Being there

Éric Rohmer's wish-images

I find Éric Rohmer’s work hard to write about precisely because its specific distinction isn’t easy to locate anywhere in particular. Mise-en-scéne, editing, composition, music, the disposition and movement of his actors, all seem underemphasised or given little special consideration. Even the famously prolix dialogue isn’t framed in any stylistically heightened way; compare Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach, his closest American analogues, with the improvised roundtables of Le Rayon Vert or My Night at Maud’s and the special reliance on the comic timing and blunt obliviousness of their young charges seems to overwhelm the dialogue. His films rarely break the laws of classical film style (the 180 degree rule, spatial continuity, etc) and are closest, generically, to the style of the middle-class comedy of manners or the talky family drama that plagued European cinema like a persistent rash before coronavirus. In other words, his is the sort of film I should despise. And yet, Rohmer is probably the director I’ve spent most time watching in the last 5 years. (The same is true for Jacques Rivette—but that’s another post.) My Night at Maud’s was the last film I watched before lockdown last March; La Collectionneuse was one of the first I watched as things recently started to open back up.

It would be a mistake to say that this—their immense watchability—is because Rohmer’s films refuse to take themselves too seriously but it’s a mistake with a kernel of truth. La Collectionneuse is, at one level, an enquiry into the value of philosophy and art for living. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is an art dealer whose model girlfriend has gone to London for the summer, leaving him to work his way up to doing nothing on the Riviera; his friend Daniel (Daniel Pommereule) is a sculptor whose razor-covered cylinders mimic the auto-destructive art of the period (compare with the sandpaper cover of Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s Mémoires). Adrien’s voiceover guides our sense of the film’s action as deliberate and deliberative. But this enquiry is delivered as a very light-touch but ultimately devastating comedy at the men’s expense. After a very short while, their projects are diverted into the form of social game-playing over Haydée (Haydée Politoff), the unconcerned and unlettered young woman they start out by demeaning and quickly take to denouncing as a “collector” of men. Guys like to think of themselves as philosopher-kings when what they’re actually going for is pussy. But Rohmer isn’t making the by-now banal and deflationary claim that art and philosophy are always undercut by mere desire. Rather, not taking philosophy seriously is part of philosophy itself. Knowledge, as Nietzsche claimed, is always contained in a specific perspective, and mistakes, hypocrisies and selfish passions all have a certain value for a history of consciousness without teleology—certainly for us, the viewer, able to reflect with ironic externality to their foibles. Rohmer may see the pretensions of philosophy and art as fallible (phallible?), even laughable, but he never treats eroticism as an intruder. To know will require collecting the bedpost notches, breaking the vase, entering the sea—for the viewer trapped in the dark of the cinema fully as much as the characters trapped in the agony of their subjecthood. La Collectionneuse nominally follows the same structure as the other Moral Tales: a man, linked to one woman, is tempted by another, but ultimately goes back to the first. But the moral point of view is more complex than this seems: there’s no hard evidence that Adrien, in driving away from Haydée and going back to his girlfriend, has learned anything, while she, who we see only from the outside, seems in her imperturbable way to immediately outrun them ‘morally’.

These Kierkegaardian leaps of faith are handled as lightly as fashion. It was Sophie Kemp’s Garage essay on the clothes of Rohmer’s women in the last pandemic summer that first encouraged me to try and write about the films. For Rohmer always had another life for me, his films endlessly abstractable into sequences of outfits, faces, landscapes, lines of dialogue, without losing any of their substance. (Contrast with those other masters of social media cut-and-paste, Wim Wenders and Wes Anderson, and see how their films suffer by the operation.) His characters’ clothes rarely look as if they’ve been stylised by the external choices of the director or production designer. Rather, they seem like the actors’ own outfits, only more so. (Even in the case of the slightly more haute attire of Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, they were the work of the intelligence of star Pascale Ogier, and mark off the film’s mid-80s yuppie beau monde.) Delphine’s red blazer and green beret in Le Rayon Vert, Blanche’s teal jacket and red jumper in L’Amie de mon Amie, Jeanne’s boxy blazer, floral camp shirt and grey slacks in Conte de Printemps, bespeak a world where things can properly become what they are, in the exercise of style as modernity’s form of living. La Collectionneuse was Rohmer’s first colour film and his first shot outside Paris, and crystallises much of the beauty that plays out in variations sprightly (Pauline á la plage), wan and melancholy (La femme de l’aviateur, Le Rayon Vert), radiant (Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle) and achingly erotic (Conte d’été). Resting in Mediterranean water, splayed out in a borrowed villa, in front of fields just after the harvest, Haydée’s green top or Daniel’s red robe are as at home in this world, in all its agon, as the flitting seaweed that Rohmer lingers on. It’s this quality that links La Collectioneuse, whatever Rohmer’s famous political differences with Godard, with Pierrot Le Fou and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, the latter released the same year. Where Two or Three Things… ends with a conflagration of the consumer goods and dormitory housing of the trente glorieuses, its battering summer light and primary colours bursting into flames, La Collectionneuse appears as a glimpse of post-war society’s unity in the form of fashion—a wish-image for the dun 21st century—in the moment before it starts to disappear.