohmer states: ‘I am really sensitive to sociological realism, as much as to psychological realism’ (Curchod 1992: 28). 25 Rohmer, quoted in the Artificial Eye press book for the London Film Festival screening of Conte d’hiver, November 1992. Conte d’hiver’s editor, Mary Stephen, notes the importance of the actresses and crew as inspirations for Rohmer’s stories: ‘It is not by accident that Winter’s Tale told the story of a young woman raising a child single-handedly while sorting out her

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sentimental webs; it was around that time that Rohmer’s immediate entourage turned from young carefree girls into young women freshly divorced or separated with a young child. (I had just returned to Paris with three very young children, Françoise [Etchegaray – Rohmer’s producer/production manager] was doing the same in the countryside of Paris, Marie [Rivière], Béatrice [Romand] and a host of others around him’ (Mousoulis 2000). 26 The prologue was filmed a year and a half before the rest of the film. Wilson (1999: 54) suggests it takes place in ‘an emotional space, the space of a love affair that has been left behind’. 27 Rohmer acknowledges that Resnais shot Hiroshima, mon amour in Nevers: ‘But for me, Nevers interested me less than the trajectory of my characters. They left the cathedral, walked towards the old town, crossed the Loire and came back. What I like is the continuity of space. I’m a disciple of Erich von Stroheim, who always filmed like this – in Greed, in Queen Kelly – the movements of the actors. The absence of ellipses creates an extraordinary suspense’ (Trémois 1994: 24). Wilson (1999: 54) also recalls the setting of Nevers in Hiroshima, mon amour. 28 Rohmer says he did not want there to be an unconscious explanation for the slip (Danton, Giavarini and Taboulay 1992: 24). Rothman (2004: 335) also points out that there is no Oedipal dimension, hidden meaning or repressed motivation for her slip. 29 Jean-Claude Biette, who has a benevolent, avuncular appearance, plays Quentin. He also has a small role in Rohmer’s La Carrière de Suzanne (1963). He is better known as a former colleague of Rohmer’s at Cahiers du cinéma. Biette was one of the people who interviewed Rohmer for Cahiers du cinéma in 1965, along with Jacques Bontemps and Jean-Louis Comolli, the latter of whom also appears in La Carrière de Suzanne. In 1986, Biette published a perceptive and appreciative essay on Rohmer in Cahiers du cinéma. Intermittently an editor and writer for Cahiers du cinéma, Biette also wrote for the journal Trafic and directed eight feature films of his own, as well as working with Pasolini in Rome in the 1960s. He published three books of film criticism before he died in 2003. Rohmer supported Biette’s filmmaking by releasing Le Champignon des Carpathes (1990) through Les Films du Losange. Haydée Caillot, who plays Edwige, appears in La Femme de l’aviateur as ‘The Blonde’ and in 4 Aventures as a woman hustled by Marie Rivière’s beggar in Montparnasse station. 30 Rohmer says that he verified the street names: ‘There really is a Rue Victor-Hugo in Levallois and another in Courbevoie, and they are both being demolished; I sent myself a letter to the address at Courbevoie; the post office sent it back to me; I sent another to the actress at poste restante; that was also returned to me. Thus, not only is it believable, it’s true!’ (Curchod 1992: 26). 31 Rohmer had long admired Hugo, calling him his ‘favourite author’ (Bonitzer and Daney 1981: 30). In 1966, he had made a short film for schools television about Hugo’s Les Contemplations. In it, he films the island of Jersey and combines background knowledge on the composition of Hugo’s Contemplations with extracts from the poems, read by Antoine Vitez.

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Towards the end, the voice-over mentions Hugo’s interest in metempsychosis; and the programme ends with Vitez reading out 20 lines from the poem that Rohmer includes in Conte d’hiver, not the passage that Loïc recites, but a similar one from the preceding page. Rohmer made a further programme about Hugo in 1969 called Victor Hugo architecte, in which he describes the relation between Hugo’s writing, his illustrations and the architecture of churches and towers, especially Notre Dame cathedral. 32 Rohmer wrote the reunion scene first, then developed the rest of the story (Danton, Giavarini and Taboulay 1992: 26). Rothman considers the film’s use of music uncanny, comparable with the ‘Mr Memory’ tune in The 39 Steps (1935). However, the music in Conte d’hiver is closer to Hitchcock’s use of ‘Lisa’ in Rear Window (1954), discussed earlier in the section on La Femme de l’aviateur. In La Femme de l’aviateur, the whistling of ‘Paris m’a séduit’ connects on-screen and off-screen worlds; in Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver, the music also alludes to the director’s intervention. However, the music in Le Rayon vert is never heard by Delphine and is, therefore, a more conventional type of film music, with the violin music stressing the significance of Delphine finding the playing cards. The music’s use in Conte d’hiver is more like that in Le Beau mariage, where the credit music is played at Sabine’s party. 33 Of Félicie’s response to Loïc’s raising of the question about whether Hermione died or not, Cavell writes: ‘Félicie evidently understands the words of the play to provide her with the articulation of an experience which is not only clear but is now a standard of clarity, as it were, for her life’ (Cavell 2005: 291). Of the conversation in the car between Loïc and Félicie, Cavell writes: ‘Loïc is stunned by her tale, understanding (truly) what she says not as a sign of hopelessness but, on the contrary, as a sort of, let’s say secular, Pascalian wager: this woman has placed her infinite stake in her life not on the theoretical rationality of God’s existence, but on the reality of her own desire’ (Cavell 2005: 290–1). 34 Rothman notes that ‘Rohmer’s films often revolve around women like Félicie who are admirable because they attend to their own experience with the kind and degree of attention necessary to know the thinking of major philosophers, but who also follow their own hearts, not books. Yet Rohmer’s films also include male characters, like Loic, who are trained in philosophy and are forever charting, through books, those women’s ways of thinking and living’ (Rothman 2004: 333–4). 35 White notes Rohmer’s interest in exploring faith and scepticism, writing: ‘A Winter’s Tale’s solemn transformation of death – love as resurrection – sets out a confirmation of faith amid worldly scepticism; it pushes Rohmer toward Rendezvous’s balanced insights, looking for grace and faith within personal turmoil’ (White 1996: 17). Félicie’s resistance to scepticism relates to Cavell’s argument that refutations of scepticism only extend it, ‘true recovery lies in reconceiving it, in finding skepticism’s source’ (Cavell 1988: 80). 36 Ennis argues that Loïc and Félicie misread the play’s ending, seeing ambiguity where there is none (1996: 319). 37 Milward argues that the reappearance of Hermione is a type of resurrection,

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which in Shakespeare’s time was associated more with Catholicism than Anglicanism. He argues that both King Lear and The Winter’s Tale deal with Catholicism. The other plays he writes about are: The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, Measure for Measure and Macbeth. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare ‘is thinking of England in the reign of Henry VIII where events centre on what More called “the king’s great matter” of the divorce from Queen Katharine’ (Milward 1997: 95). Milward points out that Leontes’ behaviour towards Hermione (charging her with adultery on the merest suspicion then arraigning her in court) parallels the behaviour of Henry VIII towards his first queen, Katharine of Aragon. The appeal to the oracle at Delphos parallels Katharine’s appeal to the Pope in Rome. The pagan background of the play is explained by Milward as a result of the 1606 Act in Restraint of Abuses of Players, passed under a Puritan influence, which made it ‘prudent for the dramatist to provide all his plays from then onwards with a conveniently pagan background’ (Milward 1997: 96). Milward also suggests that Camillo parallels Sir Thomas More, who refused to recognize the divorce from Queen Katharine or the accompanying separation from Rome (1997: 97), as a result of which he was imprisoned and executed. Milward then notes that Shakespeare reverses the locations used in his source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, so that Leontes rules over an island kingdom (like England) while Bohemia resembles the Catholic continent. 38 Rohmer reviewed Ordet for Cahiers du cinéma in January 1956. His review’s title, ‘Une Alceste Chrétienne’, refers to the Euripides play and the operas inspired by it, Lully’s Alceste (1674) and Gluck’s Alcestis (1767). In the play, Queen Alcestis volunteers to sacrifice herself for her husband, Admetus, who is ill and who, according to the Oracle, can only be saved if someone else dies in his place. When he hears of this, he refuses to let his wife die, but she refuses to let him die. Hercules and Admetus fight Hell’s rulers to let Alcestis live. At their success, Apollo appears and tells Hercules that he can now take a place amongst the gods; he also reunites husband and wife, Admetus and Alcestis. For Rohmer, Dreyer’s reuniting of Mikkel and Inger in Ordet recalled Euripides’ reuniting of Admetus and Alcestis (in his review, Rohmer refers to Inger as a ‘new Alceste’); in contrast to the pagan setting of Alceste, though, Dreyer’s Ordet, as Rohmer’s title acknowledges, has a Christian setting. Bonitzer (1999: 143) also notes the allusion to Dreyer in Conte d’hiver. 39 Giavarini suggests that the scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, which takes place in a chapel, repeats the scene in Nevers cathedral, with Félicie, like Leontes, having her faith re-awakened (Giavarini 1992: 22). Wilson suggests of Rohmer that ‘true to his Catholic origins perhaps, he rewards Félicie for her faith’ (1999: 55). Cardullo (1995) also interprets the film in religious terms, as does Bénoliel, who describes Rohmer as ‘Catholic and believer’ (1992: 23) and argues that Félicie has a ‘Claudélienne’ inspiration in the cathedral in Nevers, referring to the writer Paul Claudel (1868–1955), who converted to Catholicism after a sudden mystical experience. Bénoliel interprets Félicie’s experience in Nevers as ‘another manifestation of “the green ray”, the proof of the existence of God, ontological proof’ (Bénoliel 1992: 23). There is no evidence for this in the film, though. I prefer Bonitzer’s

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reading of Conte d’hiver, during which he refers to Rohmer as ‘perhaps a believer’ (1999: 143). 40 As Northrop Frye writes of The Winter’s Tale and Hermione’s association with grace: ‘But such grace is not Christian or theological grace, which is superior to the order of nature, but a secular analogy of Christian grace which is identical with nature – the grace that Spenser celebrates in the sixth book of The Faerie Queen’ (Frye 1995: 110). 41 Since Rohmer made his Six contes moraux in the 1960s, critics have discussed whether his films are parables that offer moral lessons. Warehime (2001), for example, discusses Rohmer’s Contes des quatre saisons as ‘seasonal variations of the Conte moral’. She refers to Jean-François Marmontel, an eighteenthcentury French writer, credited, she notes, with the invention of the conte moral as a genre. Rohmer states: ‘Just as the Six Moral Tales have nothing in common with those of Marmontel but their title, the Comedies and Proverbs should not be seen as inspired by Shakespeare or de Musset or Carmontelle or the Comtesse de Segur’. This is a quotation from Rohmer on the back page of volume two of the published scripts of Comédies et proverbs, Paris, Cahiers du cinema/Etoile, 1999. 42 Barr (2002: 69) also notes this. 43 In words that relate to Conte d’hiver’s reflections on absence, faith and art, both the art of film and theatre, Cavell has written: ‘A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film – and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I left unfinished business (Hamlet)’ (Cavell 1979: 160). Klevan (2005b) develops this conjunction of absence and haunting in his essay on It’s a Wonderful Life. 44 Of Paulina’s lines, Frye writes: ‘We notice that Shakespeare seems to be calling our attention to the incredibility of his story and to its ridiculous and outmoded devices when he makes both Pauline and the Gentlemen who report the recognition of Perdita speak of what is happening as “like an old tale”’ (Frye 1995: 113). 45 Giavarini observes that every mise en abyme, from the Arnolfini portrait onwards, represent its author in the art form (1992: 22). 46 Cavell interprets this differently. He notes that ‘Félicie’s pregnancy is emphasized by its association, as she tells her story, with her realization that she had given the incorrect address’ (2005: 289). He then points to the way that Shakespeare refers to Hermione’s pregnancy with Polixenes’ opening line ‘Nine changes of the watery star have been/The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne’. Hermione’s pregnancy is associated with the theme of separation (and with the start of Polixenes’ visit). Cavell gives weight to Félicie’s comment that she realized she had made the mistake about her address when she repeated the mistake when filling out the maternity clinic forms. Cavell interprets these as birth certificate forms, but the dialogue is ‘les papiers de la maternité’. These could be maternity clinic applications, rather than birth certificate forms. Cavell suggests that she laughs as a response to Charles’s comment, ‘You’re taking a risk’, because she knows that she

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is already three months pregnant, but there is no evidence to confirm or contradict Cavell’s interpretation. The length of the holiday at the beginning is unspecified; it could be three months or three weeks. Given Rohmer’s preoccupation with marking the passage of time, I suspect that he would have marked the duration of the holiday if it was important. Cavell suggests that the fact that Félicie connects her slip with her pregnancy means that there is some sense that she is not ready to have ‘Charles present with the appearance of the child’ (Cavell 2004: 439), is in some sense ‘conceptually unprepared’. I disagree with this reading and instead support Rothman’s interpretation that there is no internal obstacle to their reunion. 47 The film’s first line of dialogue doubles its meaning ironically: it refers to the risk she takes in having sex without using contraception and the risk she takes when they part. 48 In observing the ‘coincidence’ between Shakespeare’s tale and Rohmer’s tale (2004: 327), Rothman points out that Loïc takes Félicie to a play of Shakespeare’s that could have been written for her. 49 Egan writes: ‘Paulina intends to subject Leontes and the human world he represents to one final test of faith. Confronted with the unfeigned reality of Hermione and all the natural order for which she stood, Leontes rejected both through a diseased disbelief beyond logic. If Hermione is to resume her role as the human keystone of the play-world’s restored order, then, Leontes must first guarantee the security of that order by an act of faith that is, like his lapse of faith, absolute and beyond the terms of logic: such a faith as will grant to an artwork, solely on the basis of the moral integrity which it images, the ability to transgress the norms of literal reality by becoming itself real’ (Egan 1975: 80). Frye writes: ‘the restoring of Perdita to her mother is an act of sacramental communion, but it is a secular communion, and the “instruments” aiding in it are the human arts’ (Frye 1995: 111). 50 Critchley describes Romanticism as follows: ‘The artwork is evidence for freedom. The work of art is purposively produced through free human activity and it is intuitively available in the form of an object, it is the object in which the subject finds its own freedom reflected back to it and realized. As such, the work of art partakes in and unites the realms of necessity and freedom, epistemology and ethics or the sensuous and the intelligible that Kant had sundered. . . . The category of the aesthetic is the place where the problem of nihilism – the dilemma as to what might count as a meaningful life without the founding certainties of religion – is broached. Of course, the question can be raised, thinking in particular of Kierkegaard, as to whether the aesthetic can perform this lofty function and whether it is only through art that we respond to nihilism’ (Critchley 2004: 105). Writing of Cavell, Critchley notes that ‘the discovery of the everyday as an exceptional achievement must be combined with the acknowledgement that this achievement is never achieved. That is to say, romanticism is that process of secularisation or de-divinization that aims at the establishment of a community based on moral autonomy, but this ideal of community is never realized. Romanticism is, in my terms, a response to the problem of nihilism that aims at a de-theologized re-enchantment of the world’ (Critchley 2004: 141).

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51 Cavell begins his reading of the play by noting that at the end of The Winter’s Tale a dead five-year old, Mamillius, remains unaccounted for: ‘Shall we say that the absent boy is meant to cast the shadow of finitude or doubt over the general air of reunion at the end of the play, to emblematize that no human reconciliation is uncompromised, not even one constructible by the powers of Shakespeare?’ (Cavell 1988: 76) This is true also of Ordet, Random Harvest and Conte d’hiver. In Ordet, Inger and Mikkel’s son dies during childbirth. In Random Harvest, Rainier’s son dies soon after he regains his memory in Liverpool. In Conte d’hiver, when Félicie takes Charles back to her mother’s house, he invites her to come to Brittany with him, just as Maxence had invited her to Nevers. She says, ‘So I’d be the boss. I’d like that with you’. It is a pointed repetition, of which Félicie is aware, but also an immediate challenge to her romantic ideal. As Bonitzer notes, when Charles proposes moving to another town and starting up his own business, love transforms the enterprise for Félicie, but maybe not for her daughter (Bonitzer 1999: 145). The film ends with a shot of Elise and her cousins playing in a room without adults. 52 Curchod notes that L’Arbre was released without publicity or press in one cinema in Paris (1993: 42). Trémois notes that Rohmer released L’Arbre with a contract that demanded it be screened at that cinema for six months; ‘naturally, because it was Rohmer, the cinema was full from the first day’ (1997: 65). 53 Baratier first worked as Rohmer’s director of photography on L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque; she then photographed all his subsequent films, becoming an essential member of his team along with Ribier, Stephen and Etchegaray. She notes that Rohmer’s direction is flexible, despite the rigorous preparation, ‘He decides on his direction at the last moment; it’s when he is in the space and when he sees how it will work that he agrees. He really listened to the preliminary ideas, but above all he needs to allow for the possibility of changing it at the last moment’ (Martin 2002: 80). 54 The pairing of Dombasle and Greggory in L’Arbre recalls Pauline à la plage, made 10 years earlier, in which Greggory chased Dombasle in vain. Rohmer rewards the loyal viewer of his films by presenting them as a couple, playing with the recurrence of actors just as John Ford or Yasujiro Ozu did with their actors. 55 During the production, actors and crew lived in the chateau which features as Julien’s home (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 66). 56 Rohmer also talked to his actors. Greggory says: ‘We discuss life, things that happened, loads of things, but always with the ulterior motives of the characters in the film. For example, in the last film that I made, L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993), for my character we were really inspired by political personalities that we saw on television, people who are in front of a camera to impress the public, to seduce them’ (Hertay 1998: 130). 57 De Baecque and Jousse also note that the chapter headings written on intertitles give the film the air of being like a fable (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 68).

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58 For his discussion of Kiarostami, see Perez (1998: 260–83) and Perez (2005). Tesson (1993: 76) compares Rohmer’s incorporation of documentary into fiction with the tuna-fishing sequence in Stromboli, while De Baecque (1993: 21) suggests that Rohmer’s amateur approach is a deliberate move by the director to thumb his nose at the mainstream of French ‘quality’ cinema. 59 Rohmer also inserts shots of flowers and trees several times during the interviews. Costa (2007: 154) argues that the inserts of flowers and plants in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque are like photos in an album or illustrations in an encyclopaedia. He connects them to the photographs of the tree which characters take in the film, especially Blandine’s picture which is used on the cover of the magazine 60 De Baecque also remarks that Blandine and Bérénice are in a way rivals (1993: 20), noting that the film allows us to think that Blandine is attracted to Julien (1993: 21). Vassé thinks that Bérénice and Blandine’s disagreement about damage to the environment is a competition between the two women to prove themselves in front of the editor and the mayor (Vassé 1994: 73). 61 De Baecque agrees that Rohmer is placing his methods of research, scripting and directing on screen (1993: 20). 62 Puaux, in an article that links all of Rohmer’s work on architecture and space, writes ‘in L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, the old town or new town problematic gives way to another problem, equally real: the town in the country’ (1995: 185). Curchod writes: ‘with the consummate artistry of a fleeting look and the real talent of a pamphleteer, he creates an amiable satire of the world around him that he knows to perfection’ (1993: 42). Puaux also notes that the film was made quickly and released a month before the national elections. She describes it as a political pamphlet on the problem of decentralization that gives power to local politicians (1995: 185). 63 It may have been L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque’s engagement with contemporary French politics, combined with its allusion to the history of the Vendée, which prevented its distribution in the UK. 64 The revolt by the Vendée Royalists and the guerrilla war were the subjects of novels by two of Rohmer’s favourite novelists, Hugo’s Quatre-vingttreize (Ninety-Three, 1873) and Balzac’s Les Chouans (1829), named after Jean Chouan, the nom de guerre of Jean Cottereau. Set in 1799 in Brittany, Balzac’s novel tells of a love affair and eventual marriage between a Republican, Marie de Verneuil, and a Royalist leader, Comte de Montauran. It describes in detail the area, its geographical and social features, and the battles that take place there. A Cahiers de cinéma article on L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque is entitled ‘Fragments de chouannerie médiatique’ (Tesson 1993). Les Blancs et les bleus is also the title of a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas, published in 1867 and set in the 1790s. 65 In an interview conducted for the release of L’Arbre, le maire at la médiathèque, Rohmer reveals how conscious he is that his political and aesthetic choices have been criticized as reactionary: ‘in Cahiers in 1969, I expressed my support for ecology, before the word itself became well known. For me, an artist should be more concerned with questions of the

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environment, of the beauty of the world, of the countryside as much as the city, instead of being attached to a particular political stance. In 1969, above all at Cahiers, this was of course a bit provocative, misunderstood and interpreted as a conservative attitude’ (de Baecque and Jousse 1993: 74). 66 The book was published in 1992 by La Découverte; it was edited by Martine Barrère, within her field a well-known science writer and journalist. 67 De Baecque notes that by the end of the film Julien, through his political naivety and his commitment to the land, has charmed us (1993: 18). Curchod suspects that the name of the girl who plays Marc’s daughter Zoé, Galaxie Barbouth, prompted Rohmer to name Julien’s daughter after one of the brightest stars in the sky, Véga (Curchod 1993: 43). In an email (1 October 2008), Barbouth explained that she got the part because her father, the actor Joel Barbouth, knew the casting director Christianne Lebrima. She read a part of the script for Rohmer and he called her two weeks later to say that she had got the job. Barbouth confirms that cast and crew lived in the chateau during the production. Curchod also observes that, in the era when great emphasis is placed on the importance of Europe and the European Community, it is appropriate that the mayor’s ex-wife lives and works in Strasbourg, home of the European parliament (1993: 42). 68 Rohmer often said that he was an environmentalist and ecologist, supporting a green agenda long before it came to the attention of mainstream politicians (see, for instance, Dokhan 2007). 69 Interview with Rohmer in the Artificial Eye press book for Les Rendez-vous de Paris, held in the BFI library. After working with Rohmer, Bellar, Esther in ‘Le Rendez-vous de 7 heures’, said: ‘Rohmer still makes movies like a young man. For the market scene, we had one actor and myself, a sound man following us from behind the stalls and Rohmer himself pushing the camerawoman around in a wheelchair! We thought we were just rehearsing, but he shot it!’ (Andrew 1996: 4). Bellar wrote to Rohmer, inviting him to see a stage production of Sleeping Beauty in which she was appearing. To her surprise, he came and then invited her to meet him in his office. They talked about some things that had happened to her and two of these events contributed to the story of the film in which she appears. 70 Jousse notes that the three films that comprise Les Rendez-vous are ‘at the same time totally independent from each other and nonetheless connected to each other through latent and subtle links – rhymes, repeated motifs and other variations’ (1995: 27). 71 The song, written by Rohmer and his editor Mary Stephen, credited to Sebastien Erms, anticipates the song in Conte d’été, Rohmer’s next film, not just in the use of the accordion but in its tune. The singer and accordionist, Florence Levu and Christian Bassoul, are members of Mouffetard-Musette, a group of professional street singers. 72 Rohmer says: ‘it was rather amusing because I was pushing it myself, which meant I could control the distance between the camera and the actors. So I was very actively involved, which was very pleasant’ (Rohmer 1996a).

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73 When Aricie returns the wallet, she has a shifty way of looking around Esther’s flat, as if sizing it up. 74 Keohane (2007) writes about Rohmer’s use of walking in ‘Les Bancs de Paris’, offering several nuanced comments about the varied kinds of interaction between Renko and Rauscher. He points to the pattern of the woman moving away from the man, in the first sequence by the Seine and in the park at Villette (Keohane 2007: 15). This anticipates the ending of that story. Keohane (2007: 13) also notes that ‘Les Bancs de Paris’ opens without telling us anything about how long this couple have known each other. In this, it resembles the opening of Conte de printemps. 75 As the man explains to the woman, Galatea, a sea nymph, was loved by Polyphemus, a Cyclops, but she loved Acis. Polyphemus crushed Acis under a huge rock and Galatea then threw herself into the sea. The story is the subject of operas by Handel and Lully. The love triangle story is relevant, but Rohmer also included Ottin’s statue as it was a way of showing nudity (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 33). The statue is one of the film’s several references to art, a point also made by Legrand (1995: 61). In ‘Le Rendez-vous de 7 heures’, in the scene in the Café Dame Tartine, visible behind Aricie and Esther as they sit opposite Horace is the coloured fountain created by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in hommage to Stravinsky. Rohmer chose a Miro poster as decoration for Esther’s studio flat because its colours corresponded to those of the fountain (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 33). It is noticeable that Rohmer films the Miro poster on the wall for a few seconds after Esther walks out of frame after crying alone. We also see the Miro poster in the background as she explains to Aricie about the thief agreeing to meet her at the café. In ‘Les Bancs de Paris’, the man and the woman disagree about the Surrealists and Cubists in front of Bateau-Lavoir in the Place Emile Goudeau, where artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Gris and Jacob either lived or met. She chooses for their final rendezvous the hotel in this square. 76 Rohmer says: ‘The choice of painter was a matter of chance. I had my subject, I had even thought that we would go to the Picasso Museum, but I kept asking myself which painter to use. The painter that I met, Pierre de Chevilly, inspired me and inspired everyone. And it happened that he had a studio which I really liked, in which it was very pleasant to film. I was looking more for a figurative painter than an abstract painter because it is very difficult to talk about abstract paintings. The fact that this painter represented, on the one hand, crowds and, on the other hand, the sky, large expanses of space, connected with my intentions because in Les Rendez-vous space and the crowd are big topics’ (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 31). 77 Rohmer says that the Swedish actress, Veronika Johansson, herself came up with this remark: ‘It would never have occurred to me to say of a Picasso painting “here is the steak and here is the ham”’ (Bouquet and Jousse 1995: 31). 78 White calls him a ‘vain, deceitful hound-dog artist . . . tall, handsome, with judgemental eyes’ (1996: 14): ‘because Kraft is Rohmer’s most obsessive male

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character since Jean-Louis Trintignant in Ma Nuit chez Maud, what clearly comes through here is Rohmer exploring new territory of male immaturity and arrogance’ (White 1996: 15). 79 A number of people have found, like Jousse in Cahiers du cinéma, that Rohmer’s Les Rendez-vous de Paris represents ‘the quintessence of his cinema’ (Jousse 1995: 27). White, for example, sees Les Rendez-vous as a summation of Rohmer’s interests, judging ‘“Mother and Child 1907” the finest of his films because its narrative efficiency no longer feels constrained: one can view his entire oeuvre as a journey toward just this kind of animated numinous vision’ (White 1996: 14). Vasse calls ‘Mère et enfant 1907’ the most beautiful of the three films (2007: 109). Rohmer’s former Cahiers du cinéma colleague and fellow filmmaker Jacques Rivette praised Les Rendez-vous de Paris, saying: ‘the ultimate in direction is the last film by Rohmer, Les Rendez-vous de Paris, which looks as if it was made in the most simple way, without any effort at all’ (Rivette 1995: 3). Rivette elsewhere (2001) expresses his general admiration for Rohmer’s films. Rohmer also liked Rivette’s films: ‘If anyone has maintained the French tradition of pure cinema, with intransigence, it is Rivette. Rivette plays the same role for today’s generation that Bresson was able to play for us in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a cinema which is not affected, which is demanding, which says what it has to say without giving in to any vogues and which has a profound idea about its art. A cinema in which one finds a mode of expression absolutely original and which can only be understood by initiates, because there is an esoteric or closed side to Rivette. I think that Rivette’s influence is permanent . . . much bigger than Godard’s’ (de Baecque, Jousse and Toubiana 1990: 30).

Chapter 7  1 Tobin also notes Langlet’s importance to the two films: ‘she makes us think that the magic of a holiday romance is reproducible during the intervening years, and that a new film can rekindle the memory of another film, one which was loved a long time before; Rohmer offers this gift to his loyal viewers, which then shows itself to be in line with the explicit theme of Conte d’été’ (Tobin 1996: 6). Handyside also quotes Tobin’s review of Conte d’été (2009: 153, n.3).  2 Mary Stephen describes this as Rohmer’s aim for the opening (Fauvel 2007a: 242).  3 Langlet says that she chose the name ‘Margot’ from a list of possible names, which Rohmer showed her, without knowing its Breton connections. She notes its appearance in the song ‘Santiano’ and also remarks that it was the name of the boat on which they left for Saint-Malo (Guerin 1996: 52). She says, ‘When he showed me the script, there were three letters – A, B and C. They were the three girls. I was the letter C, I think. And he asked me if I had an idea about the name of my character’ (Cléder 2007: 59–60).

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 4 By the time Rohmer makes Conte d’été, he admits that the method of the Contes moraux is inappropriate: ‘In the Contes moraux, there was a little game between the text in the first person and what happened, which often contradicted what was said. It was a little game which was interesting, but which seems to me a little outdated now. In current cinema, I wouldn’t put a commentary’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46). The hero in La Boulangère de Monceau and the characters in ‘Les Bancs de Paris’ and ‘Mère et enfant, 1907’ also remain nameless.  5 Rohmer says of Gaspard: ‘I had wanted to show a male character, which I hadn’t done since the Contes moraux. Gaspard is all the more enigmatic since there is no interior monologue. The film isn’t presented from his point of view. We are with him all the time, but externally. The only point of view, if there is one, is that of Margot’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46).  6 Rohmer shot this scene with a minimum of planning: ‘I decided to shoot it on the spur of the moment. It was a Sunday and we thought it would be overcast and there wouldn’t be many people there. It was early in July. But it turned out to be sunny so a huge crowd turned up on the beach. At the time we were staying in a villa not five minutes from the beach. So I went to take a look at the beach, and I told everybody, “We must shoot today because it’s an unmissable opportunity”. Five minutes later, we’d done it’ (Rohmer 1996a).  7 Langlet’s shoulders rise upwards as she leans back, in a pose that recalls her pose in Pauline à la plage, which itself refers to Matisse’s La Blouse roumaine.  8 Hitchcock is famous for using forward-tracking shots to signal the closeness between a character’s point of view and the film’s: two celebrated examples include the second Mrs de Winter’s arrival at Manderley in Rebecca and Alicia Huberman’s arrival for dinner at Alex Sebastian’s house in Notorious. Elsewhere, Rohmer used this technique, notably in Le Genou de Claire, when Jérôme first meets Claire, and in Perceval le Gallois, when Perceval enters Blanchefleur’s castle. The combination of the empty painted set and the forward-tracking shot suggest Perceval’s wonder at what has happened in the castle and his uneasy movement into an unknown space.  9 Rohmer says: ‘there is one element that comes from the actor who plays the protagonist, and that is the music: if he had not been a guitarist, I don’t think he would have been a songwriter in the story’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 14). He adds: ‘the fact that Melvil Poupaud plays the guitar inspired me and made me want to have him play music which had no connection with what he normally played’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 48). Poupaud says: ‘He was looking for a young guy to play the part of an actor. When he found out that I was interested in music and that I played the guitar, the character became a musician. Eric composed a piece on the piano which I play in the film. We immediately worked on that with his editor, Mary Stephen, who played the piano and adapted the chords for the guitar. Gwenaëlle was there to sing the melody’ (Guerin 1996: 53). 10 Poupaud recalls that he rehearsed the script with Langlet and did some readings with the other two actors, Simon and Nolin (Guerin 1996: 53). Poupaud also notes the difference between Rohmer’s way of working with

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women and with men: ‘Eric had told me that he had the habit of talking with the actors a lot before filming, but when it came to men, it was less important – “It’s necessary to stick to the lines that I have written”’ (Guerin 1996: 53). 11 Langlet says: ‘I had really studied anthropology. He said, “Good, so very well”. I worked in a restaurant, so he told me “It is perfect – you will work in a restaurant”. It developed like that’ (Cléder 2007: 59–60); ‘the conversation began with Eric and continued with Melvil Poupaud/Gaspard in the film’ (Guerin 1996: 52). Handyside writes that Margot, as an ethnographer, is ‘detached from the triangle formed by Gaspard, Léna and Solène’ (2009: 155). Margot is detached because she is hesitant about forming an attachment to Gaspard. 12 Rohmer says: ‘The non-professional characters are the only ones to use improvisation. There is the sailor and the accordionist. They had no lines’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 14). 13 Knowing that Rohmer used a small tape-recorder like this to record his conversations with his actors, it is hard not to imagine that Gaspard is using Rohmer’s own machine, the fictional musician’s composing efforts mirroring Rohmer’s process of creating his scripts. 14 Gaspard is invited to two contrasting dinners: one, with Solène, her uncle, aunt and the accordionist, is friendly – his music is discussed with appreciation; the other, with Léna her cousins and their friends, is not so friendly – his music is discussed in terms of its ability to earn him money. Later on, Léna tells him that her cousins ‘can’t understand why the guy is you’ and ‘I don’t think you make the grade either’. 15 Hugues Aufray’s ‘Santiano’, which includes the line with ‘Margot’, is an adaptation of a traditional sea shanty, ‘Santy Ano’, in which ‘Californi-o’ rhymes, instead of ‘Saint-Malo’. One of Aufray’s most famous songs, ‘Santiano’ was a hit when it was released in 1961. 16 Compare the career of Margot’s absent boyfriend in Conte d’été with Henri in Pauline à la plage, also an ethnologist in the South Pacific. For the characters in Rohmer’s Breton and Norman films, the South Pacific is a mythical, distant place. Rohmer’s fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels, which he mentions in interviews, may have inspired this treatment. See, for example, Rohmer (2010: 95), Cerf (2010) and Goudet (2004: 23). In Goudet (2004), Rohmer cites Stevenson’s The Wrecker (1892), the hero of which, Loudon Dodd, sails across the Pacific from San Francisco. Bougainville’s description of his visit to Tahiti in Voyage around the World, read by Frédéric in L’Amour, l’après-midi, is also relevant. 17 Conte d’été refers to two Savignon novels, Daughters of the Rain (Filles de la pluie, Grasset, 1912), for which Savignon won the Prix Goncourt, and The Secret of the Sea (Le Secret des eaux, Calmann-Lévy, 1923, translated as Sunken Gold, G. G. Harrap and Co., 1925). The film does not refer to Savignon’s Une femme dans chaque port, published by Flammarion in 1918. The title of this book, A Woman in Every Port, could function as a title for Conte d’été.

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18 When an interviewer tells Rohmer that ‘holidays are a moment when time seems to go at different speeds’, he replies: ‘It is true that the character in Conte d’été is defined in his own eyes in terms of a distant future: when he is thirty, he will find love, become a musician and so on. He throws himself into the future, and into the past a little, and fails to live in the present’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 14). Another interviewer asks Rohmer if Gaspard’s indecision comes from his youth or his being on holiday; Rohmer replies ‘both’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46). Rohmer distinguishes between the holiday of Le Rayon vert and that of Conte d’été: ‘In Le Rayon vert, more things happened because the holidays were magical. Here, the holidays are sad, as they often are. I wanted to show holidays which ended in nothing, holidays which are lacunae, moments of “non-being”, and the summer corresponds well to this’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46). 19 The iris and intertitles reveal, for Rohmer, the influence of silent cinema on him: ‘My New Wave friends and I are silent film-makers, contrary to what is usually thought (especially in my films, where the characters talk a lot). We were brought up on silent movies, at a time when the Cinémathèque showed very few talkies. So we reckoned that instead of trying to work the date into dialogue, it was easier to use writing’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 14). 20 The director of photography on Conte d’été, Diane Baratier, describes Rohmer’s fastidious attention to framing: ‘Brittany is a flat region; it was necessary to place the horizon at the first or second third [of the frame]. One could do it in quarters, but it was not as good. Eric cared a lot about respecting this rule’ (Anger, Burdeau and Lounas 1996: 51). Rohmer explains: ‘I wanted to show people talking as they walked along because it’s realistic and it’s often difficult to do. Up to now, I’d hesitated for technical reasons. Tracking shots are incredibly cumbersome. You need rails, or complicated equipment like a Steadicam, and so on, and often the result isn’t very satisfactory . . . So in this case we found a trolley with wide tyres which could move on wet sand, which allowed me to use very long movements. The movement along the beach during the long conversation with Léna lasted for at least a kilometre. It’s very long. The beach was ideal as the sand is very hard, since the sea goes out a long way’ (Rohmer 1996a). 21 Serceau points to the similarity between Sabine’s restless movements – signifying her impatience – and those of Gaspard in Conte d’été (2000: 79). 22 Aurélia Nolin attests to the care Rohmer took with the costumes for Conte d’été: ‘He himself chose the clothes in our wardrobe. It was very funny. He bought all three of us a swimming costume at Galeries Lafayette’ (Guerin 1996: 53). 23 Rohmer says of this scene, ‘It’s a matter of back-lighting. Almost everything is backlit and, at that particular moment, the light comes in very low. But I like using accident, and light is subject to this. When the sky is grey, that lends one kind of beauty and when the sky is bright, well, then there is the beauty that comes from going against the light. What I like about Brittany is that the light is so varied, and I didn’t have that for La Collectionneuse’ (Amiel and Herpe 1999: 16–17).

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24 Serceau also notes the way that Conte d’été reprises the telephone call as a deus ex machina from Pauline à la plage (2000: 83). 25 Tobin calls him a ‘human sponge’ (Tobin 1996: 7). Rohmer comments: ‘even if my subject was written before I met the actor, Melvil Poupaud has a great facility for silence. He isn’t an exuberant actor. Let’s say that he’s not Fabrice Luchini’ (Anger, Burdeau and Toubiana 1996: 46). Claude-Marie Trémois calls Poupaud, because of his reserve, opacity and seriousness, ‘a Bressonian actor’ (1997: 234). She also calls him a ‘Ruizien’ actor, Poupaud having made seven films with Raoul Ruiz, four when he was a child. 26 In an insightful review, Martin emphasizes how Conte d’été ‘does accrue, by the end, a haunting, caustic, and rather devastating emotional quality’ (Martin 2000). For Martin, Gaspard is ‘an extraordinary portrait of a modern man’: ‘the character-portrait of Gaspard is one which most thoughtful, urbane guys will find genuinely unnerving. Seeing this chap on screen is like seeing some dark secret shared among men, leaked out for the whole world to see. Gaspard spends the whole plot equivocating between his three women. Throughout most of it he is, on the surface and even in his heart, a charming, sweet sort of chap, not at all a villain. But he is also – and this is what Rohmer shows with an unerring gaze – evasive, cowardly and defensive’ (Martin 2000). 27 Like Conte d’été, Conte d’automne uses actors who had previously worked with Rohmer, in this case two of his most important collaborators, Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière. Talking of the inspiration Rohmer received from his ‘immediate entourage’, Rohmer’s editor, Mary Stephen, says: ‘And then, Autumn Tale becomes a song, a sort of homage to those same carefree young girls (in actresses’ terms, all the girls who appeared in Perceval le Gallois) now become forty-something women’ (Mousoulis 2000). Rohmer may also be drawing on the fact that Béatrice Romand, who plays the widow, Magali, became a widow in 1980 (see Carbonnier 1984: 11). In Leigh (2007), I write at greater length about Romand and Rivière’s roles. Tortajada (2004: 234, n.1) also notes Rohmer’s use of the same actors. Of Conte d’automne’s middle-aged characters, Rohmer says: ‘The characters in Conte d’automne are still young enough to look towards the future, but they have also a dense past already. At the same time, they can look forwards and backwards’ (de Baecque and Lalanne 1998: 33). 28 Tortajada notes that Isabelle and Rosine are ‘two prototypes of the mediator, important in the theatrical tradition and often represented by the confidants, servants or friends. Marivaux’s theatre, for example, is full of such characters’ (Tortajada 2004: 233). 29 Ryan (Andrew et al. 2000) proposes that Magali and Isabelle are bored, but that is not exact enough. Both are busy, yet both have settled into routine. 30 Rohmer dresses Libolt in warm autumnal colours and, with neatly combed thinning hair, he appears as an elegant and handsome middle-aged man, younger than Isabelle’s husband. Libolt endows Gérald with enormous warmth and charm, as well a delicate blend of confidence, vulnerability and honesty. Rivière comments on Libolt: ‘For the first scene, I arrive, I see Alain sitting at a table wearing a tie, hair combed back, very handsome with

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his green eyes. I thought immediately of Les Grand Meaulnes when he was talking to me. It was very pleasant. But it isn’t normal: you place a small ad and you come across someone like Alain Libolt. If it was like that, I’d place small ads in all the papers from tomorrow’ (Higuinen and Lalanne 1998: 40). Libolt understood his character as follows: ‘This man possesses a past of which we know some elements – his travels, his life in North Africa, his divorce. He is at a time in his life where he is playing his last cards, but, also, wherever he goes, he’s a stranger. The concerns he has about this meeting are critical for him’ (Joyard 1998: 46). 31 In Leigh (2006), I describe Conte d’automne’s depiction of Etienne and Rosine’s relationship, concentrating on Sandre’s and Portal’s performances. 32 Libolt’s first film was Les Grands Meaulnes (The Wanderer, 1967) by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco and based on Alain Fournier’s novel; he also featured, early in his career, in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance drama, L’Armée des ombres (The Army in the Shadows, 1969), playing a young traitor strangled by comrades he has betrayed; both Libolt and Rohmer also appear in Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (1971). Didier Sandre’s CV can be found here: http://www. didiersandre.info/. Alain Libolt’s CV can be found here: http://www.zelig-fr. com/index.php?id=106/. 33 Rohmer still withholds something: Rosine tells Magali that she saw Isabelle and Gérald in Montélimar, but Isabelle later tells Gérald that she also saw Rosine seeing them, something of which Rosine remains unaware. 34 Cardullo (2004: 178) also notes the ‘double meaning’ of Conte d’automne’s title, writing: ‘not only have the valley’s grapes ripened, but four of its inhabitants – the principal figures in Autumn Tale – have come to that mature age of forty-five or so when the reality of winter, or the fact of mortality, first comes into view’. 35 Rohmer’s integration of Provençal wine-making in Conte d’automne can be thrown into relief by considering A Good Year (2006), directed by Ridley Scott from a novel by Peter Mayle and, like Conte d’automne, set in Provence. It is an entertaining comedy, set in and around Gordes in the Lubéron, but it makes no systematic use of its location. There are two quick references to Gordes, and viewers familiar with Peter Mayle might recognize the setting, but the film does nothing else with the location. It does not matter where it is in Provence that Max Skinner (Russell Crowe) moves to after leaving London because A Good Year uses Provence as shorthand for a generalized fantasy of ‘the good life’, reproducing the cliché of the Provençal countryside rejuvenating an angst-ridden, urban-dwelling individual. Like Conte d’automne, A Good Year refers to wine-making, but whereas Rohmer integrates wine-making into plot and characterization, Scott and Mayle use it as only as a device to get Crowe and the local girl (Marion Cotillard) together. One could also look at the work of Claude Berri and his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol’s novels, which are set in Provence, Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon de Sources (1986). Wilson (1999: 107–13) has a chapter called ‘Imagining Provence’, in which she looks at the work of Berri as promoting a ‘heritage’ vision of the French countryside.

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36 Asked why he chose the Ardèche and the Drôme, Rohmer replies: ‘First, the fact that people live in different locations and that they move, they intertwine. I like threads that intertwine and a plot is indeed like a web, with intertwinings, so it did reflect the subject of the film’ (Rohmer 1998). He also comments: ‘What pleases me in this film is that it doesn’t take place in a town but in a region – the Rhône valley – where people live a few kilometres from each other. It’s a very important element of modern life in the country: people move around a lot’ (de Baecque and Lalanne 1998: 35). 37 Villella also notes the ‘innate connection between Magali and her vineyard’ that Rohmer establishes in this scene (Villella 2000), as does Serceau, who writes: ‘Isabelle (Conte d’automne) comes and goes from the house to the bookshop, to Magali’s property, to her meetings with Gérald. She isn’t engraved into this environment, in which she merely resides. The visit to the vines reveals her lack of knowledge of nature’ (Serceau 2000: 81). 38 When Isabelle and Gérald meet for lunch, they talk about themselves, and when Gérald asks whether Isabelle (pretending to be Magali) produces ‘Côtes-du-Rhône or [Coteaux-du-] Tricastin’, she answers ‘Côtes-du-Rhône’. This discussion leads to the conversation about their backgrounds and the discovery that until decolonization in the 1960s Gérald and Magali’s families were wine-makers in North Africa. Both families then moved to La Drôme, the area where they live. This explanation is historically accurate; of the wine made in the Coteaux-du-Tricastin region, Jancis Robinson notes: ‘The region was substantially re-developed by pieds noirs returning from North Africa in the late 1960s’ (1999: 717). 39 Rohmer praises Romand’s way of speaking: ‘Béatrice Romand doesn’t speak very fast. But she has a talent which I greatly appreciate. She articulates. . . . There’s an actor I can compare her to – Fernandel. Because Fernandel was very funny, but he spoke extremely slowly. He would articulate and that didn’t stop him from being funny. We relished his words’ (Rohmer 1982). 40 Schilling (2007: 153) also cites Lalanne. 41 Ryan writes that ‘the women’s ennui is suggested by their constant movement around the vineyards rather than through their conversation . . . Nor is it by chance that, wandering away, Isabelle catches her blouse on a thorn’ (Andrew et al. 2000). 42 Tortajada, in an article on ‘ideal love’ and ‘pragmatic love’ in Rohmer’s films, points to this moment: ‘What structures the meeting is the emphasis upon the couple’s looks, which is of course highly significant because the perfect model of love at first sight shows the pair looking directly into each other’s eyes experiencing love’s transparency’ (2004: 236). For this reason, Romand’s removal of her sunglasses, the shading of her eyes to see more clearly and the turning of her back to the camera are all significant (Tortajada 2004: 237). 43 See Leigh (2006) for an extended description of this scene. 44 Several people, including Rohmer, have spoken of this shot; for example, Villella writes: ‘Isabelle’s anxiety in the final shot confirms a longing, restlessness and questioning that Rohmer explores with such masterful

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subtlety’ (Villella 2000). Mary Stephen says that she chose this one out of three or four takes and that Rohmer then approved her choice, sending written instructions to exhibitors that the houselights of the cinemas be kept down until the last frame of the film (Mousoulis 2000). Cahiers du cinéma used the final frame as the lead photograph in their special issue on Conte d’automne (September 1998, 527).

Chapter 8  1 Manning’s book describes the historical context of Elliott’s life and refutes several claims made by Richard Bentley, Elliott’s publisher, John Goldworth Alger, author of Englishmen in the Revolution (1889) and of Grace’s profile in the Dictionary of National Biography, and Horace Bleakley, author of Ladies Fair and Frail: Sketches of the Demi-Monde in the Eighteenth-Century (1909). She concludes, ‘The French have always been kinder to Grace Elliott than her own nitpicking and biased countrymen’ (Manning 2005: 379–80). Alger, for example, in Englishmen in the French Revolution (1889), disputes the veracity of Elliott’s account: ‘Had the work been trustworthy it would have been the best narrative of a British eyewitness of the Revolution. Unfortunately, though accepted by Sainte Beuve, who wrote a preface to the French translation, it has been shown by Vatel, Madame Dubarry’s biographer, and other critics, to be a mixture in unknown quantities of reality and fiction. Mrs Elliott professes to have been in four Paris prisons, but her name is not in the list of any’ (Alger 1889: 146). After listing several points in Elliott’s Journal that he regards as incorrect, Alger accuses Elliott of taking on the experiences of someone else as her own: ‘All that is certain is, that she was Gem’s fellowprisoner at Versailles, and that she knew a Mrs Myler or Miglia, widow of an Italian, who was really a prisoner in Paris, and whose experiences she has apparently appropriated and embellished. She was watched, as a suspected political intriguer, after the Terror was over; she returned to England in 1801, went back to France about 1816, and died there in 1823’ (Alger 1889: 147).  2 Although a journal, Grace wrote it several years after the events it describes. Like other readers of Elliott’s Journal, Rohmer found literary merit in it; ‘There’s a sort of novelistic narrator’ (Blouin, Bouquet and Tesson 2001: 52), he states, adding: ‘I took this story like a novel and I should say that having read it, I admired the way it was written, the descriptions and the style of dialogue, which I found remarkable in comparison with other works of the era. There is in Grace Elliott’s Journal a tone which is not that far from Dickens, or even Stevenson. It’s very nineteenth century’ (Blouin, Bouquet and Tesson 2001: 53).  3 Elliott’s Journal may have been censored and re-written in 1859 when Richard Bentley published it. A note towards the end of the Journal states: ‘[Here the manuscript terminates.]’ (Elliot 1859: 197). Bentley wrote what follows, the last 10 pages, which describe Grace’s subsequent arrest and imprisonment, the nobility she meets in prison, her attempted escape, her imprisonment

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at Versailles and eventual release. Bentley suggests that Grace received a marriage proposal from Napoleon, but he does not indicate a source for this claim, nor for several others. He describes her return to England after 1801 and how she lived in England until 1814, when the Bourbons were restored and she returned to France. Manning’s biography describes the Journal’s publication history in detail (2005: 363–82), quoting a letter from Bentley to Grace’s granddaughter, Georgina Cavendish-Bentinck, who gave him the manuscript. Bentley’s letter asks: ‘I observe the Manuscript is torn off at the end. Can the remainder be recovered? It ends with her escape from prison’ (Manning 2005: 369–70). The Journal was translated and published in French in 1861 by Michel Levy Frères, together with an appreciative essay by the critic Charles Sainte-Beuve.  4 Rohmer is correct. Orphans of the Storm, which depicts the harshness of the ancien régime, shows events in several characters’ lives, mixing historical figures with fictional characters; Danton, for example, rushes on horseback to rescue Henriette from the guillotine. Orphans of the Storm includes some Parisian crowd scenes, where sans-culottes wave around guillotined heads on pikes; these resemble Rohmer’s depictions of crowd scenes in L’Anglaise et le Duc. In his survey of French Revolution films, Harison points out that films about the French Revolution tend to concentrate on the Terror and the guillotine, but not the creation of universal suffrage and the notion of human rights (Harison 2005: 318). Harison notes that the heads on pikes in Orphans of the Storm are typical of the prevalence of ‘the negative iconography of the French Revolution’ films (2005: 306). Some reviewers of L’Anglaise et le Duc criticized it for using this negative iconography; Cyril Béghin, for instance, asks: ‘How can we not take as cynical caricatures the portraits of all the men of the people and the soldiers as vulgar and lewd?’ (Béghin 2004: 38). Further on, Béghin writes, ‘Very early, Rohmer evokes one of the most well known episodes of September 1792, a key image of the Terror and a cliché of the fury of the populace: the decapitation of the Princess de Lamballe and the carrying of her head through Paris on the end of a pike’ (Béghin 2004: 587). Rohmer films this event because Grace describes it in her Journal, though he accentuates its impact by conflating two episodes. The scene in which the mob raise the Princess de Lamballe’s head on a pike up to Grace’s carriage window joins two journal incidents: chapter four’s beginning, of ‘I met the mob on the Boulevard, with the head and the body of the unfortunate Princess de Lamballe’ (Elliott 1859: 81); and chapter one’s middle, which adds details to an account of a similar encounter, with the head of Monsieur de Foulon: ‘They thrust the head into my carriage: at the horrid sight I screamed and fainted away’ (Elliott 1859: 25). Given that Grace saw similar sights twice, Rohmer’s accentuating seems justified.  5 Renoir’s La Marseillaise mixes the intimate with the celebrated, and he encourages viewers to side with the revolutionaries. Rohmer, like Renoir, uses intertitles or signs to announce dates and places: 14 July 1789 at Versailles; October 1790, Marseille; April 1792, Coblentz; April 1792, Valenciennes. See Sesonske (1980: 323–50) for further discussion of La Marseillaise. Sesonske writes: ‘Renoir and his film stand firmly on the side of

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the Revolution – “I shot the film in a state of great enthusiasm for democratic ideas, that’s evident” – yet he represents the court and the aristocrats lucidly and objectively’ (1980: 332). Sesonske points out that the characters in La Marseillaise represent a social class first of all: ‘these Marseillais are the common men of the revolution; they have already chosen to be patriots and thus relinquished further choice’ (Sesonske 1980: 336). Their centrality in the film, Sesonske argues, ‘is as a chorus commenting on the events that transform France from monarchy to republic’ (1980: 336). Braudy (1977: 129) also notes that ‘La Marseillaise deals with the early years of the Revolution, before the Terror sanctioned scapegoat execution as a means of national unity’.  6 The filmmaker used a green screen in a huge studio (1000 square metres) and generated the exterior sets on a computer, having scanned paintings commissioned from Jean-Baptist Marot, who copied the dimensions of buildings and streets in pre-Haussmann Paris from maps, engravings, photographs and paintings. Diane Baratier (2002: 80) says that L’Anglaise et le Duc was shot on Beta-Digital video, which allowed Rohmer to composite the characters and the paintings. It was the only feature film Rohmer ever shot on digital video. Triple Agent was shot on 35mm and Les Amours d’Astrée et Celadon was shot on Super-16mm. Rohmer explains the technical processes involved in making L’Anglaise et le Duc in an interview with Aurélien Ferenzi (2001). Producer Françoise Etchegaray (2001) comments: ‘The painted backgrounds (streets, bridges, squares and buildings) were projected onto the floor by laser beam and mapped with physical markers (green, since we were shooting against a green screen) which served as guidelines for all the movements’. Etchegaray adds that it cost £4 million, high for Rohmer although not for a period film. The exteriors and interiors were filmed in the Duboi Studio at Saint-Ouen for 13 weeks, from April to June 2000. The interior scenes were recorded digitally in the studio and the use of light is noticeable, at times giving the film the look of old-fashioned television drama, shot on video in the 1980s. Frédéric Bonnaud also calls the interiors ‘televisual’ (2001: 10).  7 For Philip Horne, ‘The method provides an image of reality without supporting a full illusion of it’ (2002: 37); and he recalls Perceval le Gallois as a precedent. Referring to Baudrillard, James F. Austin argues of Rohmer’s inspiration from paintings: ‘Filmgoers are being placed face-to-face with their own familiar, clichéd representations of the eighteenth century’ (Austin 2004: 287). Courville makes a similar point, suggesting that the painted backdrops are ‘like pure surface, unreal and impenetrable’ (2007: 170).  8 To indicate Grace Elliott’s notoriety in Georgian London, Manning includes a political cartoon from April 1783 by Hannibal Scratch (aka John Nicholson) (2005: 207). The picture shows a hot air balloon encircled by three tiers holding courtesans, politicians, pub owners, quacks and charlatans. On the top tier sit Mary Robinson, Grace Elliott and Lady Worsley. On the middle tier, below Grace, sit Charles Fox and Lord North, both of them ex-prime ministers, together with the Duke of Portland and Edmund Burke, flanked by the devil and the pope.

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 9 ‘Fédérés’ or National Guardsmen were members of a federation who supported the Revolution. They came to Paris from around France to help with the rally on 14 July 1790. As La Marseillaise depicts, the fédérés of Marseille were with the Parisian revolutionaries during the attack on the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. 10 Fumaroli notes this opening discussion in his praise for the film: ‘The filmmaker in any case was not looking to encroach upon the historian’s patch. Resolutely, he situated himself in the shadow of history, not in the middle of historical debates, but in a personal witnessing, in memories or memoirs, which ties in more with his philosophy of freedom, his aesthetic of intimacy and his temperament as an artist’ (Fumaroli 2001: 43). Although not chosen by the Cannes Film Festival, L’Anglaise et le Duc was given its premiere at a special presentation out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on 7 September 2001, where Rohmer was honoured with a lifetime achievement award (see Sarris 2001: 7). Fumaroli writes: ‘That such a film has been excluded from the French selection at the Cannes Festival says volumes about the illiberal blinkers that guide the politics of our cultural establishment. Censorship of this kind by the authorities in Beijing and of a film which represented the Chinese Cultural revolution with as much success would have provoked loud cries of indignation from the same selection committee’ (Fumaroli 2001: 46). 11 Almost 30 pages of Grace’s journal describe her rescue of Champcenetz. There is hardly any direct speech within these pages. In the last chapter of her book, Elliot notes of the execution of another Champcenetz that he ‘showed great courage, more than his poor brother did with me’ (Elliott 1859: 193). Grace may mean the father not the brother. The father, the Marquis de Champcenetz, was the governor of the Tuileries palace, whom Grace helped escape. His son was a journalist who opposed the French Revolution and was executed in July 1794. 12 Schilling also notes the difference between Elliott and Rohmer in their presentations of the scene of the King’s execution (2007: 180). 13 For some critics, this limited the film. Bonnaud, for example, argues that in L’Anglause et le Duc Grace Elliott ‘is depicted as insight and fidelity personified in an era of betrayal and blind violence, a too-sublime heroine who lacks even the slightest psychological complexity’ (2001: 10). Dudley Andrew, on the other hand, appreciates Rohmer’s loyalty to Elliott: ‘Rohmer’s attention and artistry go entirely into adopting the singular perspective of a woman who was in every respect “exceptional”. This he does without the irony characteristic of his moral tales, where first-person accounts (think of Frederic in L’Amour l’après-midi, for example) are intermittently held out at arm’s length for wry inspection by Rohmer’s crystalline camerawork. But Grace Elliott is never second-guessed, perhaps because her views are so alien to the modern mentality. From start to finish her memoirs and her attitude control what is shown, even when, on occasion, her commentary is supplemented by material Rohmer took from the memoirs of the Duke’ (Andrew 2004: 202).

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14 As he does here: ‘Of course the film’s not taking sides that way, but some critics here are so afraid of appearing politically incorrect! It has no relevance to French politics today; it’s not a condemnation of the Republic, the Left, or any progressive movement. What it is about is terrorism, be it perpetrated by the state or individuals; it’s against totalitarianism, fanaticism, intolerance’ (Andrew 2002: 29). He also says: ‘I am not a conservative in respect of technology. Nor am I a conservative about the Revolution. Grace Elliott is actually against the Reign of Terror. And who could not be?’ (Norman 2001: 33). 15 Tesson suggests that Rohmer’s Grace is like one of the ‘great heroines from Dreyer’s films’ (2001c: 41). Herpe also notes the similarity between Grace and Rohmer’s other heroines, writing that she rejoins the great heroines ‘kleistiano-rohmériennes’, all of whom have as their tutelary figure, Ingrid Bergman’s Karin in Stromboli (2001: 35). Tesson (2001b: 48) suggests that Grace Elliott’s exposed neck takes on a special significance in L’Anglaise et le Duc, threatened as it is by the guillotine, and a piece of her body that is seen throughout the film, in various states of dress and undress, eroticized or not. Courville (2007: 177) also makes this point, while Neyrat suggests that Triple Agent’s Arsinoé resembles Grace in that both women exhibit ‘discrete signs of the vulnerability of a body offered for sacrifice’ (2004: 15). All three writers respond to Rohmer’s sensitive portrayal of the larger political forces shaping women’s lives. 16 Rohmer says: ‘I made Triple Agent to illustrate the intuition of a man, who, from 1936–37, senses that the Soviets and the Nazis are growing close. He foresees the German–Soviet pact, which will have a truly explosive effect when it is signed in 1939, unsettling a good part of the world, notably the French Communists. That’s the hypothesis of the film: could the pact between Hitler and Stalin have been foreseen?’ (Eltchaninoff 2004: 13). In contrast to Rohmer, one historian, Andreï Korliakov, suggests that the idea of someone like Skobline predicting the German–Soviet pact in 1937 is an anachronistic myth: ‘Hitler was still really weak. Nobody was looking for an alliance with him at this time’ (Herpe and Morrissey 2004a: 26). However, Michel Eltchaninoff, another historian, says: ‘What I liked was that Rohmer does not pretend that he [Fyodor] has anticipated it [the German–Soviet pact] consciously, but he presents him as a microscopic plaything of these forces. He is in the middle of achieving the pact before the pact; he achieves it at the level of the individual as it will be achieved at the collective level’ (Herpe and Morrissey 2004b: 27). Nikolai Skobline was the uncle of Irène Skobline, an actress who has small roles in L’Amour l’après-midi and Le Rayon vert. Skobline had known Rohmer since the late 1960s, when her mother married one of Rohmer’s friends. The director also knew her father. However, Skobline says that she had never discussed her uncle with Rohmer before, though she thinks her father might have done (Herpe, Morrissey and Neyrat 2004: 23). Rohmer states: ‘I knew vaguely of this affair because of Irène Skobline: I knew that her uncle had disappeared after being accused of a kidnapping, but it was while reading an article in Historia that I had the idea for a film. So I had a new conversation with her about the subject. She only knew this story from

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articles and books that she had read – notably Le Général meurt à minuit by Marina Grey [1981], which relates the kidnapping of two White Russian generals in Paris, at a seven-year interval. . . . In the case of my film, it’s a work of imagination which takes off from a true event: only the end is faithful to history’ (Herpe and Neyrat 2004: 5). Irène Skobline states: ‘My hypothesis is that it suited the French government quite well to help Stalin with this affair and to get rid of the White Russian organisation, which it found a bit of a nuisance. Therefore, they killed two birds with one stone: they decapitated the organisation by kidnapping Miller and Skobline and tarnished its reputation by letting everyone believe that there had been an internal traitor. The young hero who sold his own: three quarters of the White Russian community took the bait and the organisation never recovered’ (Herpe, Morrissey and Neyrat 2004: 23). 17 Elsewhere, he states: ‘I didn’t want to make a classic spy film; what interests me is the wife’s suspicion. It is this suspicious point of view that I use’ (Burdeau and Frodon 2004: 18). As well as Hitchcock, Rohmer compares the way in which he was inspired by history with the way that Dostoevsky was inspired in Devils and Balzac was inspired in A Murky Business (Goudet 2004: 23). The main thing A Murky Business shares with Triple Agent is the kidnapping of Malin (the Comte de Gondreville). Michu is accused and his wife, Marthe, is unsure initially whether he did it. She later starts to believe that he did kidnap Malin, before realising too late that she has been tricked into giving evidence against him. Marthe later dies in prison, like Arsinoé. However, before the kidnapping, Balzac reveals that the five unknown intruders who kidnap Malin are not Michu, the Simeuses brothers and the d’Hauteserres, writing: ‘While the noblemen had been transporting the fortune which the old marquis had saved up for them, a strange scene was being enacted at the château of Gondreville’ (Balzac 1972: 147–8). Like Balzac, though not to the same extent (Balzac has scenes featuring Napoleon), Rohmer integrates historical figures and events with fictional ones. As for Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rohmer may have named Renko’s character after the novelist. Rohmer states: ‘I was able to work from articles and books on the subject (notably Marina Grey’s), and the transcript of Skobline’s wife’s trial documents. . . . certain books also made a great impression on me: Dostoevsky’s The Possessed [aka Devils], for example, itself inspired by a revolutionary plot in Russia. To a lesser degree, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and obviously I watched a number of spy films’ (Eltchaninoff 2004: 12). And, ‘When I started to work on this subject, I asked myself how I should show Russians on screen. And I thought of Dostoevsky, of the Devils, of Karamazov (especially of the big confession, when we don’t know if he has killed or not), probably also of the Dostoevskien women, like the heroine of ‘The Gentle Maiden’. Nabokov wrote a short story on the same subject as my film. But it didn’t inspire me; I found it too superficial. The central character had no depth; he was just treated as a villain. Essentially, without copying what’s there, the fact that I had absorbed Dostoevsky helped me a lot. He has really influenced cinema. There are two Dostoevskien directors: Bresson and Hitchcock. I don’t know if the latter read him or not, but there

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is a Dostoevskien atmosphere in his films’ (Payen et al. 2004). See also Herpe and Neyrat (2004: 9) and Goudet (2004: 23). In an essay comparing Dostoevsky’s Devils and Rohmer’s Triple Agent, Neyrat notes that the links between Dostoevsky and Rohmer are not to do with style or temperament, but with how writer and director incorporate historical events (2004: 12–15). Dostoevsky, like Rohmer, keeps much of the plot in Devils hidden or ‘off-screen’, so that as one reads there is a continuing sense of mystery and uncertainty about the events comprising the novel’s plot. As R. P. Blackmur writes of Stavrogin, ‘His image makes it possible for the reader to tolerate the breakdown of form and uncertainty of intention in the middle of the book, where what seem riddles are tensions, where blows in the face become holy burdens, and where also there is a vast deal of high jinks, Dickensian, Quixotic, and perfectly hellish at the same time’ (Blackmur 1948: 24). 18 Morrissey also notes that the newsreels help Triple Agent hold history and fiction separate: ‘the use of the archive footage also attracts the attention of the spectator because it constitutes an admission, an admission of the impossibility of reproducing the events of history on screen’ (2004: 22). Tracz writes: ‘The newsreels are black and white, clearly “old” to modern eyes yet undoubtedly real – documentary. Fyodor is in colour, in an apartment furnished with period objects, an actor whose name has appeared before the title – clearly a recreation’ (2005). Neyrat argues, ‘Triple Agent goes further than L’Anglaise et le Duc. Grace Elliott can leave the intimate spaces of her conversations and venture outside into the events of history. Her silvery body is composited into painted scenes, along with digital crowds, without, however, being completely integrated there. In Triple Agent, an impassable abyss separates the interior scenes, in vivid colours, with chiaroscuro lighting, from the black and white newsreels’ (Neyrat 2004: 14). The newsreels, Neyrat proposes, ‘dig much larger holes than the intrigue’s ellipses. Like foreign bodies in a delicate organism, they poison the intrigue, disembowel the conversations’ (Neyrat 2004: 14). As Neyrat observes, when Voronine leaves Arsinoé to attend to his spying affairs, he does not re-join the historical events evoked by the newsreels, he enters an off-screen space that we imagine is identical to the intimate spaces just seen. 19 Rohmer says: ‘It was impossible to make a film in Russian. It was first and foremost a film destined for the French public. And, in addition, it would have annoyed me if the characters had spoken French to each other, even though they were both Russian. All the same, I wanted there to be something foreign there. So, as a result, I chose a Greek because there was at least one link: the Orthodox religion. And then there is a closeness between a Greek accent and a Russian accent that I wouldn’t have had with an English or German character’ (Burdeau and Frodon 2004: 19). Frodon writes that the importance of language is marked for us: ‘Triple Agent contains three languages (French, Russian and Greek), one hesitates to distinguish book titles written in Cyrillic and Greek, and soon the distinction is developed, in the scene of a conversation on the differences between ancient Greek and modern Greek’ (2004: 14). 20 Gaffez notes that both L’Anglaise et le Duc and Triple Agent are about exiles, and he emphasizes the importance of accent and timbre in the spoken French of Grace Elliott, Fyodor and Arsinoé (2004: 11).

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21 As Frodon (2004: 14) notes, making Arsinoé a painter allows Rohmer to identify himself with Arsinoé and to offer wry allusions to discussions of his films. Rohmer says; ‘Everything said in the film by the Communist character performed by Emmanuel Salinger was drawn from actual assertions by Communist journalists’ (Payen et al. 2004). 22 In discussing Rohmer and Dostoevsky, Pierre Léon says: ‘In Voronine there are three Karamazovs at the same time. Even Aliocha, in the manner that Rohmer films Serge: the insistence on his blue eyes, his candour’ (Guerin and Neyrat 2004: 20). 23 Morrissey also notes that the chess game is a metaphor for the political strategies and the relationship between Arsinoé and Fyodor (2004: 23). 24 Excluding the epilogue and the newsreels, there are a couple of other moments when the film separates from Arsinoé, but neither of these is as definite. They occur at lunch in the villa, when Boris and Fyodor talk about Tukhachevsky, and at the party, when the journalist talks to Fyodor. On these occasions, Arsinoé, though not next to Fyodor, is in the same location. 25 Rohmer states, ‘The staircase is simple to explain, but you don’t understand it until the end: there is a spy underneath, it was necessary to show the climbing upstairs so that viewers could better understand the topography of the building’ (Herpe and Neyrat 2004: 10). 26 Frodon also draws attention to this sequence, calling it ‘an extraordinary moment in cinema’ (2004: 14). As spectacle or drama, nothing particular happens, but the scene creates a strong impression, partly because, in a film comprised of archival footage and interior conversations, this is an action sequence and partly because it is one of the rare sequences without Arsinoé. Tracz (2005) also notes the potency of this sequence and the importance of the film’s use of staircases. 27 Rohmer comments: ‘I wanted to mark the difference [between the apartments] and suggest the idea that tuberculosis would develop in dark places’ (Herpe and Neyrat 2004: 9). 28 As Rothman writes of Hitchcock, ‘It is characteristic of Hitchcock to frame a figure in profile at the moment of his or her most complete abstraction and absorption in an imagined scene to which we have no access. In such a profile shot, the camera frames its subject in a way that does not allow that figure’s interiority to be penetrated. Indeed, such a shot declares that impenetrability; it announces that we have come to a limit of our access to the world of the film’ (Rothman 1982: 22). Rothman (2004: 232) draws attention to one example of such a profile shot used to signify withholding: when, in Vertigo, Scottie (James Stewart) drives Judy-dressed-as-Madeleine (Kim Novak) back to San Juan Bautista and says, in profile, ‘One final thing I have to do and then I’ll be free of the past’. 29 Irène Skobline explains that General Miller’s secretary, Kusonski (Melinski in the film) acted suspiciously: he was at the office waiting for Miller at 5 p.m., but he did not remember the letter until 11 p.m.; he let Skobline escape by calling the other man back, as in the film. Kusonski held the only proof

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against Skobline, and the trial notes reveal that Kusonski was reproached during the trial; after the trial, he escaped to Belgium, which was the centre of Soviet spying. He was later arrested by the Germans and deported to a camp for Communists. Skobline believes that it was a double kidnapping of both Miller and her uncle (Etchegaray 2003). 30 Rothman analyses Hitchcock’s use of mirrors and reflections; what he observes of the mirror in Norman’s office in Psycho (1960) is true of Rohmer’s use of mirrors in Triple Agent: the mirror ‘invokes the film frame and hence the camera’s presence and agency’ (Rothman 1982: 266). 31 Pointing to the recurrence of mirrors and reflections in My Darling Clementine, Thomas highlights one means by which Ford compares Wyatt (Henry Fonda) and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature). She describes the barber shop reflection as offering a ‘perfect image of the reconciliation of East and West, town and landscape, artificial improvement and untouched natural beauty, with Wyatt at its centre as the focal point and emblem of its harmonies’ (Thomas 2001: 19). However, she notes that, when Wyatt studies his appearance in the window and the mirror, he is not reflective; he admires his reflection, but does not look beyond the surfaces. In contrast, when Doc Holliday throws a glass at his framed medical certificate, thus smashing his reflection, he appears excluded from society yet more self-aware, with a deeper insight into what Thomas describes as the ‘darker realities beneath its appearances’ (Thomas 2001: 20). From Advise and Consent, Thomas (2001: 86–7) analyses Brig’s (Don Murray’s) return home and his conversation with his wife Ellen (Inga Swenson) in front of the bathroom mirror. After Ellen says ‘I had a very strange phone call, Brig’, the film cuts to the shot of Brig looking at himself in the mirror, which Thomas notes as ‘the most resonant image in the sequence’ and ‘which continues throughout the rest of the scene, a scene which seems to constitute the thematic heart of the film’ (Thomas 2001: 83). 32 In his discussion of the double in Hitchcock’s work, Michael Walker (2005: 408–9) draws attention to Hitchcock’s modelling of ‘The Case of Mr Pelham’ on Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846). 33 As Frodon notes, Triple Agent is ‘maybe the most tragic of all’ Rohmer’s films (2004: 14). Chabrol said: ‘I love Triple Agent, as well . . . The whole of world history enclosed in the four walls of a kitchen, it’s even more terrible’ (Garson 2010: 13). Morrissey (2004: 23, n.4) speculates whether it is Rohmer’s voice that declares Arsinoé’s fate at the end of the film. Frodon (2004: 16) thinks it is. I think not. To me it sounds like the distinctive voice of Laurent Le Doyen, who plays the journalist, a careful choice by Rohmer, like his choice of Serge Renko for the voice-over at the start of L’Anglaise et le Duc. As Tracz notes of Triple Agent: ‘This voice-over becomes, in effect, the voice of the newsreel, once again bridging the fiction of colour film with historical events’ (2005). 34 He adds: ‘For once, I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea for the subject matter; it was filmmaker Pierre Zucca (1943–95). He had originally proposed an adaptation of Honoré d’Urfé’s novel L’Astrée to our production company, Les Films du Losange, many years ago. But Margaret Menegoz felt the film would be too expensive and Zucca was forced to abandon the

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project. I, for one, consider Pierre Zucca and Jean Eustache to be the most important of the so-called “post-New Wave” filmmakers’ (Rohmer 2008: 3). 35 Antoine de Baecque in his review of L’Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque remarks that Bérénice and Julien, though they walk through fields, talk as if they are in a Parisian salon, ‘which gives them the merry and old-fashioned charm of a contemporary Astrée’ (de Baecque 1993: 20). De Baecque’s reference to Rohmer’s interest in romantic stories set in natural surroundings can make one feel that it was inevitable that Rohmer would film L’Astrée. 36 Rohmer filmed Les Amours d’Astrée et Céladon around the Sioule river in Auvergne in spring and early summer 2006. He also filmed at Château de Chamerole, Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire and Château de Fougères. 37 Horowitz describes its immense size: ‘The work is so vast, so detailed, so complex, and yet, so ordered, that by necessity it had to be the project of a lifetime’ (1984: 11). She later comments: ‘It would be comforting no doubt to discover that there is a “hidden harmony” in L’Astrée, to be revealed perhaps in the remaining sections of the present work. Regrettably, this is not the case. L’Astrée is a fluctuating, “unstable” work, a massive enterprise that defies efforts to synthesize, harmonize, or summarize’ (Horowitz 1984: 68). 38 Marinelli writes: ‘In so far as it begins with a longing for a world of rural simplicity from the perspective of an over-sophisticated environment, all pastoral poetry, initially at least, expresses a preference for Nature over Art. This is what we might call the pre-condition of pastoral. By Renaissance poets the court is seen as the heart of the city and as a microcosm of its evils; a move to rural retirement represents a search for the recovery of innocence’ (1971: 23). 39 Horowitz points out that the non-pastoral French novels of the time tended to be nationalistic in their usage of a French setting: ‘d’Urfé’s originality is to have idealized his native Forez, endowing it with Edenic qualities while maintaining a setting more in keeping with the interests of a sophisticated reading public accustomed to the specifically French atmosphere which prevailed in other fiction of the time’ (Horowitz 1984: 16). 40 Rohmer says he was inspired by the costumes in paintings by Rubens, Poussin, Simon Vouet and other minor painters of the same era (Frodon, Giavarini and Neyrat 2007: 88). He includes Vouet’s Saturn Conquered by Amor, Venus and Hope (1646) in the film, showing it on the wall when Céladon wakes up. 41 In fact, Rohmer admits that for the balance of the film, given its budget, he made one big change; he dropped the character of Sylvandre and gave Sylvandre’s dialogue with Hylas about love to Lycidas (Fauvel and Herpe 2007: 94). 42 Fernandez-Cañadas de Greenwood notes that, from the Idylls of Theocritus onwards, certain names were used in pastorals to represent the identity of characters; for example, Galatea, Daphnis, Amaryllis, Phillis, and that some of these names were already found in Homer (1983: 47). 43 Marinelli writes: ‘Pastoral begins with Theocritus remembering his Sicilian

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boyhood from the perspective of the over-ripe court of Alexandria in the first half of the third century. Pagan in origin, it soon becomes Christian through the happy coincidence of meanings in the word pastor, shepherd and priest, and through the influence of pastoral life visible in the Scriptures’ (Marinelli 1971: 10). He later adds, ‘the golden age is a convenient and enriching metaphor, and as such it has been used by Christian poets in all times, whenever their subject was the life of Adam in Eden’ (Marinelli 1971: 19). Rohmer says: ‘Adamas takes Céladon to the sacred oak and, prompted by the statues of gods which surround the tree, he explains how the Celtic gods relate to the Roman gods and the “one god”. The on-screen performance of the druid’s syncretic discourse, melding Christianity with ancient mythologies, was also an interesting challenge. For that great theological scene in the glade, I had the idea of using statues as a kind of teaching aid, to make those theories comprehensible’ (Rohmer 2008: 4). 44 Fernandez-Cañadas de Greenwood writes, ‘To violate the principles of naturalistic art and to place action on another level of reality – the fantastic, extraordinary qualities of fictional reality – is the core of pastoral art’ (1983: 11). She identifies one difficulty encountered by contemporary readers of the pastoral genre, the repetition of well-known characters, plots and themes: ‘When reading pastoral works such as Arcadia, La Galatea, L’Astrée, modern readers are confronted with acknowledged masterpieces of a past age which present challenging problems of interpretation. Although they exist with other types of literary expression (epic, picaresque, meditative poetry, chivalric novels, among others), they represent a particular way of stressing artistic artificiality which sets them apart from other literary genres and modes’ (Fernandez-Cañadas de Greenwood 1983: 10–11). 45 Horowitz’s analysis (1984: 25–45) divides the characters and their stories into primary and secondary tales. Henein (2010) includes a comprehensive index of the novel’s characters. 46 Not everyone appreciates these passages. Jehenson writes: ‘In the love scenes d’Urfé is not so controlled. His lack of detachment and his almost adolescent enthusiasm are sometimes embarrassing. He will identify with the male characters, and comment ecstatically on the naked shepherdesses’ (Jehenson 1981: 122). 47 Marinelli notes (1971: 4) that Phillis is a generic name for many shepherdesses in the pastoral tradition. 48 The pastoral genre evolves as a reaction to the city, and the first intertitle works within pastoral conventions, as Marinelli writes: ‘The polar opposite of the open pasture is the confining city’ (1971: 10). He argues that ‘a note of criticism is inherent in all pastoral from the beginning of its existence. It is latent in the form in its very desire for movement away from an unsatisfactory time and place to another time and place that is imagined to be superior’ (Marinelli 1971: 12). 49 She writes: ‘he [d’Urfé] uses the convention of female friendship to develop a textual experiment whereby awareness of both heterosexuality and homosexuality simultaneously filter into the reader’s mind, only to dissolve

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into an essential sexuality entirely independent of gender . . . What he does seek to realise, and quite successfully, is erotic writing which intimates both forms of loving while denying the signal importance of either’ (Horowitz 1984: 98–9). 50 The shepherds’ costumes imitate the clothes in paintings like Reni’s The Dawn (1613), Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego (1655) and Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Sacrifice to Apollo (1662), paintings which include statues of water nymphs and satyrs, gods and goddesses. Astrée and Céladon are depicted like this in a seventeenth-century Aubusson tapestry showing their re-finding of each other. The Folio edition of L’Astrée (1984) has a picture of the tapestry on its front cover. McMahon writes: ‘Many points of resemblance can be discovered between the ideals of art advocated in the Astrée and the paintings of Claude Gellée of Lorraine’ (1925: 122). 51 Rohmer says that he shows less nudity than d’Urfé describes: ‘What is written by d’Urfé is very suggestive, more erotic than what is seen [in the film]’ (Frodon, Giavarini and Neyrat 2007: 87). 52 Gregorio begins his study (1992: 5–8) by noting how well developed is the literary tradition of disguise by the time D’Urfé writes L’Astrée. According to Gregorio, d’Urfé took the plot device from Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and from later pastoral works, such as Sannazaro’s Diana (1559) and Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585). 53 Gregorio (1992: 29–31) and Horowitz (1984: 109–10) discuss Céladon’s disguise as a woman, ‘Orithie’, during the Festival of Venus. Both Gregorio (1992: 34) and Horowitz (1984: 108) also discuss Céladon’s disguise as a nymph, ‘Lucinde’, to escape from Galathée, Horowitz noting that ‘it reveals how easily Céladon masquerades as a woman’. 54 Gregorio notes: ‘The pastoral tradition in general, as well as L’Astrée in particular, portray this sort of imprecision in sexual identity as quite a natural phenomenon. The characters in question are young, discovering themselves and their erotic natures for the first time, in what is always depicted as the innocence and ingenuousness of youth’ (Gregorio 1992: 14). Of Céladon’s disguise as Alexis, Gregorio writes, ‘The mask for him is something of a defence mechanism, a means of resisting the pressures or responsibility of manhood as it is defined by society’ (1992: 38). 55 Horowitz also notes this, writing: ‘Adamas connives, and Céladon accepts, to maintain the letter of Astrée’s law, while flagrantly violating its spirit. The “perfect lover” thus enters into a situation of ill-conceived voyeurism, where libidinal fantasies of the most blatantly erotic sort may readily be sustained’ (Horowitz 1984: 112). 56 Gregorio points out that a change of clothes can transform a character’s identity: ‘Disguise is easy and most effective, and it must be said that faces count for less than clothes in attempts at identification and recognition’ (1992: 11). 57 Macé also connects Rohmer’s ending to The Winter’s Tale, writing ‘the passage from death to life is achieved without changing any of this, without altering the

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surface of things, in the carefree pleasure of seeing desire move through naked young bodies’ (2007: 22). Macé concludes: ‘A few filmmakers have taught us that we could walk with the dead, while remaining at the most prosaic surface of things, without undoing or tearing it. Rohmer, through the grace of the metamorphosis of his art, is now a member of that group’ (2007: 22). 58 Andrew also notes this, writing: ‘Astrea and Celadon feels like a hymn to the possibility of regeneration and follows The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent, by far the darkest films of Rohmer’s career’ (2008: 33).

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Index

39 Steps, The 90 400 Coups, Les 3 A bout de souffle 3–4 A nos amours 109 abortion 52 adultery 51 Advise and Consent 239 AIDS 105 AJYM 4 Algeria 33 Aller au cinéma 9 Almendros, Nestor 18, 19 Ami de mon amie, L’ 86, 126, 138, 144–55, 157, 160, 184, 210, 213 Amour l’après-midi, L’ 10, 11, 22, 51–61, 73, 239 Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, Les 221, 241–54 Anglaise et le Duc, L’ 221, 241, 254 Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque, L’ 178–87, 192, 195–6, 200 architects 180 Architecture principe 7 Arimathea, Joseph of 81 Astrée, L’ 221, 241, 242, 244, 248, 249, 251 Atalante, L’ 9 atheism 170 Axe Majeur 180 Balzac, Honoré de 168 ‘Bancs de Paris, Les’ 192 Barbier de Séville, Le 212 Bard, Serge 23, 25 Barrault, Marie-Christine 34 Bathers at Asnières 149 Bauchau, Patrick 23, 26

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Beau mariage, Le 51, 85, 95–105, 106, 110, 111, 121, 126, 127, 144, 146, 198, 231 Beau Serge, Le 3 Beaumarchais, Pierre 212 Beauregard, Georges de 6 Beethoven, Ludwig van 166, 167–8 ‘Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler, The’ 140 Bellar, Clara 188 Belle de jour 34 Bérénice 2 Bergman, Ingrid 134 Bernadette, Saint 169 Binet-Bouteloup, Marie 84, 97 Blouse Roumaine, La 107 ‘Blue Hour, The’ 138, 142–3, 144, 183 Blum, Léon 223 Boissonnas, Sylvina 23 Bolt, The 69–70, 71 Bonitzer, Pascal 159, 167 Boucher, Le 33 Boudu sauvé des eaux 9 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de 53, 54 Boulangère de Monceau, La 10, 11–13, 24 Bronzés, Les 108 Brummell, Beau 206 brutalism, concrete 148 Bunuel, Luis 34, 44 Byron, Lord 206 Cahiers du cinéma x, xi–xii, 2, 6, 7, 13 Camping 108 Cannes 32 Capra, Frank 86 Carcassonne 120 Carné, Marvel 126

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Carney, Raymond 86 Carrière de Suzanne, La 10, 11, 13–15, 23 Catherine de Heilbronn 84 Catholic Church 52 Catholicism x, 175, 209 Catholics 32 Cavell, Stanley 86, 158 Chabrol, Claude 1, 2–3, 6, 16, 33 Chagrin et la pitié, La 35–6 Chance 42 Charlotte et son Jules 3 Charlotte et son steak see Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak Charlotte et Véronique 3, 17 Chloé in the Afternoon 22 Chrétien de Troyes 63, 74, 79, 81, 82, 83, 117 Christlein, Dr Friedrich Günther 128 Chronique d’un été 17, 130, 183 Cinemathèque 15 class-consciousness 105 Claudine à Paris 122 Clémenti, Pierre 23 Clermont-Ferrand 35, 36, 37, 39 protests 32 clothes 49, 57, 91, 99–100, 107, 115, 120, 142, 150, 151, 152, 190, 198, 201, 205–6, 213–14, 217, 249 Cohen, Gustave 75–6 Collectionneuse, La 6, 7, 11, 16, 22–32, 33, 35, 41, 231 colours 57, 91, 99, 103, 111, 115, 118, 132, 142, 150, 151, 152, 161, 190, 198, 201, 205–6, 213–14, 217 Comédies et proverbes 84, 87, 120, 125, 138, 144, 148, 150, 153, 154, 155, 157, 169, 178, 196, 208 comedy 232 see ironic comedy comic irony 65 Communist Party 233 Communists 32, 235 Comolli, Jean-Louis 13 concrete brutalism 148 Cone, Annabelle 120, 122

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Confessions 45 Conrad, Joseph 42 Conte d’automne 51, 152, 158, 177, 196, 210–20 Conte d’été 178, 188, 192, 194, 196, 197–210, 213, 232 Conte d’hiver 7, 84, 158, 168–78, 181, 184, 196, 231, 252 Conte de printemps 154, 157–68, 192, 215 Contemplations 8 Contes des quatre saisons 84, 158, 168, 178, 187, 196, 198 Contes moreaux see Six contes moreaux contraception 51, 52, 53, 105 Corneille, Pierre 212 Così fan tutte 111 costume see clothes Cottrell, Pierre 13 Cousins, Les 3 Crisp, Quentin 120 criticism see film criticism Critique of Pure Reason 161 cross-dressing 250 d’Urfé, Honoré 221, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252–3 Daniel Deronda 153 Danton 222–3 David, Jacques-Louis 69 daydreaming/daydreams 102, 104 death and reincarnation 171 Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le 148 depth of field 112 Détruisez-vous 24, 25 disguise 250, 251 documentaries 18­–20, 183 Don Giovanni 15 Don Juan (character) 120, 209 Don Juan (play) 212 Don Quixote (character) 42, 88, 177 Don Quixote (film) 7 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 6 Douchet, Jean 16 drapery 69–70 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 173–4

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Index

droit de seigneur 212 early music 78 Echo de Paris, L, 8 Eco, Umberto 74 Ecole des femmes, L’ 212 elections of March 1993 185 Eliot, George 153, 219–20 Elliott, Grace 221, 223–4, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232 Journal 221 Emile 69 Enlightenment 226 environmentalism 185 eroticism 70, 202, 249, 250 Eschenbach, Wolfram von 81, 82 Et Dieu créa la femme 34 ‘et in Arcadia ego’ 253 Etchegaray, Françoise 129 Etudiante d’aujourd’hui, Une 19 Eustache, Jean 13 Expressionism 236 female characters 230 feminism 53, 105 feminist campaigns 86 feminists 51 Femme de l’aviateur, La 84, 85, 86–95, 103, 110, 126, 145, 192, 240 Femme douce, Une 6 Fermière à Montfaucon, La 19–20 Feydeau, Georges 212 field, depth of 112 film criticism x, 1, 120 Films du Losange, Les 15, 22 flashback 66, 68 Fontaine, Jean de la 101–2 Forster, E.M. 168, 171 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 69–70, 71 framing shots 112, 143, 162, 204–5 France profonde, La 33, 35 free love 53 freeze-frames 95 French Revolution 223 films 222 Freud, Sigmund 73 Fun and Games for Everyone 23 Fuseli, Henry 69–70, 71, 72, 73

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Gainsbourg, Serge 108 Garrel, Philippe 23 Gauguin, Paul 46 paintings of Tahiti 46 Gawain 79, 83 Gégauff, Paul 1 gender equality 52 roles 250 Genou de Claire, Le 1, 11, 41–51, 84, 88, 96, 107, 196 Gentle Maiden, The 6 German Expressionism 236 Gillray, James 71 Girodet, Anne-Louis 69 Godard, Jean-Luc 1–2, 3–4, 6, 16, 17, 24 Goldoni, Carlo 212 Gombrich, Ernst 253 Gothic Revival 74 Goudet, Stéphane 221 Goupil, Romain 118 Green Ray, The 128, 135–6, 137, 175 Greens (political party) 185–6 Griffith, D.W. 222 Grimm brothers 139 Guilbaud, Pierre 2 Harleth, Gwendolen (fictional character) 153–4 Hawks, Howard 22 Hertay, Alain 120 hippies 53 Histoire de la vie privée 157 Hitchcock, Alfred ix, xi, 12, 22, 24, 34, 54, 88, 90, 137, 174, 219, 232, 237, 239, 252 Hitchcock’s Motifs 236 Hitler, Adolf 223 homosexuality 248, 249 Hôtel du Nord 126 Hugo, Victor 8, 168 imagination 90 Impressionist painters 148–9 improvisation 129–30, 132 Indochina 33 Ingénue libertine, L’ 122 Institut Pédagogique National 7

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intertitles 67, 224, 230, 247, 250 ironic comedy ix, 33 ironic humour 3, 34, 37, 87 irony 5, 37, 40, 47, 65, 71, 102–3, 148, 232, 253 It Happened One Night 86 It’s a Wonderful Life 174, 175 James, Henry 154 Jaouën, Michel 179 Java des Ombres, La 118 Jeux de société, Les 157, 158 Joseph of Arimathea 81 Journal d’un scélerat 1 Journal of my Life during the French Revolution 221, 223–4, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231 Kant, Immanuel 161, 164, 165 Karavan, Dani 180 Keaton, Buster 55 Kiarostami, Abbas 182 Kleist troupe 212 Kleist, Heinrich von 63–4, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71–3, 84 Klevan, Andrew 158, 159, 161, 162, 164 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 69 Lady Eve, The 252 Lang, Fritz 88, 123 Langlet, Amanda 106 Langlois, Henri 9 Latin Quarter Ciné-Club 1 Lear (character) 173 Leconte, Patrice 108 Letter from an Unknown Woman 113 Liaisons dangereuses, Les 69, 225 Libolt, Alain 212 location filming 93 locations 18, 92, 97, 98, 128, 214 loi Neuwirth 52 Longest Journey, The 168, 170 Louis Lumière 9 Luchini, Fabrice 50, 76, 83, 117, 125 Lumière, Louis 9 Ma Nuit chez Maud 7­–8, 11, 22,

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32–41, 47, 73, 120, 165, 168, 198, 209 Mabinogion 81 Madame Récamier 69 Maintigneux, Sophie 129, 131 male chivalry 243 desire 44 fantasy 208 voyeurism 24, 54 Mallarmé, Stéphane 8 Malory, Thomas 81 Maman et la putain, La 13 Manning, Jo 221 Mariage de Figaro, Le 212 Marivaux 168, 212 Marquise von O. . ., Die 63–74, 222, 223, 230, 231 marriage 86, 96 Marseillaise, La 222–3 Marx, Karl 147 Marxism 147 Matisse, Henri 107 Menegoz, Margaret ix, 15 Mère et enfant 194 Métamorphoses du paysage, Les 8, 9 Middlemarch 219–20 Miracle de Théophile 76 mirrors 239 Misanthrope, Le 212 Mitterand, François 52, 185 Molière 111, 212 Mondrian, Piet 117–18 Monet, Claude 149 morality 21, 140 Morte d’Arthur, Le 81 Mother and Child 194 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 15, 38, 111 Munich Kammerspiele 64 Murnau, F.W. 24 music 5, 15, 38, 94, 103, 135, 166, 169, 172, 200 see also songs early music 78 My Darling Clementine 239 Nabokov, Vladimir 44 Nadja à Paris 18, 19 Nafea faa ipoipo 46

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Index

national elections of March 1993 185 natural light 135 New Wave see nouvelle vague Nightmare, The 69–70, 71, 72, 73 North by Northwest 12 Nougaret, Claudine 129 nouvelle vague xi, xii, 3, 4, 7, 9 Nuits de la pleine lune, Les 85, 117–26, 127, 138, 154, 161 Objet hors saisie 25 Onteniente, Fabien 108 Ophuls, Marcel 35 Ophuls, Max 113 Ordet 173–4, 252, 253, 254 Orphans of the Storm 222–3 Ozu, Yasujirō xi Pagode, La (cinema) 6 panning shots 204, 212–13 Parent, Claude 7 Paris nous appartient 4 Paris vu par 16–18 Partie de campagne, Une 148, 149 Parvulesco, Jean 180 Parzifal 81, 82 Pascal, Blaise 7­–8, 35, 147, 165, 168 Passage to India, A 168 Passion Play 79 Pauline à la plage 1, 85, 106–17, 120, 126, 127, 144, 145, 150, 152, 184, 192, 197, 202, 208, 209, 210, 213 Perceval le Gallois 7, 50, 63, 74­–84, 85, 87, 96–7, 117, 154–5, 183, 222, 223 ending 81–2 Perceval, ou le conte du Graal 7 Perceval, or the Story of the Grail 74, 81 Perrault, Charles 139 Petit soldat, Le 6 Petites filles modèles, Les 2, 4, 7, 24 photographs 92, 119, 180 Piaf, Edith 122 Pialat, Maurice 109 Picasso, Pablo 194 Pirandello, Luigi 212

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Plato 165, 168, 172–3 Platonism, Renaissance 244 politics 185 Pollet, Jean-Daniel 16 polygamy 53 Pommereulle, Daniel 23, 25 postcards 92, 94, 95 Poussin, Nicolas 253 Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak 1, 2 Prince of Homburg, The 64 props 107 Pyramide humaine, La 17 Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle 51, 138–44, 145, 158, 178, 182, 183 Queen Katherine’s Dream 69 Radio Télévision Scolaire 7 Random Harvest 173, 174, 175, 252 Ray, Guy de 2 Rayon vert, Le 51, 84, 85–6, 127–39, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 155, 175–6, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 196, 198, 200, 230 Rear Window 54, 90, 92, 94 Reckless Moment, The 113 reincarnation 171 religion 147, 170 Renaissance Platonism 244 Rendez-vous de Paris, Les 178, 187–96 Renko, Serge 187–8, 224 Renoir, Jean 9, 222, 223 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 148–9 Resnais, Alain 3–4 Reynaud, Bérénice 120 Rivette, Jacques 2, 4, 130 Robert, Guy 78 Robin et Marion 76 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Romand, Béatrice 50, 51, 96 Rope 34 Rossellini, Roberto xi, 134 Rothman, William 158 Rouch, Jean 16, 17, 130 roué 212

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30, 44–5, 46, 69 Confessions 45 Emile 69 Rozier, Jacques 16 Sandre, Didier 212 Schaubühne theatre collective 64, 212 schools television 6–11 Schroeder, Barbet 15, 16, 18, 24 Schumann, Robert 162, 165, 166 Ségur, Comtesse de 2 ‘Selling the Painting’ 140 sets 107 Seurat, Georges 148–9 Shadow of a Doubt 54 Shakespeare, William 158, 168, 171–2, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Sherlock, Jr. 55 Signe du Lion, Le 1, 3–6, 7, 10, 15, 24 Six contes moraux 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 19, 26, 34, 42, 44, 51, 54, 60, 63, 73, 85, 87, 110, 125, 148, 153, 155, 158, 160, 163, 197, 198 social critique 98 socialism 185 Socialist Party 185 Solidor, Suzy 200 Sonate à Kreutzer, La 2 songs 114, 120–1 see also music Soulier de Satin, Le 212 ‘Spring’ Sonata 166, 167–8 staircases 237–9 Stein, Peter 64 Stéphane Mallarmé 8 Stephen, Mary 84 Story of the Grail 82 storytelling 65, 77, 198 Stromboli 134 Sturges, Preston 252 subtitles 4 suspense 237 symbolism 30

television 180 Tempest, The 176 Terre Etrangère 212 Théophilians 75 third person 77 Through the Olive Trees 182 travelling shots 194–5, 204 Trémois, Claude-Marie 188 Trilling, Lionel 168 Triple Agent 231–41 Trou, Le 6 Truffaut, François 2, 18 Vadim, Roger 34 Verne, Jules 128, 136, 137, 175 Véronique et son cancre 2–3 Vers l’unité du monde 8 Vertigo 12, 59, 174, 175, 219, 252 Vichy regime 36 Virilio, Paul 7 Vitez, Antoine 19, 212 voice-over 67, 224, 246–7, 250 voyeurism 58 ‘Waiter, The’ 140 Wajda, Andrzej 222 Wałęsa, Lech 223 Walker, Michael 236 White Russians 221 Winter’s Tale, The 158, 168, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 252, 254 Wolfram von Eschenbach 81, 82 women 20, 51, 122, 125, 141 women’s liberation 53 rights 85 World Viewed, The 86 Xenakis, Iannis 7 You Only Live Once 123 Zanzibar group 23–4 Zucca, Pierre 241

Tartuffe 212

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