I.
The initial pleasure of an Éric Rohmer film is the pleasure of a beautiful face. The initial response of any viewer is a dazed enchantment with his titillating aesthetics. The faces, yes, but also the French landscape and the youthful, lithe bodies that populate it. Despite its name, even Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter begins with tones of blush pink and sparkling summer azure. A seagull flies overhead to the dulcet notes of a piano. A couple lounges on a beach in nude, edenic delight. Rohmer seems allergic to the grime and ugliness of material concerns. Money and means are almost never a problem for his characters, even those who appear to be as precariously situated in the economy as Félicie, the hairdresser protagonist of A Tale of Winter. Thin, young, blonde, and toggling between potential partners, Félicie is the quintessential Rohmerian protagonist. Her beauty invites viewers to overlook her questionable erotic politics and turns endearing the casual exploitation of her lovers’ generosity. Perhaps Rohmer understood that instant aesthetic gratification was necessary to carry viewers through his films, which often amount to little more than people sitting around and talking.
His classical, conversation-heavy style has literary roots. Before he became a leading director of the French New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague, Rohmer tried his hand at the nouveau roman. Éric Rohmer wrote one novel, Élisabeth. It was initially published in 1946 under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, while Rohmer was working as a literature teacher in Nancy. This was 15 years before Rohmer completed his first feature film and 10 years before he began his editorial stint at Cahiers du Cinéma in Paris, where he became mad for the movies.
Élisabeth was translated into English for the first time by Aaron Kerner and published this July by McNally Editions. In the afterword to the new translation, we learn Rohmer admired the “‘behaviorist’ approach” of American novelists like Faulkner. He prized “their determination to cleave to facts—material facts and facts of consciousness.” Yet, Rohmer’s characters need little to do with the material. Or rather, “material” to Rohmer is not financial security, homeownership, or a hefty retirement fund (the coveted objects of his American counterparts), but the materiality of landscape and body. Beauty and its subversions are Rohmer’s modus operandi. And, in a way, the tension between the setting and its beautiful inhabitants is the central, animating conflict of all his films. Rohmer’s characters are never so happy as they are elegant, in body as in setting. Despite living in paradise, they all dwell in a world of unfulfilled desire.
This is perhaps the deepest aspect of his realism: that with everything they could possibly want within reach, Rohmer’s characters are left to wonder whether they have anything substantive to say, and if they do, whether they can believe in it at all. “I’m crazy,” Michel, one of the protagonists of Élisabeth, says to himself. “I don’t even think the things I think.”
II.
So, what’s left when the material frictions of life are smoothed away?
In paradise, Rohmer’s characters are singularly interested in coupling, themselves and each other. Even as they talk through frivolities — likes, dislikes, food, literature — what is submerged, tickling them under the surface, is the act of sizing each other up as potential partners. Gaspard, the moody, black-clad protagonist of A Summer’s Tale, travels to Dinard before starting a new job to visit his elusive girlfriend Léna, despite their unstable relationship status. There, he becomes entangled with two other women — including the outgoing ethnologist Margot — and struggles with severe romantic indecision. In a stunning climax to his conversations with Margot, the shy Gaspard says, “Everyone’s alive around me, but me.” This is not only an excavation of his sad-boy psyche; it is a performance of persona. Gaspard says this perhaps because he feels it to be true, but also because he thinks it will make him the kind of person Margot would fall for. It is brooding, but also playful as Gaspard tests his charm in Dinard’s garden of delights.
All Rohmerian dialogue is like this. Unburdened by economics, characters are afforded a freedom of expression that renders their dialogue at once revealing and entirely without consequence. In A Tale of Winter, Félicie says to one of her lovers, Loïc, as he’s offering her a place to stay when she has none: “I love you. Not enough to live with you, only to ruin your life.” A reasonable person would have thrown her out, but somehow after this blow, Loïc remains perfectly friendly to her for the remaining 40 minutes of the film.
While Rohmer’s speakers pile insights atop one another, constructing philosophical arguments on the nature of love, the director appears to have no patience for intellectual snobbery. Characters attempting to show off their learnedness are either the butt of the joke, like Loïc, or a nuisance. All insight must circle back to matters of the heart. Everything else is useless. Most of Rohmer’s figures talk about love in a way that is uncomfortably frank, as in Félicie’s refutation of Loïc.
Dialogue and scenery are inextricably linked in Rohmer’s films. The philosophical, romantic, and erotic realizations of the characters are only possible during times of leisure. Insight seems to be predicated on being on vacation, on having large swaths of time with nothing better to do than think. “To do nothing, yet think while doing it, is exhausting,” says Adrien in La Collectionneuse. “Working is much easier . . . work is an escape.” It was only this summer that The Atlantic published an article on the lost art of leisure, though the idea of doing nothing is both Rohmer’s most titillating fantasy and his most prescient warning: “We speak of a leisure society,” Adrien says, “but when it comes we won’t know what leisure is.”
Rohmer’s world of leisure is a foil for our contemporary world of work. Work, Rohmer shows us, cuts both ways: it prevents our full romantic realization by taking up our time and energy, but also shields us from confronting the uncertainties of our desire. If we had all the time in the world, would we even know what, and who, we want?
III.
I have often had to pause and rewind Rohmer’s films. This seems essential to understanding the winding density of his characters’ speech, which takes multiple viewings to fully digest. Conversation moves from triviality to profundity in seconds, and I’ve frequently felt the urge to read his dialogue rather than listen to it, to trace the contours of its shifts and turns. It is surprising then, for such a literary director, that his dialogue doesn’t prove as illuminating on the page as it does on the screen.
Élisabeth follows the Roby family, their summer guests, and their flirtations. The novel has close to a dozen characters — a far cry from Rohmer’s usual ménage à trois — all to be fleshed out in a mere 200 pages, too few to grasp both the characters’ individual psychologies and their relations to one another.
Like his films, Élisabeth is structured around conversation. The first 50 pages are almost entirely dialogue, and the circularity of language is particularly Rohmerian. Yet these very features of Rohmer’s conversational art are at once underdeveloped and taken to an extreme in Élisabeth. Dialogue in the novel is repetitive past the point of intelligibility. In one conversation near the book’s end, two characters fall into a lovers’ quarrel in which the phrase “let go” recurs a dozen times in just two pages. This circularity is not isolated either, as conversations tend to meander and repeat to no discernible end. Though it contains the seeds of his later films, Élisabeth’s kaleidoscopic details are so disorienting one almost misses the identity swap between the two protagonists halfway through the book.
Rohmer’s use of fillers is also extensive. Characters constantly hedge and punctuate their thoughts with words like “idiot,” “asshole,” “does it really?” “isn’t it?” “no question,” “okay?” “what?” “anyway,” “I don’t get it,” “it’s possible,” and “listen,” to name a few of the many phrases Élisabeth’s characters deploy to say nothing at all. There is no revelation that approaches the simple elegance of “Everyone’s alive around me, but me.”
If Élisabeth sticks to the bare facts of consciousness, representing Rohmer’s own behaviorist approach, then Rohmer’s vision of human nature is repetitive, winding, and almost labyrinthine in its frivolity. Yet Élisabeth struggles with cohesion in a way the films do not. Issues of circularity and repetition appear in the characters’ internal monologues as well as in their conversation. When Michel, who is dating an older woman, Irène, begins to fall out of love, the sentiment is rendered as “I love all women but her—her I hate. I love all other women and hate her.” The thought is expressed twice here, and it will recur, over and over, for the next 10 pages, with little added nuance or insight. None of this is all that peculiar in the context of the nouveau roman, which prized the subordination of plot and character to the details of things. And yet it all seems peculiarly anti-Rohmerian.
While Élisabeth, like many of Rohmer’s works, takes place in the French countryside, its swimming spots ready-made for teenagers to find potential lovers, many of its scenes are abstracted from physical space. Aficionados of the films can supply the typical Rohmerian idyll as a backdrop, but because so much of the novel is dialogue — with action often described by one character to another rather than given to readers through traditional narration — there is little sense of physical reality.
All the Rohmerian motifs of the films — the idyllic landscape, body language, and frequent brushing up against one another, the bold, primary-colored attire — are lost on readers. Conversely, narrative techniques most often seen in film appear frequently in the novel, as readers are habitually dropped into dialogue in medias res. Rohmer wanted to know “whether the literary work managed to defeat cinema on its own terms by granting reality a stronger ‘presence’ than images would ever have been able to achieve.” Given his concern for the visual, for the direct imitation of “reality,” it is no wonder then that the medium best suited for Rohmer’s impeccable eye is film.
IV.
What did Rohmer believe film could do that literature could not? The two art forms are often set against one another in contemporary culture, literature the older, more “intellectual” cousin to film’s innovation and radiance. What proves more interesting than their rivalry is how one feeds into the other, how an artist can take the techniques of literature and rethink them within the formal constraints of film. Rohmer’s “novelistic” filmmaking suggests he never really abandoned his literary project, only moved it to the screen.
Rohmer shows how artists find their voice not through ideas, but through form. His interests and subject matter have stayed the same from his first artistic labors in Élisabeth. The maturity of those ideas in the novel mostly reflects that he was then a very young artist trying to understand the world. Élisabeth’s flaws are not flaws of content, but of form, and it was indeed his mode of expression that shifted radically, and to staggering effect. Rohmer’s mind worked the same material again and again, making it into different shapes. The critic Serge Kaganski called his short stories “neither bad nor brilliant.” The same short stories in cinematic form make up Rohmer’s Moral Tales, heralded by critics as “complex,” “absorbing,” and “exquisite.”
What is buried and banal on paper shimmers with life on the screen. The scenery we can only imagine through his writing is immediate and ever-present in his films. Rohmer carried the tools of his literary education into his filmmaking, giving his films a novelistic structure uncommon among his New Wave peers. “It was a fundamentally literary enterprise, one far removed from any real cinematic influence, that would provide the nourishment for my early films,” he said.
Rohmer forgoes camera tricks to blend point of view seamlessly into his compositions. His movies also have chapters. Frames informing viewers what day it is punctuate Claire’s Knee, the fifth of the Six Moral Tales — itself a cycle whose every installment reads as a chapter, a variation on itself. All but a few of Rohmer’s works belong to an interconnected series, approaching the same ideas with shifting methods. By the end of most of his films, the matrix of character relations has not changed. Six Moral Tales, the first of his three film cycles, which he adapted from his own short stories, was predicated on the very theme of nothing changing. Each ends exactly how it started, just as the characters in the Tales of the Four Seasons come to rest in the same configuration they began. A Tale of Springtime carries the motif of circularity into its setting, where the locations of the protagonist, the apartments she inhabits, loop back on themselves in a mirrored ABCBA form.
What shifts turns out to be less the configurations of characters than the cathartic release they achieve simply by expressing themselves. And this expression of desire always plays out through words rather than sex. Even a staunchly anti-intellectual character like Félicie comes to intricate, philosophical beliefs about love and fate.
A Tale of Winter is often called Rohmer’s most spiritual film. Félicie’s revelation at the end foregrounds not only her own spiritual awakening but the spirituality undergirding much of Rohmer’s body of work. She has just come out of a production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” Loïc is driving her home, when she is finally able to decide which man she wants:
Félicie: Well, if God loves me, let Him bring Charles back to me.
Loïc: Not so fast. We don’t know if that’s what we should be asking Him.
Félicie: But I’m not asking Him for anything. God didn’t even enter my mind, even though I do think of Him sometimes. I thought, you know, in that one second that was so full of everything, that I was alone in the world, alone in the universe, and that it was up to me to act, and that I wasn’t going to let myself be pushed around, not by anyone, not by anything.
Loïc: That won’t bring Charles back to you.
Félicie: But it will stop me from doing things that would keep me from finding him.
It’s an incredible scene. Instead of driving blindly into the future, Félicie chooses to keep faith with the past. More than that, she decides that faith, even if its hopes go unfulfilled, is enough.
Rohmer is the director of desire deferred. His characters labor at scratching each other’s surfaces. They speak paradoxically, in ways at once tentative and soul-baring, working out how to draw closer to one another, how to reach a perfect union. Sometimes, that perfection arrives: Félicie is reunited with Charles in a stroke of destiny, recapturing the happiness of the film’s opening. Sometimes it doesn’t: Gaspard leaves Dinard on the same boat he came in on, alone as ever, while Margot waves goodbye to him from the shore.
Rohmer’s films present a morality of asceticism and constraint, not only in their conservative forms, forever looping onto themselves, but in their anti-modern edge. Rohmer seems to scoff at linear narrative, suggesting that true understanding of the self, and perhaps of others, comes by walking backward, by revisiting what’s already happened. There is always some experience behind you that needs untangling, some lover’s quandary left unsolved. The ennui lingering in his films is not simply a vacation aesthetic, then, but a moral principle. To lie in wait, even if what you are waiting for never arrives, even if the love you hoped for is never consummated, is better than to fall into what was never meant to be. Only in these paradisiacal, liminal landscapes are we given the liberty to explore the crevices of our affection for one another, even if it requires winding, elliptical turns. Watching Rohmer’s films can be an exercise in patience for the 21st-century viewer. They are full of beautiful landscapes and beautiful people all tingling with want, but Rohmer never makes any promises. Like Félicie, we must lie in wait. We never know when love may strike.
Shreya Khullar was born in Delhi, grew up in Iowa City, and recently graduated from Columbia University. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harper’s online and The Blue and White, and her fiction and poetry in wildness and GASHER.
