Eric Rohmer’s late films are charming and theologically rich, says Andrew Petiprin.
Eric Rohmer has long been a darling of European arthouse cinema, having been a major auteur of the French New Wave and editor of the Cahiers du Cinéma. Yet even as he rubbed shoulders with the intellectual elites of the Left Bank, Rohmer was openly Catholic and conservat-ive. He wrote to the right-wing Romanian-French journalist Jean Parvulesco in 1964: “I am a Catholic. I believe that a true cinema is necessarily a Christian cinema, because there is no truth except in Christianity.” The films in his famous Six Moral Tales from 1963 to 1972 reflected this faith, proposing an alternative to the intellectual Spirit of ’68, with characters almost miraculously choosing the good instead of mainstream hedonism.
In the 1970s Rohmer explored German Romanticism, and in the 1980s he made a series of films on metaphysics and morality called Comedies and Proverbs. In the 1990s he returned as a mature artist to many of the themes he had explored early on, producing a third film cycle called Tales of the Four Seasons, which subtly promote the residual Christianity that has proved more difficult to stamp out in Europe than some secularists may have hoped.
Long available on DVD and Blu-ray in Eur- ope, in April the Criterion Channel finally restored and released Tales of the Four Seas-ons and made them available for streaming. A charming and theologically rich collection, Rohmer’s late works are overdue for attention and admiration in the English-speaking world, and especially among Catholics.
A Tale of Springtime (1990) begins in a tidy Parisian flat with a bookshelf full of Plato, Kant, Goethe, Husserl and Hegel. These thinkers were some of Rohmer’s heroes, and their work explains the motivations of various characters in all four films, including Jeanne, a philosophy teacher at a suburban lycée. Jeanne lives with her boyfriend Matthieu, whom we never see, and although she is not bound by Catholic morality on the question of cohabitation, she confesses that living as a married couple without being married is bothersome. Jeanne finds herself at a crossroads. Will she put her well-disciplined mind to a greater purpose, like marriage, family or even just close friendships?
A happenstance encounter and an ensuing intellectual conversation bring clarity to Jeanne’s situation. She befriends a young, emotional pianist named Natacha, whose divorced father, a womaniser named Igor, seems destined to seduce Jeanne away from Matthieu. The problem, however, is that Igor is currently living with Eve, a graduate student not much older than his daughter. Eve’s presence is an annoyance to Natacha, but it serves as the catalyst for a rich philosophical discussion reminiscent of the debate about Pascal’s wager in My Night at Maud’s more than 20 years earlier.
The debate around Igor’s table is not about society, individual liberty or even God, but about reality itself. Natacha argues that philosophy is personal, and related to making sense of one’s experience of the world. Jeanne, however, sees metaphysics as an important public matter, and she notes that her working-class students care more about philosophical concepts than they do about getting mathematical equations right.
Jeanne is a strong advocate for transcendent truth; and again, although she is no Catholic as far as we can tell, she is a woman of principle who avoids traps of lust, gossip, impatience and anger. Eve, on the other hand, does just what she likes, sparring with Natacha over petty matters like smoking whilst chopping vegetables and the whereabouts of a missing necklace. In the end, Jeanne’s unease with the selfishness and subjective mindset of both Eve and Igor deepens her commitment to virtue.
A Tale of Winter (1992) is the most enchanting of the four films, and it picks up the philosophical themes of A Tale of Springtime, infusing even richer religious significance into a touching love story. The film features the only practising Catholic in the Seasons series in the character of Loïc; but the protagonist is Félicie, the character with perhaps the deepest religious sense of any of Rohmer’s subjects. The film begins with a bright summer love affair that soon gives way to a long winter of single-motherhood in the grey metropolis. One of Félicie’s boyfriends, Maxence, asks her whether she ever considered an abortion. She replies that she has no specific doctrinal objection to it, but that she was unwilling to do “what’s contrary to nature”.
Unlike in most of Rohmer’s films, the main character belongs to the working class – Féli-cie is a hairdresser who lives with her parents in a small flat. Despite hardship, she lives in hope that Charles, the father of her young child, will one day return to her. Although Félicie says “religion and I don’t get along”, she is drawn into churches, first seeing the body of St Bernadette at the convent of the Sisters of Charity at Nevers, and later in the local cathedral, she is overwhelmed with the grace of clarity over whether to keep waiting for Charles. She declares: “yesterday in the cathedral, I felt like me”.
Loïc is Félicie’s other boyfriend – another option she must discern. He is a librarian, an amateur theologian and, like Jeanne in A Tale of Springtime, a person of principle. As in A Tale of Springtime and My Night at Maud’s, the film features a robust philosophical discussion around a table, but this time with a greater emphasis on the mystical and esoteric. One dinner guest advocates belief in reincarnation, leading Loïc to explain his own brand of anti-supernatural Catholicism. He says: “My faith doesn’t rest on miracles.”
Félicie, on the other hand, is emotional like Natacha in A Tale of Springtime; she grows bored with an increasing sense of intellectual inferiority to her educated friends. Rohmer does not criticise dogmatic religion per se, but he may also be inviting us to balance the head with the heart, pursuing the childlike faith that Jesus prescribes in the gospels. Even the Rahnerian Loïc comes around to praying for Félicie’s improbable request that “God should give me back Charles”.
The film’s climax is a performance of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, which totally captivates Félicie, who in turn delights us by her reaction. She explains to Loïc that it was not magic that brought Hermione back to life in the play, nor was it the case that the character was never actually dead. Rather, it was faith. “I’m more religious than you,” she declares, unconsciously adapting Pascal’s thought for herself: choosing to believe in Charles’s return is a reasonable pledge that God is real. Rohmer himself said of the film’s ending, “Miracles aren’t implausible! It’s rare, that’s all.”
A Tale of Summer (1996) is set at the Brittany coast, and is the only film in the series where the protagonist is male, and a brooding, lovesick artist. Gaspard, played by Melvil Poupaud, resembles Jean-Claude Brialy from Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee, and both Claire’s Knee and A Tale of Summer bear certain similarities to his 1986 film The Green Ray, which revolves around the typically French predicament of how to spend one’s summer holidays. Also, like these two earlier films, A Tale of Summer features no significant discussions of religion or philosophy. Here it is music – and in particular, a recurring sea shanty motif – that serves as an extra character shaping the young man’s decision about which woman to choose among three different options.
Gaspard is at times a Werther figure, but instead of giving in to Romantic despair he, like Félicie in A Tale of Winter, hesitates to choose, as if unconsciously expecting a Deus ex machina to open a different path. And al- though Gaspard, like the other protagonists in Tales of the Four Seasons, does not appear to be Catholic, he is ultimately relieved to run into various obstacles to fornication. Again, Rohmer shows that even in post-Christen-dom, virtue is both possible and preferable. Indeed, Gaspard’s holiday ends up being an education in a nobler way to be a man.
In the final film of the series, A Tale of Autumn (1998), Rohmer returns to a female protagonist, but he leaves us in a provincial setting, and again without explicitly religious or philosophical subject matter. The film stars Maire Rivière as Isabelle, a contented wife, mother and bookshop owner, who seeks to find a new man for the divorced Magali, played by Béatrice Romand. Magali is a winemaker in the Rhône Valley, and she shares the melancholic attitude of Gaspard from A Tale of Summer. In order to move forward, Magali requires intervention, removal of overgrown emotional weeds that hinder her flourishing alongside her beloved grape vines. Isabelle places an advertisement for her friend that says what Magali cannot say for herself, “searching for a man, appreciative of moral and physical beauty”.
The film unfolds as a Shakespearean comedy, with Isabelle impersonating Magali to a suitor named Gérald, and Magali’s son’s girlfriend trying to set her up with her own ex-boyfriend (her former teacher). The storylines converge in a wedding, but it is not Magali’s “re-marriage”, but rather the marriage of Isabelle’s young daughter. Rohmer does not depict a Catholic ceremony, or even a church, but rather a typically Old-World outdoor after-party, with everyone enjoying a beautiful spread of food and Magli’s local wine.
In the final shot, Rohmer captures Rivière unaware, dancing in character before glancing into the camera with a hint of uncertainty in her face. The party is beautiful and wholesome, but still lacking something from the medieval weddings of his ancestors, or the wedding feast at Cana, or the heavenly banquet of the Kingdom to come.
In the magnificent 2014 biography of Rohmer by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, the authors note that the Tales of the Four Seasons reflect Rohmer’s lifelong commitment to “making cinema the territory of a reconquest of the religious”. Each film proposes a partial explanation to the characters’ circumstances, but each also points subtly to the lost faith of Europe’s Christian heritage that alone has the power to bring answers fully to light.
More than a decade after Rohmer’s death, his films are more valuable to the world now than ever as thoughtful tributes to the hope he held within him as a Catholic. Indeed, it is hard to imagine expressions of Christian art more in tune with the evangelical “gentleness and reverence” St Peter describes (1 Peter 3:15).
The Criterion Channel’s restored versions of the Tales of the Four Seasons are not noticeably different to my eyes from the European versions already in circulation, and there are no special features included with them. Nonetheless, we should all be grateful that the films are available to stream. All cinephiles, but particularly Catholic ones, should rejoice in the wider availability of these edifying, underappreciated classics.
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