In the company of men
Published 7:00 am Monday, October 9, 2006
ERIC ROHMER’S MORAL TALES
runs Oct. 5-25 at Grand Illusion
MADE BETWEEN 1962 and 1972, the six chapters in Eric Rohmer’s “moral tales” cycle are both period specific and timeless. Moving from black-and-white to color, from raggedness to increased technical polish, from excessive to occasional voice-overs, from prim dresses to revealing bikinis, the films traverse the sexual revolution from the perspective of a half-dozen similarly solipsistic men. Each guy is, in effect, a woman chaser in self-denial. Where’s the moral aspect? Essentially in that each ruminative hero deliberately sets up a kind of sexual test for himself, pitting willpower against immediate gratification. Yet as Rohmer makes clear, those tests themselves are morally suspect.
Each of Rohmer’s films plays like a draft or variation of the other, as his brooders age from callow students to jaundiced businessmen. (The women, conspicuously, remain young and available.) Shown chronologically over three weeks, the talky, pedagogic, and almost music-free pictures have a certain sameness that the writer-director makes no effort to conceal. A pioneering figure in the French nouvelle vague who also edited the famous Cahiers du Cin魡 journal, Rohmer is, at 81, still making movies (his latest flick just showed at Toronto; Autumn Tale played here in ’98). The imperative for today’s viewers is to separate Rohmer’s enduring ethical concerns from the period fog of cigarette smoke and endless Gallic philosophizing.
Set in the student quarter of Paris, for instance, 1963’s The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (Oct. 5-7) takes place almost entirely in the head of a guy (Our Lady of the Assassins director Barbet Schroeder) infatuated with an unobtainable beauty. To console himself, he flirts up the eponymous bakery girl, creating the triangular structure that shapes all the moral tales. In a film that’s only 23 minutes long, Girl is crammed with the logorrheic voice-over thoughts of our serious young protagonist. (Partly it’s a low-budget device to conceal the lack of synch-sound; partly it’s just, well, French.) “She didn’t meet my standards,” he coolly declares of the poor, lovely bakery girl, and that arrogant, masculine self-regard runs throughout the series.
“NOT MY TYPE” is another recurrent Rohmer phrase. Each of his six narrators is obsessed with certain criteria—breast size, class, religion, etc.—that define an ideal mate. Dislikes are equally specific and pre-emptory: Women are either ugly or beautiful, period. That females should ever resist their charms scarcely occurs to our heroes, yet their very self-obsessed contemplativeness saves them from being irredeemable male chauvinist pigs. Thus in 1963’s Suzanne’s Career (which is paired with Girl), naive Bertand is first scornful of fast, modern Suzanne, then begins to learn from how she juggles him and his playboy pal Guillaume (another triangle). Who’s more moral, he comes to wonder, the woman who’s frank about bed hopping or the two buddies who make sport of her?
Indeed, in a striking echo of Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, Guillaume says of Suzanne, “We’ll ruin her,” and Bertrand goes along. That tenor of misogynistic, Machiavellian gamesmanship also courses through the moral tales. In 1967’s La Collectionneuse (Oct. 10-11), we have another triangle with two haughty egotists wolfishly circling around a free-loving gamine they deride as a “slut” and a “tart.” Played by Patrick Bauchau of TV’s The Pretender, haughty Adrien constantly talks of “strategies” and “attacks” as he and Daniel toy with Hayd饻 it sounds pretty ugly, but somehow no one in Rohmer ever gets hurt.
“This is the story of my changes of mind,” a chastened Adrien subsequently admits. All of Rohmer’s narcissistic heroes likewise discover the possibility of being wrong—and they often are. You can see each of them as a different stage in the progression from youth to maturity, as Rohmer’s last three protagonists are variously in search of a wife, engaged, then finally married with kids. That the series-ending Chlo頩n the Afternoon (Oct. 19-25) is a masterpiece among midlife crisis movies (with its wrenchingly unforgettable conclusion) is only appropriate. Rohmer builds his lesson plan methodically until slamming the book shut. Class is dismissed.
