Criterion Sunday 343: La Boulangère de Monceau (The Bakery Girl of Monceau aka The Baker of Monceau, 1963)

Eric Rohmer returned to filmmaking (after a period editing Cahiers du cinéma followed by the relative disappointment of his delayed feature debut) with this short film, the first in a six-part cycle he called the ‘Contes moraux’ (‘Six Moral Tales’). If the story seems somewhat slight (a man pines for an elegant woman, while flirting with a shopgirl), that doesn’t make its execution in any way simplistic. There’s some of that familiar nouvelle vague charm to the location shooting, which all takes place in one neighbourhood, on its grand boulevards, as well as its smaller byways and street market, and there’s charm too in the simplicity of the storyline. Indeed, the narrative pattern of a man in love with two women would be repeated in the later moral tales, but the differences in the women here is telling — Sylvie is a tall woman he passes regularly in the street, who holds herself with a slight hauteur, while Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier) is a young shop assistant in a bakery who works every day. Our protagonist (played by the producer Barbet Schroeder) thinks he has a shot at Sylvie but he stops seeing her around for a while and, in her absence, makes a romantic move for Jacqueline. It’s significant too that our male protagonist isn’t named, and that the title of this (and most other films in the cycle) is after one of the women. In a sense, the man is a stand-in for the filmmaker and an audience surrogate, but if so, it’s a deeply critical portrait. He may have some success in love, but he’s shallow and frankly a bit creepily stalky too, and his voiceover makes it clear that his motives are pretty flawed. Rohmer’s sympathy is with the boulangère.

(Written on 7 January 2015.)

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Éric Rohmer; Cinematographers Bruno Barbey and Jean-Michel Meurice; Starring Barbet Schroeder, Claudine Soubrier; Length 23 minutes.

Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Tuesday 6 January 2015.

Criterion Sunday 342: “Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales”

This box set takes in six films by French New Wave director Éric Rohmer, not his earliest films (his debut feature film was 1962’s The Sign of Leo), but probably the films which helped him to make his mark. The films are based on his own short stories (a translation of which is included with the box set, making up at least half of the packaging, being a not insubstantial book in itself), and start off with the short film The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), and the slightly longer Suzanne’s Career (1963). The first full feature length Moral Tale is the third, with which he started to really make his name, My Night at Maud’s (1969), nominated even for an Academy Award in the US. However, for production reasons it was the fourth to be made, while the fourth tale La Collectionneuse (1967) was filmed earlier. The series is rounded out by Claire’s Knee (1970), generally considered his masterpiece, and Love in the Afternoon (1972). Rohmer would go on to make films in two more overarching series, his “Comédies et proverbes” of 1981-1987 and “Contes des quatres saisons” (Tales of the Four Seasons) from 1990-1998, and it is from these three series that his most famous works come, such as The Green Ray (1986, aka Summer), which may be my favourite of his films.

As well as the six tales that give it its name, the box set also contains a number of Rohmer’s short films from both before and during the making of the Moral Tales, as well as some supplementary material which I shall add to this post when I watch it.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• The short films are the main extra to these discs. On the first disc are two; Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak (Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak, 1960) is a supplement to The Bakery Girl of Monceau. This is the earliest short film by Rohmer, starring Jean-Luc Godard and filmed apparently in 1951 although not finished until the end of that decade. Like a lot of the early New Wave films, it’s a slight premise, just two people hanging out and talking. She’s waiting for a train to leave, he’s killing time, chatting her up, hoping for something. Slight, but certainly not lacking in interest.
• The second short film on the first disc, an supplement to Suzanne’s Career is Nadja à Paris (Nadja in Paris, 1964), and at a certain level there’s really not very much to this short film — the titular student is in Paris to do a thesis on Proust, wanders around, makes observations — but it very much captures a certain spirit of the age. It’s listed as documentary but it could as easily be a drama (and perhaps it is), but it’s about hanging out and soaking up the feeling of a place, and it seems to me that the New Wave filmmakers were among the best at just capturing a feeling.
• On the second disc, as an extra for La Collectionneuse, is Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui (A Modern Coed, 1966). This is an odd little film, a documentary which just watches a number of young women and marvels at their increased visibility within the academic system. It’s a little condescending, it feels at times, but seems to come from a place of interest.

March 2015 Film Viewing Round-Up

Herewith some brief thoughts about films I saw in March which I didn’t review in full.

The Boys from County Clare (aka The Boys and Girl from County Clare) (2003, Ireland/UK/Germany)
Divergent (2014, USA)
London: The Modern Babylon (2012, UK)
Perceval le Gallois (1978, France/Italy/West Germany)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012, USA)
The Prestige (2006, UK/USA)

Le Signe du lion (The Sign of Leo, 1962)

I have this feeling that among the famous auteurs of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer is the one most apt to be overlooked. Perhaps it’s that he lacks a really stand-out work (although 1969’s Ma nuit chez Maud gave him some of his initial success), or that his directorial style avoids much of the flashiness of his contemporaries. His film career, too, took a little longer to take hold, not least because he was heavily involved as editor of the influential Cahiers du cinéma film journal in the early part of the 1960s. Certainly, his debut feature film, produced in 1959, the same year as the other notable debuts of Truffaut and Godard, was delayed in its release for a number of years, and never really attained the same kind of either critical or commercial success. But this is all a bit unfair to the film, which has plenty to recommend it. Le Signe du lion is a beautiful evocation of Paris with a great sense of place (Rohmer always seemed to have the most knack for capturing the spirit of wherever he was filming), shot in luminous black-and-white in some iconic settings along the river and around the Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

If the film’s shooting locations are quite swanky locales, even by the standards of over 50 years ago, it only serves to emphasise the distance its protagonist Pierre (Jess Hahn) has to fall. He may not start off rich, but he cuts a louche, overfed figure, from a solidly middle-class American-Swiss family, and pursues a bohemian lifestyle (as a musician with distinctly modernist proclivities). When a promised inheritance windfall doesn’t materialise, the debts he’s accrued begin to take their toll, and with all his well-connected friends off for their summer holidays (the date intertitles are given prominence), he gets progressively more desperate as July wears on into August. Streets which were once packed with familiar faces start to become more alien to him, friends replaced by Europeans on holiday. This disconnect is made literal as a downwards class mobility by his ever more grubby clothes and dishevelled appearance.

Aside from this sense of place, what Rohmer captures so well, and so subtly, is the way that Pierre’s desperation takes hold. At first he lives on credit at various hotels, having run-ins with the staff, barely making ends meet. We see him walking the streets in his freshly laundered shirt and jacket, passing rough sleepers while frittering away spare francs on inessential items like stain remover for his trousers. But when finally kicked out of his accommodation, it doesn’t take long for this to seem ridiculous, as his shoes start to give way and he’s reduced to fishing out flotsam from the river in the hope it might be discarded food he can eat. But the film isn’t all grimness, and there are periodically sparks of hope, as when he falls into the company of a fellow homeless artist-of-sorts alongside the river.

Throughout all of this, there are continuities with Rohmer’s later filmmaking. Its setting over the summer holiday period is one that he would return to many times (not least in Le Rayon vert 25 years later, likewise marked out by title cards with the date, as well as 1996’s Conte d’été and others). Then we have those solo male protagonists, so often creatures of high-flown intellectual taste, which might suggest some form of autobiographical self-identification, but if so, it’s one riven by self-criticism. For his male protagonists, though they may be nice enough guys, are never really heroes, and are often marked by some weakness in their morals (which is partly the great subject of his six subsequent films, grouped together as the ‘Six Moral Tales’). In Le Signe du lion, there’s a compassion instead for the experience of homelessness, and the way the homeless are patronised and barely tolerated by polite society, but I’m not always convinced that this compassion extends to the protagonist. There’s a nagging sense in my mind that Rohmer is judging Pierre, whether for falling into this situation, or for his slight sense of aloofness even when he’s at his lowest ebb. This judgement would only become clearer in subsequent films (and I hope to convey this in future reviews, whenever I get round to them; they’ll show up in my Criterion Sunday series).

I don’t mean any of that to be a criticism of Rohmer – if anything I think it marks him out as being every bit the equal of his contemporaries as a director and screenwriter, with a great concern for his characters. Le Signe du lion is a first feature, but it should stand alongside those other more famous titles, as a great work in its own right.

CREDITS
Director Éric Rohmer; Writers Rohmer and Paul Gégauff; Cinematographer Nicolas Hayer; Starring Jess Hahn; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Saturday 3 January 2015.

Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, aka Summer, 1986)

I’ve by no means seen enough films by French New Wave director Éric Rohmer to judge where this 1986 film, one of his ‘Comedies and Proverbs’ series, fits into his œuvre, but I’m given to understand it heralds a move away from formalism towards something freer and a little bit spontaneous. Certainly, that fits with the later films of his I’ve seen (primarily the ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’), and there’s something almost artless about the filming and lighting here, done with a minimal crew on a 16mm camera that in (the relatively infrequent) indoor scenes is pushed towards an ugly graininess, and which at times suggests a vérité documentary quality (as when the kids look directly into the camera). But this, along with the film’s largely improvised dialogue (for which the lead actor Marie Rivière received an assistant screenwriting credit), is all part of a very conscious style that may not come across as much initially, but builds to a fascinating character study of a woman who seems to be dealing with depression, on the occasions when she reflects on her life and her failed relationships.

All this, though, comes in the details; the film feels light and airy in the way that its central character Delphine aspires to be. The film is structured as a series of dialogues with friends, family members and those she meets on her holiday travels, interspersed with scenes of her on her own, in Paris where she lives and on her vacances in Cherbourg and Biarritz. In the discussions, references are made to various new-agey philosophies and ways of living and connecting with others and with one’s spiritual self, and Delphine tries (albeit unsuccessfully) to articulate something of these, most notably in a lunchtime scene as she expresses her dislike for eating meat — still something of a minority position on the European continent, it must be said. Her happiness, though, seems to remain predicated on her lack of a boyfriend figure, or at least so those around her keep trying to tell her (Delphine avers she has one, but her friends are quite aware she is clinging to the memory of a failed relationship). Men certainly move around her, and the camera takes note of these periodically, but she largely pushes them away — and for good reason, whatever her friends may say, as they are variously rather aggressive or unpleasant.

What the film captures particularly well is this social interaction that continues to make Delphine feel like a failure because she’s unattached. The green ray of the title (an optical phenomenon that occurs at sunset) appears to be just another semi-mystical idea that Delphine wants to believe in — that seeing it will allow a person to find clarity — and Rohmer leaves it unresolved at the end whether it does, though there seems at least to be hope for her. It’s this, perhaps most of all, that makes the film ultimately a ‘comedy’, even if there are plenty of tears along the way.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Éric Rohmer; Cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux; Starring Marie Rivière; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Saturday 3 January 2015.