Introduction
In 2013 I watched all of Éric Rohmer’s ‘Moral Tales’. That is, the series of six films he made in the 1960s based on short stories he had written as a young man, each following, at least in principle, a set structure in which a man, who has committed himself – either formally, in marriage, or just in his mind – to one woman, but is momentarily distracted by another. My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, The Collector. Love (or Chloé) in the Afternoon. The other two are shorts, Suzanne’s Career, The Bakery Girl of Monceau. I watched them because I was friends with a group of people doing a film masters, who all loved Rohmer, and I wanted to know what they were talking about. But I had a strong sense of ‘not getting it’. Of finding them seductive and entertaining, but being unable to get past the fact that he seemed to present as universal a world which was certainly not; a world which the films seemed to take for granted, onto which little intruded: the social world of its characters, bourgeois and, crucially, straight.
Not that I was against films about straight relationships; but the films I liked presented marriage, straightness, gender as a problem, a place where other kinds of violence became concentrated, a trap or prison. Films where if adultery didn’t work out, there was something lost, there, too. I cared strongly about the authenticity of the relationships I was in, which meant disassembling the norms and striking out on one’s own, together, to make something new. I was against marriage, monogamy, gender, all of which seemed at best unimaginative, off the peg, and for that reason a kind of lie. I was frustrated that Rohmer’s characters did not see that there were more options than these – that there was more in the world than this.
I maintained this prejudice over the following nine years; and then, after a slow drip of pro-Rohmer messaging from several of my friends, I went back. What actually happened was that I announced that I was going to read Pascal, and two of my friends suggested I watch My Night at Maud’s. I then watched The Good Marriage, then My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, then decided to watch all of them. Over the next two and half years, I did. Last night, finally, I watched The Sign of Leo, his earliest, commercially unsuccessful feature film. (I actually only watched half, because the DVD which I borrowed from the library had a scratch.)
As before I took pleasure in the systems and symmetries; the intelligence, the lack of compromise in aesthetic terms, the focus on gesture. But where before I had thought: who are these people?, I now thought: this is me. I am the woman in her forties who claims to want a husband but not to be bothered to find one because she is too busy with her work. I am the callous anthropologist who runs away from someone who is obviously in love with him by going on a sailing trip. I am the young woman who, surrounded by people who seem more obviously at ease in their conventional lives, decides, in the abstract, to get married. I am the restless barmaid seeking to impose my will on the world by having a baby with a married man, I am the same married man who fantasises about being magically irresistible to women. I am the gauche provincial artist obsessed with truthfulness and authenticity and the perfection of momentary sensory phenomena, I am the woman who persuades her boyfriend to let her stay in Paris for a wild weekend only to find all her friends are busy. I am the Duc d’Orleans, weak-willed and naive, the divorced father who moves from one young woman to another, the law student eating six cakes in the street. I am the Catholic who believes that pursuing sensual pleasure, women, wine, is a way of pursuing the good:
(etc.)
Rohmer’s films presented me with aspects of myself and showed me how they were mistaken. Each of his characters was taken by an idea – an idea of themselves, an idea of how to live – that prohibited them from seeing something else. Yes, this was me, and I wanted to be told I was wrong.
In 2013 I had believed it was correct, authentic, to pursue as many people as struck one as pursuable. As friends, as lovers – in any case, the distinction didn’t seem so great. As a kind of necessary response to their qualities – as if not to pursue them was almost an insult. And so I had lived according to this idea, without necessarily knowing that this was the idea, more or less energetically for a decade or so. A couple of years after this first Rohmer season I had realised that this was deeply mistaken. Not because it was immoral to pursue several relationships at once, which we do all the time anyway, but because the underlying idea – that I should be friends with all of the people who struck me as befriendable, that I should sleep with everyone I found attractive and got on with and who found me attractive and got on with me – when taken to its conclusion, pursued rigorously, was completely impossible. If, growing up, the idea of finding friends and lovers seemed unlikely, now I had discovered that the world was full of exciting, attractive, admirable people who I might find something in common with, millions and millions of them, and I would never be able to sleep with them all; I couldn’t even sleep with the few in the small city I lived in without sacrificing other interests or friendships and certainly not without causing emotional and moral complications. And so I had taken to sleeping with nobody.
And, on the other hand, I had begun to read, and watch, differently. I had gone from liking books and films which confirmed my belief in the rottenness of the world as it was, and pointed, in some way, to other ways of organising it – which presented characters correctly struggling against society, for instance – to liking those which showed up where I was mistaken, or limited, in my ideas. This conversion – like Ignatius’s turn from reading chivalric romances to the lives of the saints – was accompanied by a conversion in religious terms too, but the religious conversion followed this other desire to read ‘morally’.
In Rohmer’s short story, My Night at Maud’s, the narrator, who has, in a cautious and uncommitted way started going to Mass again, buys a copy of Pascal’s Pensées at a venture. He says – in Sabine d’Estrée’s translation:
I hadn’t read the book since high-school days, yet Pascal is one of the writers who have made the biggest impression on my life. I thought I knew his work by heart; as I reread it, however, though I found the text familiar, it was no longer the same one I remembered. The one I recalled had taken to task human nature as a whole. The text I was reading now, after all these years, struck me as uncompromising and extreme, passing judgment on me, on both my past and my future. Yes, a text written for and aimed specifically at me.
*
I’m not sure how many people do watch Rohmer to be ‘taken to task’. I don’t know if this was part of the attraction to my friends in 2013, hidden beneath the talk of structures, gestures, colour. Probably not. It seemed to me that this way of engaging with art was something that came with age. I had had the same experience, for instance, with the novel Effi Briest, by Theodor Fontane, which I had read as a student purely as a critique of social attitudes to women in the 1880s, which was how my own students then read it. I told them that when re-reading it for teaching I had come to identify more with Innstetten, the husband, whose boundedness by his own ideas of correct behaviour, whose pedantic and unnecessary pursuit of a particular system of honour, ruins Effi’s life and his own happiness. They didn’t ‘get it’, and what they did get they were a little horrified by. But I knew that I too hadn’t ‘got it’ at 19. In the same way, at 25 I had not got Rohmer. I had been puzzled by this then, and a little ashamed, thinking it showed how much cleverer and more discerning these friends were than me. And now, reading other people writing on Rohmer, I can see that for many of his viewers, at least his anglophone viewers, he stands for something else – a kind of European chic; perhaps (as David Hering has discussed in the context of Brexit), a nostalgia for a world we could once believe ourselves part of. I will say more of location in a future post; if Rohmer’s Frenchness was part of the attraction to me it was for slightly different reasons, and I want to write more about the exoticising of European languages, but again, not now.
Even friends who do watch ‘morally’ tend to talk of Rohmer as if seeing him as taking to task ‘human nature as a whole’. They too were horrified when I said I had found something ‘aimed specifically at me’ in Rohmer’s men, particularly the men in the Comedies and Proverbs, the films of the 1980s: Féodor Atkine’s anthropologist, André Dussollier’s self-important lawyer, all of whom put their own independence, which they connect to their work, ahead of any openness to others. (But then so does Béatrice Romand’s vintner in An Autumn Tale, a much more sympathetic character.) So the following comments are all made in the knowledge that my sense of having been spoken to directly by Rohmer is very personal, and possibly very alien to you, both in how and with whom I identify, and in watching in this moral way at all. And also in the knowledge that the protagonist of My Night at Maud’s, with his ‘horrible habit of seeing everything from [his] petty point of view’ is wrong, too. That this form of watching is its own form of hubris, even narcissism: yet another mistaken idea one might follow.
A year ago I began to want to write an essay on Rohmer; but something was always in the way, I first had to finish a novel, I then had to make some money, I had deadlines, etc., etc., and so the idea of the essay grew and grew and became something I wanted to be really good, a masterpiece, a book, and I despaired at not having the time to write it. So instead I’ve decided to write it in instalments, rather than trying to write it as a whole, perfectly constructed thing. In any case it is gauche and foolish to use Substack for the kinds of ‘finished’, carefully wrought, agonised-over things I currently put on it. I nonetheless have a vague idea of what is to come: the following posts will look at, among other things: the provinces; gender (and Rachel Cusk and gender, or perhaps that comes later); sex; and identifying with Rohmer the man. And if, in the meantime, you have watched Rohmer and thought – as we used to say – ‘it me’ – then please let me know.