REVIEW: DVD Release: Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales























Film: Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales
Release date: 12th July 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 480 mins
Director: Eric Rohmer
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Beatrice Romand, Jean-Claude Brialy
Genre: Romance/Drama/Comedy
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: France

Originally released over a nine year period from 1963 to 1972, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales can be considered the world’s first ‘relationship comedies’; in Rohmer’s hands, a genre unto itself, and as far removed from the rom com as can be imagined.

The Girl At The Monceau Bakery (1963)
A student roams the streets of Paris in search of a beautiful young blonde he has grown infatuated with. When she mysteriously goes missing, he begins a flirtation with a girl who works in a bakery. Following the blonde’s reappearance, the student must make a choice after arranging dates on the same day with both girls.

Suzanne’s Career (1963)
A young student named Bertrand is friends with Guillaume, a womaniser whom he seems to both despise and admire. When Gauillaume takes up with the seemingly naïve Suzanne, his poor treatment of the girl leads to tension within the trio.

La Collectioneuse (1967)
Adrien is an art dealer who takes a vacation at a friend's summer house alongside his artist friend Daniel and a mysterious, promiscuous girl named Haydee. Adrien becomes increasingly infatuated and frustrated by the girl’s mixture of inscrutability and apparent availability.

My Night At Maud’s (1969)
A Catholic engineer named Jean-Louis believes he has found his perfect woman one day in church. When a philosopher friend introduces him to Maud, a beautiful divorcee, the engineer ends up spending the night at her apartment after it begins to snow. His growing attraction to Maud threatens to overthrow all his assumptions about love, marriage and morality.

Claire’s Knee (1970)
While on vacation, a diplomat named Jerome is encouraged by his female writer friend to begin a flirtation with a precocious 16-year-old. Although engaged to be married, Jerome engages in a brief flirtation with Laura before moving on to her older sister Claire, culminating in a strange desire to touch her knee.

Love In The Afternoon (1972)
Frederic is a successful businessman, married with one child and another on the way. When an impulsive friend from his past named Chloe comes back into his life, their initial friendship begins to grow into something much more troubling to Frederic’s conscience...


Rohmer always occupied a singular space within the Nouvelle Vague movement with which he is chiefly associated. Significantly older than many of his peers (he did not have a major success until his fifties), many critics viewed him as self-indulgently introspective, and out of touch with the political urgency of contemporary French cinema. Further misgivings arose from the suspicion Rohmer had turned to cinema only after failing to gain much success as a writer.

Ironically, it is the very tendencies his detractors accused him of (introspection, the personal over the political, literariness…) that account for much of the strength of Rohmer’s cinema. Through their focus on a particular type of self-deluding male egoism, the films present the unfurling of thought as their main spectacle, comparing favourably in this respect to the great literature of Goethe or Proust. With their layers of suggestive narrative, intentionally slow pacing and complex characters, they admittedly demand as much from those who see them as they actually give back. Part of the joy of Six Moral Tales, though, is the way in which aspects and themes emerge in your mind for days after having watched them. A great deal of Rohmer’s genius lies in his ability to lead us in a number of directions without our ever feeling as though we are being manipulated – no music tells us what to feel, and what little symbolism is employed always seamlessly incorporated within the story.

In terms of obvious visual spectacle, the Six Moral Tales may initially come as something of a disappointment. Some picturesque alpine and seaside imagery in Claire’s Knee and La Collectioneuse, some evocative shots of Paris in most of the other films, and that may seem to be about it. The first two films in the set feature some of these stylistic tropes typically associated with the Nouvelle Vague (16 mm film, tracking shots of a character’s footsteps, etc.), and the effect is curiously to make them more conventional, even generic. It was only when Rohmer began his fruitful collaboration with Nestor Almendros that the films attained that distinctly Rohmer-esque originality. The level of beauty Almendros displays in his landscapes (particularly in La Collectioneuse, almost Impressionist-like in its use of Cote d’Azur colours) attests to the selfless discipline he brought to the overall collaboration. Incredibly subtle in its effects, it is an exquisitely precise cinematography, especially adept at capturing the nuanced minutiae of glances and gestures that are integral to illuminating the abstract ideas and complex inner emotions of Rohmer’s cinema.

It is the attention to character and the strength of dialogue that really stands out. What strikes you as most remarkable is being able to listen to people talk about love for 480 minutes without them ever resorting to the clichéd, tired or trite. The acting throughout is of a consistently high standard, and Rohmer often asks much of his cast in the many long, uninterrupted dialogue-heavy scenes. Initially, the performances in the earlier films seem somewhat awkward and mannered (particularly in comparison to the later works), but they are thrown into a different light when you realise they are, in fact, performances within performances – almost everyone is playing a role, one they present both to the outside world and to themselves. As the series progresses and the characters become slightly older, these performances become more complex and ingrained, the protagonists clasping more tightly to the masks that seem to wear them as much as they do them.

There is a telling exchange in Claire’s Knee when the writer informs Jerome there are no ingénues anymore. It is, in fact, the young, the seemingly naïve, who are often presented as being the most perceptive. Often female, they have not yet constructed those psychological walls and seem more able to see through the poses the males have. When Suzanne is married at the end of Suzanne’s Career, Bertrand comes to the realisation that he and Gauillaume were children, that she has beaten them “to the finish line.” In Claire’s Knee, the eponymous teenager is closer to the truth than Jerome can admit when she says he doesn’t like her boyfriend because he refuses to bow down to him. The younger precocious sister from that film actually reappears in Love In The Afternoon during Frederic’s daydream in which he fantasises about a charmed amulet that allows him to control the will of all the women in Paris; she is the only one resistant to its powers. It would be misleading to view all Rohmer’s women in this way, however. In many ways, they are often equally self-deluded, just as flawed as the male characters; only the focus in these films is on a specifically male psyche.

Most of the moral tales achieve their effect through a conflict between the protagonist’s words (his own, usually limited or faulty, understanding of his intentions and desires) and his actions. The student justifies his selfish decision to stand up the bakery girl after the blonde reappears as a ‘moral’ choice. Adrien believes he has a moral victory when he abandons Haydee, despite her never being all that responsive to his advances. That Rohmer often allows his male protagonists to maintain their illusions through the ironic manner in which the films usually resolve accounts for much of the subtle comedy of the Six Moral Tales.

Such conflict is given its most extreme manifestation in the strange mix of Les Liasions Dangereuses meets Lolita that is Claire’s Knee. Despite some initial misgivings, Jerome takes to the writer’s challenge with a little more enthusiasm than seems necessary. There are definite shades of Humbert Humbert in his waxing lyrical over his preference for the svelte body-type of Claire, and the scene in which he kisses the younger girl is quite uncomfortable viewing (although mentally very mature, she does appear physically much younger than her stated sixteen years). As Jerome continually attempts to rationalise his increasing obsession, the symbol of Claire’s knee and his desire to caress it gives us something by which to measure the diplomat’s drift from reason.

Perhaps the most conventionally satisfying films are those in which some sort of understanding is reached, even if it is a compromised one. In an epilogue of My Night At Maud’s, the now happily married engineer comes to suspect the wife he was first drawn to for some idealised purity may actually have more to hide from revelations with his night with Maud than he. Realising the jeopardy such suspicions could lead to, or even their meaningless in relation to the lives both now lead; he makes the decision to instantly put it from his mind. In Love In The Afternoon, Frederic and his wife come to realise the detachment they believed essential to their marriage has actually been detrimental to them both. The closing scene in which the couple tearfully embrace is the closest Rohmer comes to emotional catharsis in these films - a highly moving climax to the collection, and arguably the least ambiguous in its optimism.


Some may find these films easier to admire than to truly love, but what is undeniable is that the best of the Six Moral Tales represent the crowning achievements of a true master of French film. An essential collection for fans of European cinema. GJK


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