Rohmer, Eric

Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales - Criterion Collection

Audiences love or hate the films of Eric Rohmer. The magnificent Criterion set of the French director's Six Moral Tales, his first film cycle, contains the films that first brought Rohmer to international attention--particularly My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, andLove in the Afternoon--in gorgeous film-to-dvd transfers, accompanied by a bounty of short films and other extras. Watching any of these films, even the short features that begin the series (The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne's Career), you will discover if Rohmer is for you. To some, his examinations of social mores and the psychology of love are absorbing, subtle, and sublime; to others, they're meandering, talky, and flat. But even his detractors must acknowledge that Rohmer draws out the twists of joy and anguish, brief and ephemeral, that haunt lovers as they grope towards security and happiness; and though his visual approach is rigorously simple, his images--thanks to cinematographer Nestor Almendros--are luminous.

The Bakery Girl..., only 23 minutes long, has all the basic elements: A man, infatuated with one woman, flirts with another, all the while comforting himself with self-serving rationalizations and a comic lack of self-knowledge. This film's simplicity makes it more charming and satisfying than the more awkward efforts of Rohmer's next two films, Suzanne's Career (about a student who idolizes a callous older boy and only too late realizes that the girl they've been mocking may have a better grasp on life) and La collectioneusse (about a love triangle at a countryside estate; oddly, though released two years before the next film, it's presented as the fourth in the series), though each has moments of insight and delight. The remaining three movies are masterpieces: In My Night at Maud's, a Catholic engineer (the superb Jean-Louis Trintignant, Three Colors: Red) wrestles with his morals and his desires while spending the night with the enigmatic and alluring Maud (Francoise Fabian, 5 x 2). Claire's Knee gently mocks Les Liaisons Dangereuse as a man about to be married is goaded by a female friend into pursuing an infatuation with a young nubile nymph. And the last of the series, Love in the Afternoon (also known as Chloe in the Afternoon) follows a husband whose unconsummated affair with an old friend almost capsizes his happy marriage. What's most remarkable about this series is that, though each has virtually the same plot, watching all of these films in close succession only highlights their intricate differences and the complex shadings of delusion and yearning. Rohmer's work grows more fascinating the more familiar his methods become. Some filmgoers consider "nuance" code for "boring," but anyone who finds the collision of hearts and minds more exciting than car crashes will find Six Moral Tales revelatory and rewarding. --Bret Fetzer

The multifaceted deeply personal dramatic universe of Eric Rohmer has had an effect on cinema unlike any other. Gently existential hyperarticulate character studies set against vivid seasonal landscapes Rohmer's audacious and wildly influential series defined a genre. A succession of jousts between fragile men and the women who tempt them the Six Moral Tales unleashed onto the film world a new voice one that was at once sexy philosophical modern daring nonjudgmental and liberating.Six-disc box set includes the films: The Bakery Girl of MonceauSuzanne's CareerMy Night at Maud'sLa collectionneuseClaire's KneeLove in the AfternoonFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 715515019125 Manufacturer No: CC1640DDVD

Pauline at the Beach

Teenager Pauline spends a holiday at the beach with her recently divorced cousin Marion. She observes that Marion loves well, but not wisely.
Genre: Foreign Film - French
Rating: R
Release Date: 7-SEP-2004
Media Type: DVD

In the lighthearted third film in Eric Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" series, 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet) gets an eye-opening lesson in the games grown-ups play on a two-week summer vacation with her recently divorced and ready-for-fun older cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle, every inch the vivacious blonde goddess). Smitten young Pascal Greggory turns aggressive with jealousy when the smooth, seductive, happily shallow writer Féodor Atkine wins the fancy of the "perfect" Marion while continuing to fool around on the side. The tangled affairs, mistaken identities, and white lies are the stuff of sex farce, but Rohmer is more interested in the folly of love and the impulsive, illogical workings of human nature. He deftly crafts a gentle and sexy little human comedy that ends with Pauline learning perhaps the right lessons after all. --Sean Axmaker

The Lady and the Duke

Seeing a film by the great Eric Rohmer was once notoriously likened to "watching paint dry"; in the haunting The Lady and the Duke, it's as if paint has come to life. To re-create France in the 1790s, Rohmer staged his intimate scenes against blue screens where his digital footage would be blended with backgrounds from Romantic paintings and eerily pure perspective drawings of 18th-century streets, rooflines, and landscapes. This cost-effective technique pays rich dividends, creating a Masterpiece Theatre-type world of such quaintness, it seems impervious to the bloody Reign of Terror crowding in ever more insistently from just offscreen. That's a rough analogue for the precariously privileged existence of our sympathetic main characters: Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scotswoman relocated to France, and Philippe, duc d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), her close friend and former lover, who's also King Louis XVI's cousin. As in so many Rohmer works, much of the film consists of conversations marking milestones in this pair's now-platonic, yet still intellectually passionate, relationship. But this time the issues truly are life-and-death. --Richard T. Jameson

Summer

Gloomy young Parisian Delphine (Marie Rivière) faces her summer alone when her best friend cancels their travel plans to stay with her new boyfriend. Determined to have her vacation, she tries a number of alternatives but feels left out at a family retreat, runs into a former lover at a ski resort, and becomes completely cowed by her unlikely companion on the French shore, an uninhibited Swedish vacationer who sunbathes nude and picks up men for one night stands---a far cry from the insecure Delphine. Willowy Rivière plays Delphine with a combination of romantic idealism, headstrong determination, and uncompromising (often debilitating) demands, an impossible standard that leaves her lonely and wanting until she meets a handsome young man at the train station on her way back to Paris. The two become charmed by one another and, giddy with anticipation, Delphine insists they watch the setting sun to see the legendary green ray (the French title of the film is "Le Rayon Vert") in an ephemeral conclusion both magical and tenderly human. Rohmer changed his shooting style completely for the fifth film in his "Comedies and Proverbs" series, creating the characters in collaboration with the actors and shooting with only a script outline to create a largely improvised portrait of Delphine, but the easy rhythms, the gentle naturalism, and Rohmer's genuine affection for his characters, foibles and all, continue in his tradition of smart, sensitive, and delightfully witty romantic comedies. --Sean Axmaker

Boyfriends and Girlfriends

The title of Eric Rohmer's sixth and final film in his Comedies and Proverbs series, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, makes much more sense in its original French form: L'ami de mon amie (The Friend of My Friend). In this series, each stand-alone film is based on a proverb, in this case, "the friends of my friends are my friends." Thus when conservative 24-year-old Blanche (the beautiful and talented Emmanuelle Chaulet) is befriended by wild-child 22-year-old Lea (the exotic Sophie Renoir), they find themselves each tempted by the love interests of the other. Fabien (Eric Viellard) is Lea's long-term beau, into windsurfing and hiking, which fills Lea with ennui; she'd much rather party all night. Blanche is besotted with Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron), a ladies' man who barely acknowledges her existence and who is dating Adrienne (Anne-Laure Meury). But of course, as things always go, Fabien is enamoured with the sporty Blanche, and Alexandre finds Lea irresistible.

In typical Rohmer fashion, the film is heavy on dialogue and light on action. By stripping away the veneer--no unusual camera work, no elaborate settings, no pounding soundtrack--Rohmer is able to effectively focus on the empty lives of the modern suburbanites (they all live in a spanking-clean suburb of Paris, Clergy-Pontoise, where the sparseness of the apartments and streets echoes their lives) and his New Wave influences show in the simple theme, the fickle nature of the heart. Yet his characters are immensely likable and their situations comical and ordinary enough for the viewer to relate to. This is an excellent entry into the world of Eric Rohmer for the New Wave neophyte and a refreshing, lighter outing for those who are already fans. --Jenny Brown

Triple Agent

True lies are given a historical spin in Eric Rohmer's invigoratingly ambitious Triple Agent. A period tragedy in the vein of the octogenarian French New Wave director's The Lady And The Duke, it's very loosely based on the true story of White Russian Army general Fyodor (Serge Renko) who played a triply duplicitous role as a spy in 30s France, deceiving not only Marxists, Soviets and Fascists but also his long-suffering wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou) until the forces of history finally caught up with him.

My Night at Maud's

French director Eric Rohmer, former critic and Cahiers du Cinema editor, created a very special romantic film series around the difficult choices men make when they fall in love with two women called "Six Moral Tales." My Night at Maud's was the third entry, and it was so well received in 1969 that it gave Rohmer international prominence. To this day, it remains Rohmer's masterpiece, a brilliantly insightful and sublime meditation on adult indiscretions. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a chaste engineer who thinks he's met his soul mate in church (Marie-Christine Barrault), yet winds up accidentally spending the night with the seductive Maud (Francoise Fabian), who is more his intellectual equal. Filmed in stark black and white by Nestor Almendros, this is one of those rare films in which questions about philosophy translate into unexpected answers about the heart. It's slow and methodical, but well worth the experience. --Bill Desowitz

A Tale of Springtime

OscarÂ(r)-nominated* writer/director Eric Rohmer (Pauline at the Beach) delivers this 'splendid, engaging, delightful revelation (The Village View) that sparkles with humor andsizzles with romance. Heightened by the splendor of the French countryside, A Tale of Springtime is radiantly alive, blissfully awareand among the most beautiful and enlightening [films] in world cinema (Los Angeles Times)! The well-ordered life of Jeanne, a high school philosophy teacher, suddenly spins into disorder when a young stranger she meets at a party involvesher in a devilish scheme. Natacha, an adolescent pianist with a penchant for subtly playing her elders, invites Jeanne to her father's home...hoping to make a match of the two and send her father's current lover, Eve, packing. But when the tempestuous Eve arrives at every chance meeting between Jeanne and Natacha's father, fireworks of an entirely different sort erupt, and everyone is forced toexamine his or her own philosophies on love, relationships and other sordid affairs of the human heart. *1970: Story and Original Screenplay, My Night at Maud's

Marquise of O

After Eric Rohmer completed his "Six Moral Tales," and before launching into the "Comedies and Proverbs," he tackled two projects very different from anything else in his career. In the first of these, The Marquise of O, based on the novel by Heinrich von Kleist, Rohmer leaves the young intellectuals of Paris for Italy during the Napoleonic wars. During the Russian invasion, the beautiful young marquise (Edith Clever) is saved from certain assault by a handsome and dashing count (Bruno Ganz). She spends the night guarded by her chivalrous savior, who returns months later to rather insistently court her. Only when he leaves does she discover that she is, unaccountably, pregnant. Rohmer's style is both more lush (shot in rich colors by Néstor Almendros) and less intimate than his previous romantic comedies, directed in painterly compositions at a removed distance. Unlike the self-obsessed young adults of his modern films, the count and the marquise act out of moral duty and social responsibility, and their actions reverberate through family and community. Yet this is still a Rohmer film, filled with carefully tooled dialogue (spoken in German) and informed by irony. The story of innocence and corruption, and the shades that lie within even the best of men, ends on a note of delicate forgiveness and understanding. Rohmer followed this with an even more unexpected stylistic experiment, the beautiful and beguiling Perceval. --Sean Axmaker

The Aviator's Wife