Getting Lost in Rohmer
Éric Rohmer produced a body of work, spanning several decades, so consistent in tone as to have been fully formed almost from the beginning. This sets him apart from his New Wave peers, most obviously from Godard, a filmmaker whose work continued to evolve dramatically throughout his life. It might be said, with some justification, that Rohmer is the anti-Godard, eschewing the latter’s erratic but fruitful experimentation with jump cuts, non-diegetic music, tracking shots, slow motion, language, color, and even 3-D in favor of more modest pleasures. While Godard’s films confront and overwhelm, variously assaulting one’s consciousness from without, Rohmer’s films seem to well up from within, a single current unfolding and extending across the decades, forming a steady stream of unassuming but deeply stirring work.
Rohmer’s vision has not become stale because his subject, contemplation, is timeless. As he once said, “For me what is interesting in mankind is what is permanent and eternal and doesn’t change, rather than what changes, and that’s what I’m interested in showing.”1 Rohmer created and maintained a distinct style that evokes the constancy of the contemplative consciousness: long takes, fixed or meandering; the absence of non-diegetic music; quiet voyages on trains, on boats, in cars; and, of course, conversations, strung together like pearls, forming a single dialogue running the length of his oeuvre.
In doing so, Rohmer famously inverts the traditional filmic relation between action and dialogue. Film tends to favor action, the moving image being the special preserve of the medium (even when this distinctive aspect is occasionally subverted), while dialogue functions as a catalyst, carrying the viewer from one action to the next. Rohmer, however, isolates the activity of consciousness-in-reflection, emerging through a dialectic of solitude and conversation. In doing so, he crafts a cinema in the interstices of the traditional plot, dwelling on moments of reprieve from action, in which we pause, stepping back from the well-worn tracks of our everyday lives, in order to think.
As Michael Wood recently wrote, Rohmer’s characters think about their thoughts. Indeed, they turn situations, ideas, and desires over and over in their minds. They grasp hold of a thought, a feeling, a mood and try to pick apart and trace the many threads that comprise it. Often, they are faced with an impending decision, which, unresolved, consumes them. In a Rohmer film, natural landscapes – beaches, and mountains, and fields – lie open before the camera, vast and given. His characters, unsettled by indeterminacy and the burden of freedom, wander these settings and dream of fate, a future-to-come (l’avenir) in which their own free choices will be reflected back at them in the guise of necessity. Rohmer alights on this desire, on his characters’ search for direction, a sign, something to license their return to action.
Rohmer’s characters demonstrate a distinct mode of being, of relating – to others, to oneself, to one’s own thoughts. But crucially, they contemplate together, turning to others to help them clarify their thinking, to see more clearly. As Marco Grosoli observes, with regard to Rohmer’s early film theory, “For Rohmer and [Claude] Chabrol, solitude is inseparable from the supposition of oneself as innocent.”2 I believe this theme is carried through into Rohmer’s own filmmaking. In conversation, his characters step out of their solitude and suspend the fiction of their innocence, the self-exonerating fantasy of being the passive object of external powers. Deliberation betrays the dream of fate, even as it retains its mystical appeal. The real energy of the films derives from conversation, as his characters sort through their values, desires, and horizons, infatuations and disappointments, achievements and failures, past and present, in order to figure out how to move on. In practice, then, Rohmer emphasizes interpersonal (horizontal) relations over transcendent (vertical) ones.
For this reason, in Rohmer’s moral vision conversation is tightly bound to friendship. In Conte d’été (1996), Rohmer’s thesis is stated plainly: “Friendship’s serious. Maybe more than love.” If this is true, it is because friends are invested in the reality of the other, neither taken in by illusion, as a lover might be, nor ready to assume the worst. This is why, in Conte de printemps (1990), Natacha is so hurt when Jeanne takes her behavior at face-value: “You say I’m your friend, but you treat me like an enemy. You don’t look for my real reasons.” A friend is someone who looks for the real reasons; and this generosity is central to the relationships that structure so many of Rohmer’s films (e.g., Ma Nuit chez Maud [1969], Le Rayon vert [1986], Conte d’automne [1998]). Even in those that focus on the enigmatic nature of sexual desire, friendship generally provides the context for its interrogation while also throwing it into relief. Le Genou de Claire (1970), for example, is not organized around Jérôme’s sexual desire but, rather, around the discussions he has about his desire with his friend Aurora. Only with her, a novelist attuned to the psyche, can he articulate and clarify his desire, refining it to its improbable but real point of fixation: Claire’s knee.
What is most touching about Rohmer’s films is that, although his central characters tend to be lost, they bear a profound sense of responsibility to their values, which, however, they are always in the process of discovering or reconsidering. Unencumbered by cynicism and irony (with rare exceptions, such as La Collectionneuse [1967]), their seriousness is striking to the contemporary viewer. They are deeply concerned with the ethical questions they face. They agonize over them, are paralyzed by them, weighing not simply their practical implications but something higher, too, almost soul-concerning. Their need to be able to give an account of their actions, and of the life that their actions comprise, sends them outside of themselves and into the world.
There they encounter another Rohmer-type: resolute characters with developed (yet fallible) principles to which they hold themselves and others. As Rohmer once put it, “My characters can be wise or ‘mad.’ It’s never madness as such, but a sort of exaltation, a spiritual fervour, the refusal of a flat reality, sometimes even a Don Quixotesque madness.”3 Often, these characters serve as testing grounds for ideas and justifications while offering models of particular forms of ethical existence. In Conte d’été, Margot is disappointed in Gaspard for taking up with “vulgar” Solène, even when she has playfully encouraged him to do so. Perhaps a hint of jealousy tinges her reaction, but it is clear that his choice profoundly shifts the way she understands him. First, she is cross, then merely saddened by what she regards as his ethical failure, his lack of dignity, of self-respect. For Gaspard has stooped to his context – in this case, loneliness and the first girl to express sexual interest in him, leading him to neglect his more meaningful friendship with Margot. But looking through the lens of her disapproving gaze, he learns a little more about himself and about the person he aspires to be.
In the periphery of Rohmer’s world we find others too, less reflective, seemingly unbothered by ethical and philosophical, that is to say distinctly human, concerns. Sure, they occasionally recall a line of Pascal or Jules Verne from their university days, but in the way that one recalls the date of a famous battle, without feeling, without interest. They feel quite at home in this world, content to retrace the footsteps of those just up ahead on the path. Rohmer’s protagonists, by contrast, strain against the world, resisting its demands. They cut their own path in pursuit of an ideal, which, though unknown, exerts its mysterious pull.
Still, Rohmer insists on the sporadic interruption of our gait, when the rhythm of our ordinary lives falls apart. For, inevitably, we encounter obstacles and contradictions that force us to pause and think again. In these moments, which sometimes stretch into seasons, we enter the ranks of the lost. Stepping off course, we watch for signs from above to point us toward a certain future.
And as we wait, we encounter others. Only with them does the future appear, unfolding in each conversation, actively bearing us toward a fate that we ourselves are shaping.