Aside from the joy of seeing a Rohmer film, there's the joy of seeing one Rohmer film so quickly succeed another. It's the pleasure, by now too rare, of the series. In these times, when French cinema is losing itself in the search for 'crenels,' a filmmaker who each year successfully brings together the elements of a world exclusively his own is, by any measure, to be treasured.
By now Rohmer has well established his crenel, and suffice it to read his collection The Taste for Beauty to know he takes it seriously. First, as a critic, Rohmer established his principles (drawn from a strict 'Bazinism'). Eventually he set the stage for his characters to appear (one could almost say 'to appear for judgement'). He set aside his territory, first theoretically, then erotically. Is this what makes an auteur? At the least Rohmer is a man who has succeeded in filming only that which interests him.
So what's the latest Rohmer film like? Like all the others, we'll say (and rightly: our director is repetitive). Very different from the others, we'll say (and again, rightly, since we've learnt to see, and to taste, the smallest variation in the series). The series frees us from the burden of judging each film as if it were the last; it frees us to 'choose' which film suits us the most. There are no longer any catastrophes among the work of this moralist and prestidigitator. His system is too considered, too substantial, too perfect. That's why, since the grandiose failure of Percival le Gallois (Rohmer's Land of the Pharaohs, insofar as with these films both he and Hawks stepped too far over the precipice into the turmoil of an elaborately demanding past), we ask less and less whether the latest Rohmer was a success, and more and more whether it pleases us personally.
A Full Moon in Paris is, on first viewing, a dark, bitter, not very funny film, and quite cruel. It's also evidence of Rohmer's irrefutable place as the premier ethnologist of contemporary French society. Like any ethnologist, he lives with a certain contradiction: he loves only his savages, but he sees them always from the exterior, as the perfect sum of the gestures of which they are capable, of the words under which they drape themselves, and the clothes by which they're covered. Our ethnographer has studied only one tribe (let's call it the 'bourgeoisie'), and has specialised in two sub-groups (let's call them the 'grande' and 'petite' bourgeoisie). These are talkative groups, who -- more than just for the sake of it -- speak in order to make cinema about the nature of their desires, which generally means their desire for freedom (in the strict sense of free will). Intrepidly, Rohmer snares them in the trap of their own words and dryly reminds them that their desires don't exist beyond these words they gargle. Every little speech seals the condemnation of he (or rather, she) who has taken the bladders of her discourse for lanterns of reality. As
Chandler said, “There’s no trap more deadly than the trap you set for yourself."
When he films the bourgeois (those who don’t really work, are
never tired, are elegant), Rohmer adopts a sensual, vacationing tone. When he
films the petits-bourgeois (those who deal with schedules, public transport,
casual jobs, who labour despite their pretentions), he adopts a cold light,
with dead blues, flabby bodies, ugly rooms, and with pity for nothing naïve or
indecisive in their world.
It’s to the more ungrateful tribe that the
characters of A Full Moon in Paris belong.
The action revolves around an apartment, in which Louise (Pascale Ogier) wants
to live at the same time that she’s living with Rémy (an actor we should keep
an eye on: Tcheky Karyo). Louise thinks that to be a free woman depends on having
he option of choosing between these two homes: one for Louise-in-a-couple, the
other for Louise-alone. Obviously, she’s made a misjudgement, and the plot will
be the elaboration of this initial error.
One can’t recount the film. One can only say that Rohmer
leaves nothing vague, as if he felt a sovereign pleasure in showing the smallest mechanism of the trap which will close on Louise; as if he felt a still greater
pleasure (almost a perversion) in giving us the impression that the trap might
not even close. Rohmer knows, more than anyone, how to make sure the spectator
accepts an absolutely artificial premise, so as to better remind him at the end
that he was wrong to accept it.
Since the detail of the mise en scene is so rapid, precise,
and seductive, we forget to ask where it’s all going. It’s the illusion of true movement which makes us lose sight of the
reality of simulated sentiments. That’s the trap. Delicious and bitter,
according to whether we identify with the Rohmerian characters, or to Rohmer
the puppeteer (though I must admit that nevertheless, I savour most the films
of Rohmer in which I also love the characters: La Marquise d’O, Le Femme de
l’aviateur).
Throughout
her Parisio-suburban comings and goings, Louise encounters a variety of
characters. But there’s something which distinguishes her. Louise lies to
herself (her second home not being that which brings her closer to her freedom, but
rather that which pushes her to her solitude) and that’s why she is at
once sympathetic and irritating. The other characters content themselves with lying
to her. That’s why they’re wrecks. There are thus two portraits of men in the
film which aren’t exactly of “authentic men,” but are two overwhelming depictions of men in their own skin. The good Rémy who builds new cities near Paris
and, being a homebody, accepts to live there; possessive Rémy who says to
have found in Louise an absolute and will betray her the moment she turns
her back. Octave (Fabrice Luchini), the male best friend who, suddenly unable to restrain
himself, puts Louise in a difficult situation.
There's a hard tone to the film, and the male-female relations never quite seem to live up to it. There
are women who play frivolously with the idea of their freedom (it’s never a
matter of “liberation” which, by quite a hypocritical trick, Rohmer supposes
already achieved), and men who take themselves for cool casual lovers and return
throughout the film to the “bestial scenario” (rape, pathological possession)
that Rohmer, admittedly, never films (it’s too messy), but that he touches on from time to time. There is violence in this film, and not just in the unremitting tit
for tat of language. There is the violence of the slap which Rémy never gives
(though bumping his elbow becomes something of a gag), the interrogatory violence of
the jealous and obsessed Octave which nearly becomes a rape. Louise, alone in
the scene, dreaming aloud, slave to her caprice, is taken into the helpless
network of men. Louise, all things considered, is heroic.
Rohmer
is, in a sense, the contemporary
feminist filmmaker, and if he is seen today as an auteur of the current – Rohmer so resolutely a stranger to fashions and who has always been in
opposition to the idea of modernity – it’s because his most recent films
coincide with feminist discourse's redundancy and erasure.
Instead, it’s the old literary theme of the free woman that he had already treated,
in a fine 19th century fashion, in My Night at Maud’s, and which appears, in more modern guises, in
the Comedies and Proverbs. Perceval,
the mystic fool, was the last male Rohmerian character still able to make
errors about his desire. Since then, every man, young and old, has the feebleness
of those who know well where they want to go with their desire. The women
remain. They alone are blessed with the heavy privilege of not conflating desire and the satisfaction of desire.
The ethnologist is, more fundamentally, a theologian, for whom the scenario of predilection would be that of the immaculate conception. The
women are tricked* when they're not present (the Marquise d’O while asleep, Louise when
she leaves for her own place), and never whenever they are. And perhaps free women
dream only of keeping for as long as possible their childhood bedrooms. Let’s
not forget the painful precision with which Rohmer has already depicted a good
number of young girls’ rooms. The ethnologist who studies them develops, after
all, the role of a Sadeian confessor, or of a love-struck tutor.
The charm of Rohmer’s films is attributable to a simple cause:
the difficulty of identifying with his characters. They’re sympathetic and
irritating, like spoiled children. It’s thus that Rohmer practices a sort of
perverse Brechtism. At first, nearly by convention, he asks us to follow the
character who, by his or her caprices, drives the fiction. But the moment that
we understand that this character is heading towards an inevitable punishment, and
we are constrained to leave him (so as to see him from further away) – this is
precisely the moment the auteur anticipated so as to remain in a one-to-one with
his character, to console him and to enjoy her tears.
Such is the definition of an auteur
film in the modern cinema. The classic auteur (Renoir, for example) made a gift
of his characters, and didn’t think he should take them back. Such was his
generosity. However, the modern auteur is jealous of his spectator. His art, at
the limit, consists of showing us the door. We can call that “distanciation.” In
any case, he swallows the key.
4 Sept. 1984
*Daney uses a phrase with an English parallel, "se faire avoir," literally "to be had," as meaning "to be tricked," and in parenthesis notes that one could apply "both senses of the phrase," no doubt intending to refer to the "bestial scenario" that is also a subject of this article. I haven't translated the phrase directly as "are had" in the article since, without an explanation, it would be an obscure reference that would more quickly bring to mind Daney's connotation than his denotation.
Published in Cine
journal Volume II/1983-1986, Petite bibliotheque des Cahiers du Cinema, 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment