The Sign of Rohmer

FILM DIRECTOR

by Joseph Jon Lanthier on August 17, 2010 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

Within the remaining entries in the cycle, Rohmer often alights the top of his self-deprecating game with snarling aplomb; the ideals he'd converted female types into during the last two decades are resisted by their skin-and-bone vessels with puissance, and they eventually win the rhetorical skirmish. Even Pauline Kael noted how Almendros's gradually roving camera couldn't properly fetishize the snugly swimsuit-ensconced preteen rump of Pauline at the Beach's title character. And when an older womanizer plants kisses on Pauline's nymphet legs, she double-kicks his chest out of her comfort zone and, seemingly, into the honest if off-kilter chivalry of Claire's Knee. Both this and the dissection of conjugal bliss as a predestined goal that develops, however incipiently, with the gonads in Le Beau Mariage applaud women who maximize the benefit of their otherness; in Rohmer's world, both sexes are equally befuddled and frustrated, but adamantly clasp an awareness of their influence on that befuddlement within the opposite gender. There's a thin razor hiding in Pauline's smile. She knows, even as she becomes weepily embroiled in the politics of her aunt's desperate divorcée decadence, that she will only have her automatic pick of suitors for so long; after that comes the smoldering, clawing decline and reckless sexual hegemony epitomized by the macguffin mystery in The Aviator's Wife.

This buoyant, boy-crazy bitterness is what makes the sixth of the "Comedies and Proverbs," Boyfriends and Girlfriends, such a balmy farewell to Rohmer's most rewarding period. The Shakespearean lover-swapping and admire/admonish relationship between the blond, timid Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet) and the tan, scrappy chick-of-the-world Lea (Sophie Renoir) is ironically an emblem of the director's staggering growth. Who else could fashion a film so slight and yet so necessary? It's not surprising that Whit Stillman created a near-facsimile of the bumpily brainy dynamic between the two young ladies, and their clueless but worthy beaus, for his unfairly maligned masterpiece Last Days of Disco.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends is a portrait of twentysomething unkemptness, a paean to the clumsy transition from teenage overreaction to adult compromise filtered through the gracious attentiveness of a septuagenarian with unflappable memory. Even the interiors represent rebirth: Blanche's pale tomb of an apartment vibrantly blossoms a guilty rouge after her seducing of Lea's on-again, off-again boy toy. And in a smirking, highly didactic nod to the schism between the "Comedies and Proverbs" and Rohmer's first cycle, one character bemoans his inferiority "not morally, but physically." The "Comedies and Proverbs" affix the autumnal intellect of the "Moral Tales" to Elizabethan errors of corporeal l'amour, a juxtaposition that gives both attributes sinews of verisimilitude and gravity; if My Night at Maud's is a lyrically fictionalized essay, both The Aviator's Wife and Boyfriends and Girlfriends are formative experiences plucked from the fray of life and saturated with sense-providing, color-coordinated drama.

The ending sequence of Boyfriends and Girlfriends shows Rohmer at his most fraternity-affirming. Blanche and Lea half-apologize to one another for their dalliances, working each other up into a hissy confusion just short of explosion until realizing that they've unintentionally freed one another from past obligations and can happily entrap the men they truly, maturely desire rather than the ones they've pined for at a Chekovian distance. The content-for-ever-after closing is thus not without the suggestion of an incommunicative continuum; there will be further horn-locking, further self-doubt, further self-searching, but all with the acknowledgement that the germ of existence resides within this endlessly neurotic, neural grind. And this truism is all but evident in the process-driven art of a director like Rohmer, who in one sense explored but a handful of themes across nearly thirty feature-length films without flagging. There is no other filmmaker for whom movies are "essays" in the most French sense of the term—attempts at coherence that must be reiterated in variations if meaning is to be achieved. There is no other filmmaker who more successfully infused the loquaciously verbal with its unagitated visual counterpart. There is no other filmmaker whose work has so often metamorphosed my living room into a secular temple from which I emerge baptized in clarity, with dense, oily droplets of patterned angst-language and feminine beatification clinging to my brow.

Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, "The Sign of Rohmer" (August 18 to September 3) is the most complete North American retrospective of Rohmer’s work in more than a decade, including all of his feature films and the U.S. premiere of his 1980 TV film Catherine de Heilbronn. For more information click here.

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