Realisation (this’ll become obvious, below). Writing about Rohmer is really writing a series of names (French names) over and over again. It might resist interpretation, because you have to muck about with trying to describe a decidedly ‘ordinary’ situation and why it is actually a really extraordinary situation. Like writing a diary, but a diary that belongs to somebody else.
— Curious, isn’t it, how the first audiences in the tents and cinematheques of Lumiere and brother were witnessing a thing that we handle delicately—a big vibrating fruit—but that was in reality was just a sort of ecstatic distraction-without-god for all these lumpen fabric workers and stiff-collared haute bourgeoisie who were really trying to shift their amours in the back seat of a carriage. We handle these like ancient axes, pretend that it’s all very serious. Really, distraction-digression that was at once shocking and banal. Lest we forget their banality! The banality of sitting in a tent — burnt sugar everywhere, stinking ham, waves of hot air—and watching a train or a load of people (workers actually) “leaving the factory”, and now they are perpetually “leaving the factory” (the automatisation of cinema’s organs, which have become distributed away from the living body and pulped into editing software and Fiverr nameless labour and non-unionized labour and the magical buff of green screens). The queue went on forever, is still going on—entering and leaving the factory. But we are looking at the factory now, and there’s nobody left inside of it. Press your head up closely, very closely, to the door, the windows. Nobody is there! Only machinery, and that writhes and clicks (cooling down, suspended, or whirring through its indecipherable behaviour). Cinema is indecipherable, nobody knows how it functions. It is not quite a document of history, but it has elapsed (dead).
— Or that is what it can feel like. When you watch the slew of cinema’s most recent pulses, there can be a certain jocularity-without-fun. I abandoned my watching of Titane, last night. It is a very cynical and stupid film that, wearing the gaudy trappings of beautiful light and glistening chrome, is actually a very stupid and ugly piece of cinema. It has less merit than a bunch of workers leaving a factory, because it is careless about the instruments of film. It is too comfortable with them. I don’t want to talk about Titane.
— I want to talk about Éric Rohmer. Or, specifically, I want to talk about A Tale of Springtime (1990), which I watched a few days ago. It has been—as they say—‘lovingly restored’. It looks extremely lively, somewhat like a good Matisse; blocks of soft, chunky colour scattered across your eyes. But this is Rohmer, and you could well wonder what connects the films of Rohmer with the films of the Lumiere brothers. Not much. Perhaps a great deal. It is not arrogant with the tools of film, and—to some observers—might even seem a little dull. In A Tale of Springtime (1990), Rohmer does what Rohmer does best. That is, to explore diffidence. To articulate a kind of mesh of longing and indecision. But he is always very, very entertaining, precisely because of the diffidence and the flapping and the patience he takes with breathing, confidently, on the smudged mirror of human behaviour. Wipe it with your sleeve. That’s better. No, it’s not.
— For a lot longer than many of his New Wave peers, Rohmer continued to fix his gaze on alienation. But he never really pushed his foot down on the gas. It was always the same kind of apathy/uncertainty. The ‘moral tales’ and ‘the seasons’, his two great/grand cycles of films, always took their time and levelled their eyes into the lives of (typically) young(ish) people trying to figure out what it is they’re supposed to be doing. At times, there is the haunting evocation of the inchoate, the sublime. Example. The rapturous ‘green ray’ glimpsed by Delphine at the end of The Green Ray (1986). Example. Félicie’s miraculous encounter with Charles in A Tale of Winter (1992), the man she loves but has been separated from for five years. She prays for him. She embraces the faith of the metaphysical. She runs into him on a bus. God, or something like it, intervenes. Or seems to. Tears stream down her face.
— This is Rohmer’s poetics. It is often strapped about with a kind of moral quandary. Characters are attempting to feel their way toward a kind of ethics. Rightness. It doesn’t always coincide with the dictates of organised religion or politics. Everybody manages to be slightly unlikeable just as they are, in the same breath, likeable. Whoa wait, the subject is really springtime itself.
— Fastidious. Rohmer was, by all accounts, very fastidious; and very “restrained”. But this restraint, rather than coagulating the possibility of radiance (subtracting it, I mean), really served to deepen its ambiguity. It is a kind of occlusion through extraction. Here, Becca Rothfeld talks of his approach:
“The director’s style is elaborately unadorned, in some ways quasi-documentary: Rohmer eschewed artificial soundtracks in favour of natural noises, and many of his stars were unmannered amateurs. He sometimes named his characters after their actors, with whom he often collaborated on screenplays, making tapes of long conversations that he subsequently incorporated into his movies”
— His realism—if that is what it is—has the sheen of the artificial about it. Situations, like coincidences (God?), erupt quite improbably. Jeanne is the protagonist of A Tale of Springtime. She is a young philosophy teacher caught in a fold of ambiguity. She declares herself “homeless” (lol) because she has the keys to two flats, neither of which she can really stay in. One, her own, she has lent to her actually nice but quite oblivious cousin. The other belongs to her boyfriend (unseen), and she refuses to stay here – she claims – because it is left in a real state. She expresses her disgust at this untidiness. We learn this because she bumps into a slightly younger woman, Natascha, at a party she has decided to attend for no real reason in particular. What follows is the emergence of a very peculiar friendship between Jeanne and Natascha. Jeanne is a little older, more self-assured. Really, Natascha—stroppy and petulant—is trying to set Jeanne up with her father (Igor), whose girlfriend she dislikes. Etc.
— Much of the film involves people travelling from one place to another; apartment to apartment. They come, they go, they stay for a bit, somebody else arrives, their arrival is either welcome or embarrassing. They leave. They argue, perhaps. There are different motivations and desires sort of ebbing and lapping all over the place. These are rarely articulated in any coherent way. People seem to be upset about such and such. This is what Rohmer is. A sort of quietly exaggerated mirror of life.
— You feel that, in its avoidance of formal and editorial intervention, that the foreground and the actor’s behaviour within that foreground is the most important thing. It is a kind of passivity that would have been approved of by Bazin, a kind of “essence of objectivity”, and therefore reality.
— Elsewhere. Jeanne toys with the idea of being seduced by Igor. Really, from a kind of laconic ambiguity. Why not! Her disgust at her boyfriend’s untidy flat really seems like a sublimated disgust at the idea of him. Jeanne is not very good at expressing her needs or preferences. She kisses Igor, mostly because he asks if he can kiss her. She seems indifferent one way or the other.
— Colour seems to play a figurative role in expressing the warming up and cooling down of these sloppily sloshing emotions. Jeanne and Natascha temporarily fall out (when Jeanne gets wind of Natascha’s plans). They both appear in blue. Flowers are everywhere. Jeanne brings flowers, waters plants. She stands in front of a Matisse print. Spring (either as renewal or repetition) doesn’t necessarily imply transformation. Jeanne ends up walking away from Igor and Natascha and returns, eventually, to her boyfriend’s apartment. She brings flowers with her. She doesn’t want to fit into the tiresome ecological cycle of Igor/Natascha. Spring is a trap, as much as it is a kind of opening.
— Renewal. They’re all trying to find it. Igor is a bit lost with his young girlfriend, Eve. He’s drawn to Jeanne, sort of. Natascha is also trying to shuck off Eve. Natascha wants to freshen up the country house they own outside of Paris, painting the old, rusted arbour, spraying pesticide on the plants. She’s a bit diffident about her own boyfriend. Jeanne is trapped inside all of this fervid, quiet rutting and renewal. There is a lot of life in any Rohmer film, even if it doesn’t look that way on the surface. Appearances can be deceiving, even if A Tale of Springtime is – visually – very blatant about its nuances. There are flowers everywhere! It is literally about spring. Natascha’s favourite countryside view, her “vista”, is shrouded in fog. The horizon is literally unseeable. Rohmer is having a lot of fun with this.
— He claimed that he wanted people to “forget the camera”. His scenes are monotonous, often. Conversations stretch out, babbling toward inanity or clever stupidity. People are very good at talking about what they’re not talking about. Jeanne chops salami. Igor chops vegetables. People prepare drinks and then gulp them down. This is really living. But, through the corrugation of repetition, through the subdued artificiality of their recurrence and normality, they attain not so much the “sumptuousness” that Rothfeld writes about, but a kind of bizarre hysteria. It serves to trip us up a little. We forget about the absurdity of a given situation (Igor/Natascha/Jeanne) because we are staring with big banal eyes at two women peeling potatoes, while one of them—another—frets about a plate. It’s never quite normal, even while it wears the trappings of ordinariness. Here is our own temptation. It suddenly feels like a not very passive cinematography at all. It is actively directing our looking, while obscuring the un-looked. Here it suddenly feels less like Bazin.
— Love. The awaiting of a true or morally correct love. This, too, is beyond the ordinary, largely because the belief is imbued with the insane conviction of faith. Belief toward. Renewal (springtime) might not involve the bawdy explosion of the entire structure, but rather a distillation of feeling subtly felt. Jeanne arrives at her own, unspoken articulation of ethics. It necessitates a return to her boyfriend. Emotions align, but not visibly. They refine, percolate, whatever; like the incessant budding of a flower. The colour-switching of jumpers and jackets and vases and wallpaper is really a kind of kleptomaniac kaleidoscope that begs and borrows from the costume cupboard of the natural world, a thing that escapes the desires of the people who exist within its folds (i.e., those who project upon it). Natascha’s vista will not be revealed. Flowers will die and flowers will survive. What each Rohmer film seems to contain within itself is a nub or kernel of correctness. It is always present in the skin of the film, but takes the entire symphonic movement of the film for it to become apparent. For Jeanne, this is the necessary realisation that she is done with Igor and Natasha and would prefer to return to the boyfriend who has always been there, even while never being present (literally: unseen). Distillation.
— Do we forget about Rohmer’s camera? Yes and no. The fervid, bustling activity and precocious conviction of his characters (e.g., Jeanne’s decision to sleep for a week at Natascha’s father’s house, a woman she has literally just met) betrays the inherent absurdity of his scenarios, and you realise how you are tumbling behind all of this, an eye glued to the surface. It is intimacy. You rarely detach from Jeanne. She is almost always in shot, and we rarely wander off to pursue the wanderings of others (we don’t follow Natasha to her piano class; we don’t experience what Igor gets up to when he’s not at home; we don’t meet Jeanne’s boyfriend). The lens is vigilant, and hyper-focused on Jeanne as a body. It’s as if Rohmer is giving us everything we need to anticipate or to co-arrive at the same decision as Jeanne. This renders the lens (the camera) an instrument of fragile yet insistent surveillance. Idk, Bazin again.
— Why fragile? Because it is hemmed by the possibility of infidelity or betrayal. Jeanne and Igor. The un-desiring kiss they share. The anxious possibility of her spending the night with Igor in a situation that has been orchestrated by Natascha. Elsewhere, A Tale of Winter (1992), Félicie rejects Loic – her former lover who she does not love – with an explanation that she feels “weak”, that is: a weakness to resist seduction. She sleeps upstairs instead. What sustains her, in this different-but-similar film, is a faith that she will encounter Charles, her “correct” love. This eventually happens. Of course.
— You can forget the almost hysterical and insane approach that Rohmer takes to narrative conundrums. Example. The ‘missing necklace’ in A Tale of Springtime. This McGuffin radiates outwards into the film’s fretful foursome. Natascha believes that Igor’s girlfriend, Eve, has stolen it. Igor believes that he has misplaced it. Jeanne doesn’t know what to believe. She locates the necklace by accidentally knocking a shoe box from a shelf, into which it had fallen. The two women reconstruct Igor’s exact movements so as to determine exactly how the necklace had gotten into the shoe inside the shoebox. It was a gentle accident, but the necklace becomes a device of interpretive strangulation that various characters deploy against others. It signifies Natascha’s dislike of Eve. It speaks to Igor’s clumsiness (something shared by Jeanne). It means nothing and everything. There is a kind of dull yet lively edge to all of this. A diaphanous desire that bulges and retracts. The same can be said of the film’s very explicit deployment of colour and light and warmth. It signifies toward an air of renewal and of sexual indiscretion, but the real chemistry between characters can seem muted or inert. Rohmer’s colour, here, is paradoxical, or perhaps simply ironic.
— You think about Titane, with its extrovert chaos. It is an anxious film, uncertain of what it is doing. Rohmer does chaos better. An electric buzz that has its own kind of maniacal unpredictability. We don’t need gushing and blood. We are given suddenly unpredictable decisions. We are confronted with absurd conviction. Jeanne, seemingly so diffident and dull, makes a series of quite insane decisions. Her dallying with Igor. Her ‘explosive’ intervention between Eve and Natascha, at once maternal and not. Why does she insert herself into the fraught triangle of Igor/Natasha/Eve? She pouts and hurries. Much of the film’s first twenty or so minutes involve her rushing from one place to the next (flat, flat, party, flat). The return to her boyfriend who we never see is important, not least because we too need to throw our wild faith into this decision. Unglimpsed wives and partners, they appear also in Love in the Afternoon (1974). Rohmer reveals to us the emotional anatomy of some of his characters in precise and unblinking intensity, while withholding others entirely from us. Charles, the love object of A Tale of Winter, speaks barely a few ordinary lines. When they embrace at a bus stop in the film’s penultimate scene, we have to jump the blind gulf of ambiguity. We trust into Félicie’s love. Rohmer knows when to withhold. The same cannot be said of stroppily inane Titane, of course.
— In his Lover’s Discourse, Barthes wrote on the exploding ambiguity that troubles the relationship between the lover and the object (of their love). Suffering coincides with desire. “I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned”. This feels like the words of Félicie in Winter. “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits”. This feels like the words of Jeanne in Springtime. It feels like them both. The central irony, of course, is that the discourse is entirely one-sided. It flows outwards. This is its risk, its fraught intensity - an obliterating tide. Jeanne’s boyfriend, Félicie’s Charles. Both men are withheld and flowed-toward. We do not glimpse them, even while we are exposed to the figurations of those who love them (however complicatedly).
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