Éric Rohmer: It Is So Not “Like Watching Paint Dry”

Pascal’s wager is a recurring idea amongst the films of Éric Rohmer and his characters, which reasons for a belief in God through a probability-backed rationale, it goes like this: if you believe in God and live a moral and virtuous life, and it turns out that God exists, you will gain eternal happiness in the afterlife, but on the other hand, if you believe in God and live a moral and virtuous life, and it turns out that God does not exist, you will have lost nothing. In contrast, if you do not believe in God and live an immoral and selfish life, and it turns out that God exists, you will face eternal damnation.
This neatly reflects the many tendencies present in Rohmer films – so much so it is its own genre, with many students and imitators. With characters prone to philosophising at any moment (many of them being philosophers or teachers), who are coolly rational and remarkably precise – to the point of being practised – about their own beliefs, emotions and objectives. An idiosyncratic visual style (with the help of DoP Néstor Almendros) of compositional rigidity, minimalist mise-en-scene and lack of depth perspective with stories set in picturesque vacation towns or metropolitan cities together with the complete absence of non-diegetic music in his films narrows the focus down to what he considered essential: the dialogue. His films are all about people talking. He laid down his film-making philosophy early in his career as a film critic (like in the essay “For a Talking Cinema”).

He had a varied career - high-school teacher, novelist, film critic, ran a film club, founded and edited a film journal, and began to make films under the name Éric Rohmer, born Maurice Schérer, in the town of Tulle, in 1920. He kept his personal and professional life distinct and far apart from each other, so much so that his mother never found out his role as a prominent critic and director of the French New Wave. But even amongst them he was the odd one out – he was a practising catholic and not politically fervent. Rohmer was the oldest of the Cahiers du Cinéma cineastes, even being a mentor to them, then young and impressionable, but was the last director to be established , finding international critical and commercial success with My Night At Maud’s after years of making shorts, features and TV documentaries.

Several of his films are categorised into cycles, the first one being “Six Moral Tales”, to which both films “The Bakery Girl of Monceau” and “Claire’s Knee” belong to. The ‘moral’ referred to in the title is a mistranslation – ‘moraliste’ was meant to be what someone thinks about their behaviour. Thus, the films in this cycle are all variations on a similar story, that ironically investigates the rationalisation the characters (in this case, short sighted male protagonists) sustain themselves with. The men of his stories have a tendency of being blinded by an easy bet, but end up reverting to what is old, known and reliable. In fact all of his films follow the same path - the temptation, then rejection of a false love/s while waiting for a true one – reflecting Pascal's wager. A Summer’s Tale comes later in his career, in the ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’ cycle, and although it adheres to his style and thematic interests, it is his most autobiographical film.

Éric Rohmer never stopped making films throughout his life, always low-budgeted, meticulously written, planned and extensively rehearsed (often needing very few takes) – but there was acceptance of improvisation and inspiration from chance in the making of it. It is these simple contradictions between extremes that makes his films endlessly fascinating and the familiar themes, style, stories and characters, continuously investigating the world and itself, that make him an auteur of the highest order.