Éric Rohmer

French moralists​ are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of infinite space; they remind us that hell is other people. Or they make movies. Among the early works of Éric Rohmer are Six Moral Tales. Among his late works are Tales of the Four Seasons, which take the notion of moral experience for granted. New restorations of these films have just been released on the Criterion Channel.

Rohmer’s characters are both alert and blinkered. They know they are acting and enjoy their own performances. But they don’t understand the show as well as they think they do. It’s a little surprising that the word ‘vampirish’ should recur in the dialogues of these films, along with ‘puerile’, ‘capricious’, ‘monstrous’, ‘chimerical’, ‘fabulator’ and ‘ridiculous’ – not the ordinary vocabulary of modern realism. We start to wonder if there may be such a thing as a gothic comedy of psychological manners.

Certainly there are people here who try to steal or manage the emotional lives of others, and do it as a form of deluded kindness or wisdom. But there are even more people who will have no life at all unless someone pulls them out of their stylish sorrow. The first of the four late films, A Tale of Springtime (1990), sets the scene for the whole sequence by inviting us to visit a series of Paris apartments. No dialogue for quite a while, just a young woman arriving and leaving. She is carrying a satchel, seeming to have come home from work. But ‘home’ is already inhabited by a man’s clothes lying all over the place, by piles of books and folders. The woman starts to tidy up, then changes her mind. She goes to another apartment, which appears to be empty, until a young man she doesn’t know springs out of the bathroom. She isn’t bothered by this but decides not to stay. She gets back into her car and goes to a party she has no desire to attend. We see her sitting alone on a large sofa. She looks serious, but not sad; lonely but composed. She is not going to lose control, either now or at any point in the movie. Then a woman quite a bit younger than she is joins her on the sofa, and the plot begins.

We learn the narrative set-up of the apartments: the first belongs to the woman’s absent boyfriend; the second is hers but she has lent it to someone. The overload of visual information is considerable. Places in this film are not going to talk, but they say quite a lot more than the people do, even though the people do plenty of talking. This is true of the other three films too, though the effect is especially strong in the first one, since the story hinges on a necklace found in a cupboard – a physical object whose discovery destroys a whole string of fantasies about where it has been and why.

The young woman is Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), who teaches philosophy in a high school. The woman who joins her is Natacha (Florence Darel), a piano student at a conservatoire. They are interested in each other and have everything necessary for a pleasant relationship: Natacha’s father’s apartment, where she can invite Jeanne to stay; Jeanne’s car, which can take them to Fontainebleau when they feel like leaving town. Jeanne makes clear that being a ‘prof de philo’ is not at all like being a professional philosopher. ‘I don’t like general ideas,’ she says. But she also says what all of Rohmer’s characters would probably say if they could: ‘I think a lot about my thoughts.’

The main storyline concerns Natacha’s Freudian dilemmas: fixation on her father, resentment of her mother, detestation of her father’s distinctly detestable girlfriend. The obviousness is relieved by the fact that nobody in the movie has ever heard of anything like such problems, and the key moment, which points across the series directly to A Tale of Autumn (1998), occurs when Natacha does or does not try to set her father up with Jeanne. A version of an arranged non-marriage, let’s say.

Meanwhile, the films in between, A Tale of Winter (1992) and A Tale of Summer (1996) explore the notion of ‘unjust unhappiness’, where a sudden romance has no afterlife, and the possibility is raised that friendship may be more serious than love. Rohmer’s remark about A Tale of Summer being his ‘most personal vehicle’ is often quoted, but it’s worth noting that he says it contains ‘things that I experienced in my youth or things that I noticed’, which allows the personal quite a bit of non-confessional leeway.

The non-marriage game is played twice in A Tale of Autumn, and there is no doubt about the players’ intentions. Magali (Béatrice Romand) is a widow of a certain age (she looks younger) who claims to be happy with the vineyard she owns and works in, and to need nothing or nobody else. ‘They are all taken,’ she says of possible male companions. Her friends think otherwise, and the plot here gets so complicated that a mere description of it suggests a high degree of satire: people of a certain kind of class and education cannot put up with life unless they make it tangled. The first conspirator we meet is Isabelle (Marie Rivière), who thinks she is (and may well be) happily married, but whose husband is so absent from the screen that we have to reassess our idea of happiness. She devises a wonderful remedy for Magali. She, Isabelle, will respond to an advertisement in a newspaper placed by a man looking for a companion. She will then meet the man a few times, and once he is taken with her, and if she feels he’s the right person, she will pass him on to Magali. Will anyone be bothered or hurt by this deception? Not an issue, because the fundamental plan is so benevolent.

Just in case we were hungry for a little more confusion, Rosine (Alexia Portal), the girl who is engaged to Magali’s son, has the perfect man for her future mother-in-law: the philosopher professor she has been having an affair with, and now needs to convert into an asexual friend. He is none too keen on this plan but goes along with it anyway – in a neat reversal of a cliché, the men in these films never resist the women’s fantasies. There is a lot of talk too about relations between older men and very young women, but the talk only manages to make all questions of choice or responsibility seem beyond anyone’s control.

None of this results in disaster, and at the end of the film happiness for all may be just around the corner. But Magali makes a crucial mistake, and an untold story takes us away from the told one. Isabelle is saying goodbye to Gérald (Alain Libolt), the man she found through the advertisement. She has explained the game, and he has got over his anger. They part with a kiss that is a little too fervent, and at that moment Magali opens a door and sees them. She draws the obvious conclusion and sulks until the final moments of the film.

She is not entirely wrong, even if Isabelle and Gérald show no awareness of what has just happened, that is, of what we have just seen: Isabelle’s game could have become a reality in the process of play, and Gérald might be just the man she didn’t know she needed. The moment flickers and is gone from all public representation. But not from our minds. We do, after all, like to think about our thoughts.