In one of the two booklets that accompany Criterion’s well-supplemented box set chronicling French New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer’s film cycle Six Moral Tales, there is an essay by Rohmer himself entitled “For a Talking Cinema.” In the essay, written in 1948, Rohmer discusses the present film aesthetic which, according to him, does not utilize speech properly. Rohmer writes that “If talking film is an art, speech must play a role in conformity with its character as a sign and not appear only as a sound element, which, through privileged as compared with others, is but of secondary importance as compared with the visual element” (45). In other words, speech, to Rohmer, must be paired with image in order to be successful at progressing film as an art form.
Given this context, it seems somewhat ironic that Rohmer relies so heavily on dialogue in his films. However, Rohmer’s use of dialogue is much more literary than others, so its not incredibly surprising when one becomes aware of the fact that Rohmer wrote the entire series as a novel before filming it (this novel also accompanies the DVDs). Whereas Eisenstein was interested in the statement two clashing visuals could evoke, Rohmer’s work revolves around the relationship between sound and image. Quite simply, in Rohmer’s universe, people do not wear their feelings on their sleeves: they say one thing and do another.
Rohmer intersects this aesthetic with a simple theme: a man is looking for a woman and meets another one, who he becomes infatuated with until he finds the first woman again. While this could become rather formulaic during the course of six films, Rohmer, like Krzystof Kieslowski, continually finds a new approach to his material, allowing the experiences of the previous films to tie in and enrich the new film which, in the end, forms a cohesive whole.
For instance, the first film in the cycle, the 23 minute short The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), sets up the series perfectly with its humor and irony that becomes more and more refined through out the series. The film revolves around a lawyer, played by Rohmer’s producer Barbet Schroeder, who pursues the woman of his dreams but, when she is no where to be found, turns his flirtations towards the girl at the bakery that he frequents everyday. The great thing about Bakery Girl is that it serves as the perfect introduction to a viewer unfamiliar with Rohmer’s themes and aesthetic due to the distillation of both within the film’s brevity.
The series loses a bit of its footing on its second venture, Suzanne's Career (1963), which is takes the themes of Bakery Girl and expands upon them both temporally (the film is nearly an hour) and in terms in narrative (this time there are two men). While the film features a wonderfully ironic ending, the viewer is largely left with a sense of disappointment when, as Richard Neupert, the author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema, “[The Narrator] is left looking foolish, as if he has wasted his time these last few months, which in turn risks making the audience feel it has been wasting its time as well these past fifty minutes…Suzanne’s Career remains the weakest of the Six Moral Tales” (264-265).
The cycle, however, comes to its apex over the course of the next three films: My Night at Maud’s (1969), La Collectionneuse (1967), and Claire’s Knee (1970) before coming to its conclusion in Love in the Afternoon (1972). It is within these chatty masterpieces that Rohmer’s creative vision finally comes to full fruition, specifically in Maud and Claire which are stunningly beautiful in their simplicity. Moreover, his Monet-esque compositions finally begin to emerge as he begins to collaborate with cinematographer Nestor Almendros.
There is no mistaking the taste of a Rohmer film, they play with one’s cinematic pallet like a fine wine. While he's less intellectual than Jean-Luc Godard, he’s far less playful than Francois Truffaut. While his films are dry and bitter, there is a great deal of humor to be found within them as one delves into the second half of the series, specifically in the beautiful cinematic compositions of My Night at Maud’s, La Collectionneuse and Claire's Knee.
Not surprisingly, Criterion gives Rohmer the grand treatment. In addition to the two aforementioned booklets, Criterion has supplied the entire series with glorious new transfers supervised by Rohmer himself and a barrage of extra features, the two main attractions being a collection of Rohmer’s short films and a feature length interview between Rohmer and Schroeder filmed this year. After this and their treatment of Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, one cannot wait to see their new edition of The Seven Samurai.
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