On Rohmer and Being Wrong: Part 2

Moving to London, plot twists, perspective, doubt

In 2022, just after I began my project of watching or rewatching the films of Éric Rohmer, I moved to London from the provinces, and found that almost everything I had pictured about living in London had been wrong.¹

I had expected life to be faster-paced, and knowledge to be faster-paced. I had pictured a kind of frenetic keeping up, a need to be in the loop at all times – but found the opposite, as if being at the centre of things meant one had to care far less about what was going on, as if all of culture, of politics, of ‘news’ might just happen to you by osmosis. The provinces had required a strong will, to be in the know required constant effort, constituted a kind of forceful activity. The capital, by contrast, felt a place of floating in the stream. I was amazed at the dedication to leisure, the pubs brimming, the parks full of people, the weekend culturally enshrined.

Paradoxically, the sense of the local was much stronger in London, it felt. And why not, because for the first time I saw high streets where no shops were boarded up, with independent shops, markets. My first impression was of being back in the 1990s, as if history had not happened here. The calm at the centre of the storm, is how I pictured it to myself in those first months, or else London as some sort of huge vehicle that we had all boarded and was now taking us forwards while we just got on with life, without any need to look out of the window.

In the provinces I had not understood much of this. I had not understood the reality of the metropolis, which is that the metropolis does not need to think of the provinces. It is the centre of the world – it is not mistaken in thinking only of itself, it is right to. It is de facto a separate country, with its own separate interests. To be provincial is to be self-satisfied, narrow-minded, content with the limits of one’s vision. But the condition of being provincial is always to have a relation to an elsewhere, both the elsewhere of the metropolis and other elsewheres – the nearest big city, or a rival city, or other parts of the country that are peers in a struggle for recognition. In this sense one’s view is wider, one’s knowledge is greater.

In a podcast on The Line of Beauty I heard the host, David Runciman, describe how Hollinghurst makes explicit the ways the novel is not Middlemarch – that is, it is ‘not provincial… not panoptic’. From the way he says it it’s unclear whether the two terms are meant to be equivalent or complementary. But that Runciman connected the two, and connected these to a literary mode, helped me see something more clearly, and helped me formulate something also about Rohmer.

Rohmer was from the provinces. He claimed to be from Nancy, in the east, but was actually from Tulle, between the south and the centre – a city I had never heard of, although I’d heard of the fabric (so Rohmer, like me, was from a former lace-making town: I added this to the list of connections I felt to the man). And his films, while not all set in the provinces, deal with the different kinds of perspective offered by different types of place: provinces, metropole, suburbs, resort, with some films set entirely in one type of place, but others involving movement between the two, commuting between the suburbs and Paris, moving from Paris to the provinces or vice versa, or, in the case of the ‘holiday’ films, Paris as the norm from which the period of the film is a momentary deviation.

He films differently, he has said, in Paris and elsewhere, relying more on chance in the provinces, letting his films be dictated by the particular place and what he finds there. But also, in the suburbs and the provinces, the films take a more panoptic view, of the built environment, of the social architecture. I watched My Night at Maud’s again last night and this time I noticed that it opens and closes (not counting the epilogue) with a view over Clermont, the provincial city it takes place in.

In his first feature film, The Sign of Leo, there is a helicopter shot of Paris, but as far as I know he did not repeat this: Paris is, for the rest of his career, shown at street level. The scope of view is also about movement, the speed of movement, the scale of movement: Paris is experienced on foot, where Clermont, and also the Drôme (An Autumn Tale), Le Mans (The Good Marriage), Nevers (A Winter’s Tale) are seen in movement through a car window, the suburbs (Love in the Afternoon) from the window of a train.

But one is not privileged over the other; each form of life, each perspective enables its own pretensions, its own ways of being mistaken. What Rohmer shows is not that one perspective is better than another, but that each is limited; there is always more than one view, always one more way of seeing things.

*

I was thinking that I should issue a general spoiler warning – consider it issued! – but it seemed a bit unnecessary in the case of films in which, as critics have often liked to point out, so little happens. It’s nonetheless the case that many of Rohmer’s films involve a kind of plot twist, where a piece of information is revealed which adds a new point of view, which casts all that has gone before in a new light. Sometimes this information is withheld only from the characters, with the audience in on the joke – we know, for instance, that ‘Alexis’ is Celadon disguised as a woman, and we also know, in Pauline at the Beach, who it was that was in bed with the woman who sells snacks on the beach. In other cases the information is something we might already have suspected – it is not a surprise, for instance, when we find that Rémi in Full Moon in Paris is sleeping with the tennis-playing Marianne, who was introduced as a kind of female counterpart to him. But sometimes the information is genuinely new to us – most obviously in The Bakery Girl of Monceau which ends with Sylvie – the woman the film’s narrating protagonist had initially pursued – letting him know that all along she had been watching his daily visits to the bakery from the window of her apartment, where she was stuck with a broken ankle – a new perspective in all too literal a sense, perhaps.

In an interview for Sight and Sound in 1971 Rohmer describes these twists:

When you find an explanation—and you always can—there is always another explanation behind the first one. I never really manage to finish my stories, since the endings I find all have multiple repercussions. Like an echo. You might say that the end is a way of going back over the story. As in Ma Nuit Chez Maud: a ball bounces on the ground and turns the story around so that we see it in a different light.

The twist is never the end of the story – in fact, it is often the case that it introduces a new uncertainty. The late film Triple Agent, for instance, never reveals what actually happened to Voronin, nor who, or how many parties, he was spying for, despite the title. Similarly, in The Aviator’s Wife, it’s never established who the woman with the aviator is, although it’s probably not his wife. And Sylvie may have seen the narrator eating six cakes one after the other; but she has not seen that this was part of a game he was playing at the expense of the girl who worked at the bakery. The truth can never be exhausted; no one person can see all perspectives at once.

Kleist’s Marquise of O, which Rohmer adapted in 1976, was written in the aftermath of his reading of Kant, who showed him, he wrote, that ‘we can’t determine if that which we call truth really is true, or if it just seems so to us’. ‘The thought’, Kleist wrote to his sister, ‘that we here below know nothing of the truth, nothing at all… this thought has shaken me in the sanctuary of my soul’.

For Rohmer, this thought encourages humility, the loss of illusion and pretension. The characters ‘here below’ will never get to the bottom of the truth. But that doesn’t mean the truth does not exist. For instance, in The Collector, an example I take from Colin Crisp’s Eric Rohmer, Realist and Moralist (1988):

the mechanical roar of an airplane invades the soundtrack, as it already has done twice and will do several more times in the course of Adrien’s trials. As well as reminding the spectator at crucial moments of the ‘absent alternative’ – Mijanou, London, and self-denial – these serve as an ironic comment on Adrien’s moral progress, suggesting, oddly, an unseen watcher in the skies to whose rumbling disapproval Adrien remains steadfastly deaf.

I don’t see why it should be odd at all, especially given Crisp’s reading of Rohmer – at least his work until the mid-1980s when the book was written – as a strictly Catholic director.

The most shocking change of perspective, I think, is in Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer’s adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes – and in this case I do want to issue a kind of spoiler warning, because it was something I was not in the least expecting, and found it miraculously strange and, yes, transformative: the narrative breaks off and we find ourselves watching a passion play, with Fabrice Luchini, who has played the naïve, provincial (!), Perceval, as Christ. This seemed to me to bring to the surface exactly the thing that had been lurking in all of his films to that point – that is, a treatment of perspective that was essentially Christian.

On this, and to return to My Night at Maud’s, Crisp makes the following, to me fascinating, point:

Provincials, more so in France than elsewhere, can seem to be living on the fringe of things, excluded from meaningful participation, grubby faces peering in the window at an elegant festivity. It's logical, then, in an age when the center doesn’t hold, that the generalized sense of a loss of belonging should be translated in book and film into images of provincials who know themselves to be such – outcasts, travellers who like our narrator are as much at home in Vancouver, Canada, or in Valparaiso, Chile; and this principally because they are truly at home nowhere. As Maud says, ‘Wherever you go, these days, you’re condemned to the provinces.’ Though, as she hastens to add, she prefers it that way: she, at least, has learnt to live in a relative world. The narrator has not, and will not. He is forced towards a religious commitment in order to regain a focus, a center to his existence, in order to transcend his provincialism.

I will return to the idea of moving to London as a form of commitment later, as I will those who, like Maud, identify with their status as outsiders, who prefer to be alone in the provinces than with others in the metropolis. Perhaps just to end then with the fact that, while it was important to Rohmer that the actor who played Vidal, the Marxist, was himself a Marxist, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who plays the narrator, at first refused the part because he wasn’t a Catholic and felt it would be dishonest (interview here). But Rohmer won him over by saying it was better that way – that there would be more ambiguity. In 1965 Rohmer directed a discussion on Pascal between an atheist philosopher and a Dominican priest which fed into My Night at Maud’s. It is the priest on whom the complacent narrator – ‘the very picture of Jesuitism’, as Maud describes him – is based; the philosopher, Brice Parain, comes across, to me at least, as much more willing to have his picture of the world troubled by Pascal, to entertain doubt and be transformed.

If at the end it seems that Jean-Louis’s commitment to Françoise and to marriage, and their joint commitment to not speaking about the past, has led to a more integrated life than Maud’s, who, at the end, is left once more alone, this is a life that is shown to have rested on one piece of withheld information – the identity of Françoise’s lover – and continues resting on another, in that he implied to her that he has had sex (and not just ‘slept’) with Maud. The final shot of the couple running happily into the waves with their child can only be coloured by our knowledge of this.

1. A previous draft included a justification of why I felt able to describe Oxford – where I spent most of my adult life – as the provinces. But I cut it, telling myself that no one cared about my little distinctions. I then sent this current version to a friend, who was so scandalised by what appeared to him an obvious piece of bad faith that he refused to read further. So, for the sake of little distinctions, it is clear that Oxford is not the provinces: the university has long been an exclave of London; the city itself is quickly becoming one too. One of the reasons I moved to London from Oxford was because it wasn’t the provinces enough, and I thought I might as well do the thing properly one way or another. At the same time, in many other also obvious ways – logistical, cultural, historical, psychological – Oxford is the provinces; and even an exclave will have its own resentful relationship to the centre, its own particular ways of being mistaken, on which more next week.