On Rohmer and Being Wrong: Part 3

Preferring life in the provinces, types of guy

MAUD: Wherever you go, you are condemned to the provinces.
Well, ‘condemned’, that’s not the word. I personally prefer life in the provinces.

For a few months I had a job delivering bread by e-bike. As I cycled around the Victorian inner suburbs of south east London – Brockley, Crofton Park, Forest Hill – everything felt familiar. The abrupt hills, the villas built for the local industrialists, the intermittent rows of shops, everywhere marked by the railway. I wondered if this, after all, was what I liked about south London. The fact that it looked like the provinces.¹

I applied for the job because, among other reasons, it seemed a way to recreate the paper round I’d had as a teenager, the beautiful solitude of the early morning, the sense of sovereignty as I pulled a hi-vis trolley up the steep leafy streets. The appeal was of being alone – of watching the world come to life but not being part of it. This also is the appeal of the provinces for Maud. She lives in the provinces but is not ‘provincial’; she is worldly, almost bohemian, with her bed in the living room, her sailor’s undershirt as a nightgown. She can jokingly liken her life to that of a salonnière of the 17th century. She enjoys being an ‘outcast’, a ‘traveller’ (both term’s Colin Crisp’s), an outsider both to Paris and to the conformism of the provinces. Last week I quoted Crisp’s inversion of the usual moral picture, where the provinces in My Night at Maud’s stand not for conformism against the laxness of the city, but rather ‘the relative world’, the loss of the moral centre, as opposed to which the narrator chooses religious commitment. But it seems less that Maud has ‘learned to live in the relative world’, as he puts it, than that it suits her.

The provinces in My Night at Maud’s, themselves, are shown as a place of intense intellectual life. The critic Jean Douchet (from a TV panel discussion on My Night at Maud’s):

It’s a view of provincial life rarely seen in French films, where it’s usually much more of a caricature than a true portrait. Here it’s really a provincial environment among fairly intellectual people. And one thing about the provinces - where Rohmer lived - is that intellectual discourse is deeper because people have more time. A long discussion about Pascal over dinner is realistic. Not for everyone, of course, but for a specific social class, whereas it wouldn’t be realistic in Paris.

The discussions of My Night at Maud’s, then, are part of Rohmer’s interest in how particular places form particular kinds of behaviour, particular ways of thinking and talking, of moving and feeling. The ways that the structures of the place – the modes of transport, as I mentioned last week, the kind of work that goes on, the social hierarchies, the amenities, the distance between the houses – the placement and timings of the pedestrian crossings as in Rohmer’s segment of Paris vu par… – form the behaviour of the inhabitants.

This is illustrated in his films of the new towns of the Parisian suburbs, where a suburban new man or woman (the architect Rémi in Full Moon in Paris, the young administrator Blanche in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend) fits as if naturally into these new spaces, with their purpose-built sporting facilities, the light, minimalist apartments. It is also illustrated in The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque in the contrast between the schoolteacher’s child’s vision for the village, in which its existing structures are enhanced, and the mayor’s metropolitan scheme, which is shown neither to be suited to the needs of the inhabitants as they express them, nor the physical geography of the field it is to be built in.

Rohmer’s films, in sometimes baroque ways, follow the constraints of place (and time, which I will come back to in a later post). He talks of how the area in which Tale of Autumn is set – between Montélimar to the north and Avignon to the south, the Drôme on the left bank of the Rhône and the Ardèche on the right – formed a diamond, which is mirrored in the diamond shapes and intertwining trajectories of the film’s plot (even – as Rohmer discovered in editing – the appearances and characteristic gestures of its leading actors, Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière).

The provincial setting makes possible the action of My Night at Maud’s; and also furnishes it with particular character types: in Rohmer’s films, the provinces are shown form a fertile soil for eccentricity and for strong personalities, for free thinkers who see themselves as free thinkers – the schoolteacher in The Tree, the Mayor, Reinette in The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. For those who like to be a little bit outside the place that they live; who like the kind of panoptic view that the provinces allow, in part because to have it requires distance not just from the metropolis, but also from the provinces.

In the last years of living in Oxford I had a habit of running twice a week up a hill just outside the ring road, from where you could see the city laid out in front of you, the pale stone of the university here, the industrial estates of the east of the city there. It was this that I thought I would miss the most, the fact that it’s so easy to leave Oxford. To have visual proof of having left the city behind. The vast expanse of the flood meadows where peregrines hunt and huge flocks of duck and gull roost in the winter. To be a little bit outside of the place where you live.

Another story: A friend was on his way to therapy, somewhere in Hackney, when he got caught in a rainstorm and stopped to shelter under a bridge. He saw that there was another man sheltering from the same rainstorm under the same bridge, and this man was his doppelgänger, in style, in outfit. Blue workwear jacket, I’ve forgotten the rest. At first he felt the shame of recognition. The humility of being forced to confront that he was, as my friend put it, a ‘type of guy’. But after this first moment of shame, the two of them started chatting. The other man lit up a joint and they shared it until the rain eased off. And when he told me the story, we agreed that this was London. Perhaps in the provinces you could flatter yourself into believing you were unique, an individual. But London never let you forget that you were a type of guy.

I was reminded of this when reading two reviews of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, a book of academic literary criticism which argues that the contemporary novel is a creation not of an individual author but of a system, that of the conglomerates that publish it (or so I understand it from these reviews). Both cite a self-deprecating vignette, in which Sinykin mocks his younger self, who thought himself unique for liking Gravity’s Rainbow:

It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic education not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again.

But there are more options than this – than the naïve belief in one’s unique tastes on the one hand and the knowing joke at one’s own expense on the other. Because it’s not just one’s own, but also that of all of these other cocky young people who read Pynchon, or whatever it might have been, in the provinces, and found something exciting there. That is, the disavowing is exactly the same move, of taking pride in being rather better – cleverer, more sophisticated – than one’s peers. (Hugh Foley comments that he ‘find[s] this kind of disavowal of one’s litbro past more embarrassing and predictable than being now or having ever been a litbro.’ There is no escaping being a type of guy.)

To see yourself as a type of guy is to see that you are not outside the structures that formed you – and also to look with charity on the people around you, whose desires and hopes, the stories they tell themselves about themselves, are no less important to them than yours to you. Which can be a source of joy, of melancholy, even a kind of sublime, with both its overwhelming terror and excitement. I feel this almost to sickness sometimes watching the cyclists pass at rush hour. The impossibility of fully taking on board that each of these people is, in fact, an individual.

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Rohmer’s characters are, I think, types of guy. In interviews Rohmer insists on his characters as individuals, unique, such as in this interview in Women and Film:

What I like about the temptresses is not an abstract idea of their prettiness, but because they have a variety, a richness of life. What I like about them—as in all of life—is the fact they are unique. And the cinema, of all the arts, is the best to show the unique aspect of a human being.

They are not abstractions: ‘I’m showing a Marxist, a Catholic, not the Marxist, the Catholic’ (from an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma translated here). When the characters speak as Marxists or Catholics, they speak from their own understanding of Marxism or Catholicism, as heterodox as that might be. This is part of his realism: these are the kinds of things a real person would say, because a real person has often said them, both in the films, like The Green Ray, based on improvisation, and in those that are not (not only was Antoine Vitez, who plays Vidal, a Marxist in real life, the dialogue in the restaurant was based on things he had actually said in discussing Pascal with Rohmer). These are the clothes a real person would wear, because they were usually from the actors’ own wardrobes; these are the ways a man might behave around his own partner (Love in the Afternoon).

Each actor belongs to a certain type, a different social type, and I often borrow their social status from my actors. For example, if one of my characters paints or plays the piano, the actor will too, and if one of my actors speaks in a very polished, classical French, I’ll give her a different social status than if her French is more working class.

That is, if the characters are types, this is because real people are also types. Formed by their environment, and then choosing after that from a finite range of options; narrating their choices, their preferences, their trajectories; speaking from the scripts that are available – in part because to do otherwise would not be to speak in language at all. Taking their position in systems of relations and oppositions (oppositions being one of the most productive ‘guy’-producing games: bus vs tube guy, line vs colour guy, ‘early’ vs ‘late’ guy. Rohmer vs Chabrol, classical vs romantic).

If Rohmer’s characters are types it is perhaps primarily through these systems, which include class, ‘social status’, but also character, appearance, acting style. Rohmer has said that he likes to have a diversity of actors – he talks of not being able to be able to tell the actors apart in other people’s films – and rather than the characters thereby looking like individuals, they come to be types through these differences, seen in relation: Arielle Dombasle tall, blonde, her movements flowing, Béatrice Romand short, dark, with jerky, impulsive gestures (The Good Marriage); the three women Gaspard is choosing between in Tale of Summer. The characters are shown mostly at half-length or full length; this, combined with the squarish frame of 1.33 format, means we see them in their surroundings, as part of a larger picture, always in relation to others and to a particular place.

They are not films that encourage identification in the normal way, cinematographically, with close-ups, shallow focus, or in the presentation of the characters as heroes and villains (it has often been the most unsympathetic characters that I’ve found myself reflected in ­– which undoubtedly says something about me but also about Rohmer). But this is what enables the kind of moral identification I found so compelling. We witness from a distance, able to see the characters in a way they cannot see themselves. And this is what it is, too, to find oneself a type of guy: to see oneself from a new perspective, as if from across the street or at another table in the pub; to see what one looks like from the perspective of another.

Of the protagonists of the Moral Tales, Rohmer said, in an interview published in Film Quarterly,

The character has made a mistake; he realizes he has created an illusion for himself. He had created a kind of world for himself, with himself at the center, and it all seemed perfectly logical that he should be the ruler or the god of this world. Everything seemed very simple and all my characters are a bit obsessed with logic. They have a system and principles, and they build up a world that can be explained by this system. And then the conclusion of the film demolishes their system and their illusions collapse.

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There are other character types, moral problems, for which the provinces are fertile ground. Last week I said that Paris was only ever seen at street level after The Sign of Leo. But rewatching Rendezvous in Paris I saw I was wrong:

This segment of the film (it is made up of three unconnected stories) is about a young woman and a man who meet in the parks of Paris while the woman waits for the right moment to leave her long-term boyfriend. The man, a literature teacher at a lycée, has spent his career so far ‘condemned to the provinces’ – Saint-Dizier, Romorantin, Châtellerault – and the outer suburbs of Paris. The woman tells him she can’t love a man who longs to live in the provinces. He protests that it’s not easy to get a job as a literature teacher. What if, he says, the man were to live in the provinces, but his dream was to live in Paris? If it’s just a dream, she says, no. He has to make it happen.

Both here and in My Night at Maud’s the characters are professionals of a particular type, university educated to postgraduate level, culturally ambitious. Academics, doctors, teachers who are ‘agrégé’. No clergymen, although Maud jokes that Vidal will become one, but otherwise these belong to the type of peripatetic provincials, the same ones as in Middlemarch or Madame Bovary, who are condemned to the provinces by their professions, from where they can dream, safely, of the metropolis, of bigger things. Who can remain in their restlessness, the peculiarly adolescent state that the provinces allow, a state of suspension. The narrator mocks Vidal for hanging out with students – but then marries one, a woman 12 years younger than him. Both men are 34 (the age I left Oxford). (In Tale of Autumn, the provincial high school philosophy teacher has relationships with his students). The provinces, a waypoint or staging post on a particular career, become too easily a place where one gets stuck, reluctant to make things happen, unable to decide or commit, at the same stage of life as one’s younger, sometimes much younger, friends, who move on, move to the centre. In that sense too the provinces stand for exactly the kind of ‘ideas’ that Rohmer’s characters live their lives by, in which they are convinced that things have to be a certain way – a certain way that happens to be convenient for themselves, at least until the illusion is destroyed.

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I can’t not mention that, as I found out from David Hering’s essay in The Point, GQ has an article on ‘Rohmer Guys’. No Rohmer next week as I want to get my head down with a different project; in a fortnight I am going to look at the most basic typology of guys of all: gender.

1. By this I mean the Midlands, the most quintessentially provincial part of the country, although more generally anywhere of and for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. The phrase ‘the provinces’, I know, is provocative, and sounds different in English to French; but no existing terms or taxonomies, certainly not North and South, do justice to the functional separation of London from the rest, and the role of London in the English imaginary. ‘The provinces’ is not only seaside towns, rural backwaters, but also places like Clermont-Ferrand in My Night at Maud’s and its English equivalents, hardly sleepy or uncultured, industrial cities in the centre with universities, concert halls, shopping streets bustling at Christmas, and all the same characterised by a sense of being forgotten, ignored or passed over, culturally insignificant outside of the city’s bounds. On Birmingham as capital of the provinces, see Owen Hatherley in the LRB; on Shropshire and the West Midlands, and on ‘uncanny moment[s] of recognition’, see Andrew Key’s essay on M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.