By A. O. Scott
Among the films Eric
Rohmer directed in the ninth and last decade of his life were “The Lady and the
Duke”, set in the embattled aristocracy of 18th-century France, and “The
Romance of Astrea and Celadon”, based on a 17th-century French literary
pastoral. These were not Mr. Rohmer’s only forays into the past — in the
mid-’70s he made “Perceval” and
“The Marquise of O...” — but period dress was hardly this filmmaker’s habitual
get-up.
Rather, the name (or
the pseudonym) Eric Rohmer conjures a particular tableau of modern Europe, in
which generally well-clothed (and occasionally unclothed), nicely spoken men
and women converse in picturesque settings, reflecting calmly on the unruly
desires to which they cannot help falling prey. His interest always gravitated
toward the sexual mores and intellectual preoccupations of the present. And
while some aspects of late-20th-century life — most notably, politics — were
absent from his palette, he was also free of nostalgia or grandiosity. Meals,
conversations, love affairs, excursions to the countryside and trips to the
beach: his zest for observing such happenings was inexhaustible.
Still, those two late
explorations of an older world don’t seem anomalous when set against earlier,
better-known films like “Claire’s Knee” (1970)
and “My Night at Maud’s” (1969).
Instead, the characters and situations in “The Lady and the Duke” (2001) and
“The Romance of Astrea and Celadon” (2007), borrowed from literature and
history, appear quintessentially Rohmerian and unmistakably contemporary. Not
because the nobles and shepherds who populate the films strike us as
anachronistically modern, but rather because most of Mr. Rohmer’s other films
can be described as classical.
His principal subject
was passion, which he explored in various configurations. Mr. Rohmer, who died
on Monday at 89, was interested in triangles, but also in more complicated
geometrical patterns. In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” (1987),
“La Collectionneuse” (1967)
and “Pauline at the Beach” (1983),
desire ricochets between and within various pairings.
Even relatively simple
scenarios — an accidental glance at a girl’s leg in “Claire’s Knee,” the
more-or-less conventional adultery of “Chloe in the Afternoon” (1972)
— yield reversals and paradoxes that defy easy summary. But even at their most
feverish and fraught, these situations are diagramed with precision and
detachment. Passion may be the subject, but the method is reason.
In an earlier era Mr.
Rohmer might have been an exemplary man of letters. And he was, in the first
phase of his career, a novelist, a critic and a scholar. But when he embraced
cinema, which he saw as the pre-eminent art form of the time, he did so very
much in the literary spirit of the 17th and 18th centuries, insisting it was
fully compatible with both the medium and the age.
“Believe it or not,”
he once wrote, “Diderot is a more modern scriptwriter than Faulkner is.” In the
same essay Mr. Rohmer — or rather, Maurice Schérer, as he was then known —
declared that “The classical age of cinema is not behind us, but ahead.” The
strongest evidence for this contention would turn out to be his own oeuvre.
Mr. Rohmer made his
prophecy in 1949, when the French embrace of American novelists and Hollywood
filmmakers was at its most ardent. Along with other young polemicists at the
journal Cahiers du Cinéma, he championed Nicholas Ray,
Alfred Hitchcock and
Howard Hawks, helping
to establish a canon of film history and to lay the groundwork for the art
form’s next phase. In the late 1950s Mr. Rohmer’s colleagues went from theory
to practice, turning Cahiers du Cinéma’s axioms and arguments into a movement
identified (though not by them) as the New Wave.
It is worth pausing to
marvel at just how many of them are still around, and still producing work that
upholds a tradition of iconoclasm. Jean Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Claude
Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Alan Resnais- all are figures in French
cinema’s present as well as in its past.
Mr. Rohmer was the
oldest of the group and something of a late bloomer as a filmmaker, hitting his
stride with “The Moral Tales,” a cycle of six films (two shorts and four
features) that began with “The Bakery Girl of Monceau” in 1962 and concluded
with “Chloe in the Afternoon” 10 years later.
“The Moral Tales” and
the cycles that followed — the six “Comedies and Proverbs” in
the 1980s and the “Tales of the Four Seasons” in the 1990s — are the essential
Rohmer. Other filmmakers manufacture sequels or burrow repeatedly into genres.
His cycles are unusual in the way that they arrange self-contained narratives
around themes, ideas and suggestive anecdotes. They don’t make arguments so
much as offer slightly different views of similar problems. What happens when
we fall in or out of love? How do accidental occurrences impinge on our plans
and ambitions? What happens next?
These are not
necessarily timeless questions, at least not in the way that fundamental
problems of philosophy are. But they are always part of life, and framing them
— in language and in pictures, the constituent elements of Mr. Rohmer’s movies
(he rarely used music) — is what art does. Classicism is an approach that takes
up these problems as they occur, without worrying too much about their
contemporary relevance or their permanence. The cynical lovers in “La
Collectionneuse” or their innocent counterparts in “Boyfriends and Girlfriends”
are who and where they are, which is to say in French movies, but they would
also be recognizable in 18th-century paintings or 17th-century plays, in
England or Greece or Arcadia.
So Mr. Rohmer’s movies
are unlikely to grow old. Future viewers seeking information about France in
the 1960s will have to look elsewhere, to Mr. Godard, for example, who caught
the spirit of the age. Social turmoil, sexual anxiety, changes in fashion and
popular culture: these are all but invisible in Mr. Rohmer’s compositions, even
as his words and images arise naturally from his milieu.
“Art is a reflection of our time,” he mused in
1949, when his own period of creativity still lay ahead of him. “But isn’t it
also an antidote?”
Publicado en The New York Times, 01/13/2010
Foto: Eric Rohmer
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